Movable Type; Installing and Japanese Support

By Oli
At 9:46 AM · Tuesday, 29 April · 2003
To Unix · Weblogging

I’ve been playing around with MovableType with the view to migrate to it, and here’s what I’ve learned about installing and Japanese support. It’s probably pretty obvious to all of you, but hey ;-)

Movable Type’s excellent installation instructions could be a little clearer in a couple of places;

Configuration 2 - Configure Movable Type URL
For example, if you are installing Movable Type at http://www.your-site.com/movabletype/ , you would change the CGIPath line to CGIPath http://www.your-site.com/movabletype/ For installs into the cgi-bin folder you need CGIPath http://www.your-site.com/cgi-bin/. I can’t see any way to install MT into a root-level folder (ie same level as your www or cgi-bin folder, and not visible to the general public) other than the cgi folder. This is different to Geeklog.
Configuration 5. Configure Path To Static Files (only relevant for installations into the cgi-bin)
For example, if you chose to locate your static files at the root of your web-accessible area, you would add this line to mt.cfg : StaticWebPath /mt-static/ This means the path in your www directory, so the full pwd path might look like /home/your_username/www/mt-static/, of which you only need the bit after www. mt-static holds all of your weblog text files etx, and you might make the folder with the name of your weblog, but not necessarily.
Additional notes - Protecting mt.cfg
I like it how this is the last thing in the install guide ;-) If you didn’t install into the cgi-bin folder, you might want to do this. If you don’t it means your database user name is in the clear, which isn’t really a big deal, but better safe than sorry huh. You might also want to consider setting a .htaccess file to make things a little more secure (I gues this isn’t needed if you installed into the cgi-bin folder, but I’m no Apache expert - I guess it wouldn’t hurt ;-)
Whether you install the mt-db-pass.cgi into cgi-bin or a folder in your www folder (ie a publicly accessible folder), it returns a server error if you try to view it.

I still haven’t cracked Japanese language support, but my present efforts are over on Miwa’s weblog. I’m trying to get UTF-8 to work (rather than just taking the charset=shift-jis approach) because I guess Japanese language display support is default for Unicode. For older browsers I think that if you have an English page with some Japanese and look at it in IE5/Win without Japanese language installed, you get prompted for a 2.5MB japanese language support patch download. Now I’m guessing here but I figure that Japanese glyphs are already bundled with UTF-8 support (as part of the Unicode fonts), so the page will just display even if you haven’t gone out of your way to update your PC for Japanese language ability.

I bet that I’m going to find that older browsers don’t have support for UTF-8 etc etc. But it’s worth a try!

As an aside, the reasons for wanting to move are:

  • Geeklog’s torturous default templates (all nested tables, which I hate - this is by far my biggest issue)
  • Geeklog’s ‘issues’ accepting character entities
  • Geeklog’s patchy Japanese support (both for inputting and as an interface language)
  • MT’s near dominance of the Japanese weblogging scene (Internationalisation issues plague most weblog software, but MT seems pretty good)
  • Geeklog’s lack of plugins for trackback and a few other nice MT features (SmartyPants, Textile, posting bookmarklets)
  • MT’s ability to have multiple weblogs running from one install
  • MT’s generally better documentation
  • MT’s ability to have more than one category for a post (I really like this feature)
  • the nice software that is MT-compatible (mainly Kung-log)
I’d prefer to use a feature-parity Geeklog because it’s PHP-based, and I’d rather learn a little PHP than a little Perl (I’ like to learn both, but I think PHP will be both easier and more beneficial for me to learn ;-) Until Geeklog 2 comes out I don’t think there’s any hope of this though. In Geeklog’s defense I haven’t found how to customise MT nearly as much (yet) - the Geeklog config.php file is considerably more detailed than the MovableType mt.cfg file. Maybe there’s a per-weblog config file I haven’t found yet.

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