Trac and Wheeljack

by Jay Allen

As many of you have noticed, the Trac installation at code.sixapart.com is currently responding in a less than friendly manner. This is a temporary problem as we are currently in the middle of a server migration. Trac will be reinstated at soon as that migration has been completed.

Had Trac been running or you had looked here, you would have seen that we've created a new branch called Wheeljack which represents the next development branch for Movable Type. If you have Subversion access you can check out a copy at that URL and follow along with our progress.

While our checkins to that branch will be sparse for the next month or so while we work on an update to Movable Type Enterprise (not accessible because it's on an internal repository), the branch already contains two very compelling features:

• Paginated category archive rebuilds
• An update to the MT::Bootstrap module for FastCGI.

The pagination of category archive rebuilds should make a huge difference to those of you who might be experiencing timeouts during category archive rebuilding for whatever reason. The number of pages per rebuild is currently controlled by the EntriesPerRebuild configuration directive.

The Bootstrap/FastCGI update makes setting up FastCGI with MT extremely easy since it eliminates the need to create a "dispatch script". Now all you have to do is:

• Set up FastCGI on your webserver
• Add (or alter) the AdminScript configuration directive (AdminScript mt.fcgi) and any other config directives corresponding to scripts you wish to run through FastCGI
• Change the names of the scripts you configured above to their new names

If you check out a working directory, please let us know what you think.

Posted on August 23, 2006 2:28 PM in Announcements