Movable Type Beta Weblog - templates_c problem and the easy upgrade

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templates_c problem and the easy upgrade

by Jay Allen

This is an archived entry from the Movable Type 3.2 beta test.
Entries from the current beta release (v3.3) can be found here.

I just finally upgraded my own site, which is a little ritual that I always do when we're nearing the end of the development cycle just to look for the remaining kinks. I happen to have one of the most complex Movable Type installations known to man and so if something is going to break, it's going to be on my site.

The upgrade itself went smoothly, although upgrading over 15000 entries, comments and TrackBacks took a good long while. After the upgrade, I checked my main page and it was fine. I checked my monthly archives and they were fine. I checked my dynamically published individual archives — and got an error.

The requested page could not be found.

main(/home/j/www.jayallen.org/cgi/mt/php/extlib/smarty/libs/core/ core.load_plugins.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Great... I pinged Brad who happened to be online and asked him about it. He took about 5 seconds to answer and said:

Clear your templates_c directory.

I did, and everything returned to normal.

I tell you this first to let you know that if you hit the same snag, there is an easy solution. But I also write to say that if I can upgrade my site in 10 minutes anyone can do it and much more likely in under a minute.

This truly was — by an order of magnitude — the easiest upgrade ever.

Posted on July 22, 2005 11:13 PM in Announcements

Comments

hmm.. am I the only person getting the Build error in template 'Atom Index' etc? (I've emailed it).. and not getting the 'thanks for signing in' comment page either? Has anyone else done a fresh install rather than upgrade?

Posted by: demonsurfer | July 23, 2005 6:02 AM

Ahem

Posted by: Jay Allen | July 23, 2005 9:02 AM

Does this mean the the dynamic page caching is no longer an "experimental feature" as it was in 3.1x? Just wondering.

This is probably as good a place as any to mention that the caching in 3.1x didn't work with Chad's Smarty page navigation hacks, which has been widely recommended for paginating dynamic archives...

Posted by: Kevin | July 29, 2005 9:29 PM

The status of the caching mechanism hasn't changed. That's good to know about the smrty navigation hacks, although I use them and used page caching at one time too. I don't remember having problems, but it was a long time ago.

Posted by: Jay Allen | July 29, 2005 11:10 PM

Since caching was out of the question, I added this line:

<?php obstart("obgzhandler"); ?>

to the top of the Dynamic Site Bootstaper template and it made a big difference.

I went to http://www.nibbleguru.com/tools/gzip-test.php to verify one of my archive templates was getting compressed. Here's the skinny (literally) on one of my category archives:

The webpage is COMPRESSED / GZIPPED! Savings: 78.90% Filesize: 103.3KB [21.8KB] html / text onlyPerhaps gzip should be added to the default Dynamic Site Bootstaper template. A vast majority of web clients support receiving compress pages, and as I understand it there's no (or little) penalty for using gzip, and and enormous upside in speed.

Posted by: Kevin | July 31, 2005 9:19 PM

Umm, great, where is this mysterious "templates_c" directory

Posted by: Adam Rice | August 29, 2005 9:25 AM

templates_c problem and the easy upgrade

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