on the move to MT 3
I seem to be taking "better late than never" to its ultimate extreme. It's getting close to a year since MT 3.0 was released (I think about nine or ten months now). All this time, I've still been on MT 2.661. The main reason for this, other than just a general lack of time, is that my 2.661 installation has so many hacks, mods, and plugins that I've been hesitant about upgrading it for fear that something would no longer work and would break my blogs.
However, I was an original 3.0 beta tester and set up a separate installation at that time. I've kept that version upgraded (it's on 3.15 now) and finally decided to do something with it. Most of my blogs don't actually require anything special in terms of plugins and hacks, it's basically Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs that's the problem. So what I've started doing is to migrate my blogs from the 2.661 installation to the 3.15 installation. Ultimately, most or all of them should be on 3.15 except for AMIB.
I've uploaded two essential plugins to the 3.15 installation: MT-Blacklist and Jacques Distler's variation on MT-DSBL, which blocks comments and tracbacks from open proxies (which many spammers use, but few legitimate commentors do). See note below.
I've also uploaded the MT-Close2 script to allow mass closure of comments and trackbacks (something I already have on the 2.661 installation and posted about before). And I've replicated the separation of post and preview that I have on 2.661.
Together, these plugins, scripts, and hacks should provide some basic protection from spam, inshallah, and I recommend at least the plugins and script as the basic spam-fighting tools any MT 3.1x installation should have.
As a note, I had some weird experiences with the javascript cookie code that's listed for the <head> sections of the Comment Preview and Comment Error default templates. I resolved this problem by using the code recommended here instead. For some reason, the other code was causing all of my comments to be submitted by the TypeKey account I had used for signing in on my test blog, even though the information inputted in the comment form was different. I don't know if this was because of my forced preview, or what.
In any case, I've created a new category for this blog having to do with MT 3 and will post to it about tips, plugins, scripts, etc that are specific to MT 3 as well as my own experiences in migrating to MT 3, inshallah. Maybe now that I'm not completely stuck in a dead-end version (2.661) I'll have more to post to this blog.
Added: In order to use the DSBL plugin or the Distler version, you will need to upload the Net:: DNS module. Click on "Source" and save the resulting file to your computer as a text file called DNS.pm then upload DNS.pm to the extlib/Net directory in your MT installation. Copying and pasting the plugin code from Distler's site gave me a file with some junk in it, HTML code at the beginning and end and & and > were converted to & and > so I had to fix it up. However, after uploading Net:: DNS and cleaning up the code if necessary, you should be able to get the plugin working for you.
Added 2: On the topic of essential spam-fighting plugins, there's also Real Comment Throttle, which I had forgotten was a plugin available for 3.1. I was achieving the same effect on my 2.661 installation with a hack. The plugin only throttles for comments but there's also a hack for 2.661 to add a trackback throttle.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Comments
As-Salaamu 'alaikum,
I've been using MT (originally 3.11, now 3.14 with patch providing 3.15 functionality) since late last year, and I've had quite a bit of trouble with it and I'm considering migrating to WordPress. WP provides much better anti-spam provision out of the box - you need plug-ins to do the same in MT and in my experience, they slow the system down. I almost always get "Internal Server Errors" when rebuilding or deleting comments, which may be to do with my hosting provider, but I can't find anyone offering hosting with the same facilities at the same price. The only thing with WP is that you need to do multiple installations to get multiple blogs, although you can use the same database.
Posted by: Yusuf Smith | February 26, 2005 09:08 AM
I haven't had any problems with MT like that. I've been running one version or another of MT for nearly three years now without more than minor concerns caused by problems experienced by my hosting provider, which were soon fixed.
Considering that I have nearly a dozen blogs (including various "hidden" blogs to run various parts of my website, etc), I don't think I want to install WordPress 12 times.
Posted by: Al-Munaqabah | February 26, 2005 11:20 AM
Do you have your 2.661 and 3.15 installations on the same server? If so, were their any problems with that?
Posted by: JT | April 5, 2005 07:47 AM
They're on two different subdomains and using two different MySQL databases. I haven't had any problems at all with this. I think the main issue would be to make sure that you keep the databases separate.
Posted by: Al-Munaqabah | April 6, 2005 12:28 AM