Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

Adding new tricks to MT is fun, but after awhile, it can start slowing down your rebuilds, especially when comments and trackbacks are posted, which affects your visitors, not just you. Unfortunately, MT doesn't offer a lot of rebuild options out of the box.

Along comes Sean Willson with his rebuild type hack. This is for advanced users only, since it requires substantial tinkering under MT's hood and in the database. Follow the instructions at Sean's site.

If you've already hacked some of your MT files, I recommend using the patch files instead of uploading his new versions. That way, you don't overwrite your hacks.

Once you've patched all the files and made the database modification, you will have a bunch of new rebuild options for each index template. You can rebuild it only when new entries are added, only when new comments are added, only when new trackbacks are added, when new entries or new comments are added, when new entries or new trackbacks are added, when new comments or new trackbacks are added, when anything is added, or never.

If you have templates that don't display comments or trackbacks, nor list the number of these, you can set them to rebuild only when a new entry is added. Now, when new comments are posted or trackback pings sent, the rebuild process will go just a bit faster. This is also useful for your RSS feed, since it prevents the feed from showing as updated (because it was rebuilt) when a comment was added or ping sent but no new entries have been added.