Changes to the dirify routine

The dirify routine in Movable Type 3.3 has changed slightly in functionality, handling accented characters better than in previous versions and now acting consistently between static and dynamic publishing in the dirification of words that result in no characters. While this is a an improvement, it has the ability to change the URLs created by Movable Type to your archives.

Dirification of category label for archive URL

Since the dirify routine is used to create the category portion of the category archive URL, this change has the potential to alter your URLs after upgrade. To avoid this, you should take note of each category archive URL before and after upgrade. If any of them differ in the category label portion of the URL, you can enter the old dirified category label into the new category basename field introduced in this version. Like the entry basename introduced in Movable Type 3.2, the category basename allows you to specify that portion of the archive URL and allows it to remain consistent regardless of changes to the category label.

For example, if you have a category Produse de unică folosinţă, Movable Type 3.2 and before would create a category URL like:

http://example.com/produse_de_unic_folosin/index.html

The changes in Movable Type 3.3 will cause that URL to change to:

http://example.com/produse_de_unica_folosinta/index.html

While this is the more correct version, incoming links will break for existing users. To avoid the breakage, go to your weblog's category listing and click on the category label in question (Produse de unică folosinţă). On the category editing screen you will see a field called "Category Basename". Simply paste in the old version of the dirified category (produse_de_unic_folosin) and rebuild if you are using static publishing for your category archives.

Finally, you should go to your blog's publishing settings and make sure that the archive map for your category archives is not using <$MTCategoryLabel dirify="1"$>. It should instead use <$MTCategoryBasename$> to allow you to have consistent URLs in the future.

Dirification of entry title for archive URL

Note: The following is for those upgrading from versions prior to Movable Type 3.2.

Movable Type 3.2 introduced the entry basename field which allows users to specify the filename portion of the default individual entry archive URL. Previous versions of Movable Type defaulted to the padded entry ID for this, such as the 00028 in http://example.com/2002/04/00028.html. Many users however changed that to use <$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>. Because of the changes in the dirify routine, this has the potential to break URLs to your individual archives if you have entry titles with accented characters.

The solution to this issue is posted in the entry from the last beta test entitled "Converting from dirified title to basename". However, you must create the index template described in that entry before upgrading and then execute it after upgrading.

Finally, you should also then switch to using one of the default archive mapping settings that corresponds to your current individual entry archive URLs or use <$MTEntryBasename$> instead of <$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$> if you are using a Custom one.