Problem

You want to upgrade the Movable Type software.

Solution

Upgrading follows nearly the same steps as installation except that you will want to perform a backup of your system before attempting the upgrade. If you are upgrading from Movable Type 3.1x or before, you will also want to migrate to the new configuration file: mt-config.cgi.

Discussion

If you're on any past version of Movable Type, version 3.2 offers a lot of features and improvements that will make managing your blogs easier. To take advantage of them, you'll need to install the latest version of the application. This document tells you how to upgrade your Movable Type installation from any past version.

Overview

The Movable Type upgrade process is straightforward if you've installed Movable Type in the past. We'll discuss each necessary step in detail below; here's a quick overview:

• Review a list of technical prerequisites, including basics like an FTP program, a text editor, and a web browser
• Collect information about your web server, including available storage space and configuration information such as FTP login user name and password
• Prepare to upgrade by backing up your Movable Type data
• Check the mt.cfg file settings to make sure they're still correct, and move them to the new mt-config.cgi file, if desired
• Upload the new version of Movable Type on top of the old installation
• Log in to your new version of Movable Type to complete the upgrade

If you're familiar with upgrading Movable Type, you can skip to the section on backing up your installation.

What you'll need

Installing Movable Type requires a little bit of software. You'll need:

• A copy of the Movable Type software, which you should download from your Movable Type account. The .zip download is the best choice for Windows users and the .tar.gz is great for Unix command-line installations. You can always log in to your account to get another copy when you need it.

  As of version 3.2, Movable Type downloads are no longer split into Full and Upgrade versions - there is now a single download package which works whether you're installing Movable Type for the first time, or upgrading an existing installation.

• An FTP (file transfer protocol) program to send the files from your computer to your server. If you need an FTP program, there are many available for free. (SmartFTP is a good FTP program for Windows, and offers a free trial version. Transmit is a good FTP program for Mac users on OS X, and it has a free trial, too.)

• You may need a simple text editor to edit your configuration settings, and a web browser so you can log into Movable Type. These are free, too, and come with your computer. Windows users can use Wordpad (or even Notepad under normal circumstances) and Mac users can use TextEdit. All of these are bundled with the respective operating systems.

Good to have

Some additional items which can make your Movable Type upgrade experience a lot easier include:

• Information about your web server or hosting account. (The email or confirmation message you got from your web hosting provider when you signed up for your account usually includes a lot of this information.)

• The login information for your web server control panel. You may not need to change any settings in your hosting account's control panel, but you can often use it to help troubleshoot settings or to find useful information.

• A web browser open to this documentation. If you get stuck, you'll want to be able to search for more information, either by searching the Movable Type User Manual and Knowledge Base, by requesting help from our support team at Six Apart, by navigating the community forum for Movable Type, or by searching the web.

Preparing to Upgrade

Before you upgrade, you'll need to do a few things:

• Collect necessary information
• Backing up your Movable Type data
• Backing up your Movable Type application files
• Remove outdated plugins

Collect your web server information

For the rest of the process, you'll need the FTP login information for your server (if you didn't use it already to back up your files) so that you can change or add files on your web server. If you already know your FTP information, you're all set. If you don't know it, refer to the help documentation, or introductory email message from your hosting provider to find out your FTP user name and password.

Just as important, you need to know where your current installation of Movable Type is located. This is very frequently in a directory called MT, which can be under your server's home directory for web pages, or in a special directory for applications called cgi-bin. If your root directory when you log in to FTP is /usr/example/htdocs, Movable Type is most likely in /usr/example/htdocs/mt or in /usr/example/htdocs/cgi-bin/mt.

One last tricky bit: the static folder. Some servers don't let you put application files and regular files (like images and javascript) into the same directory. In that case, you might have the directory mentioned above and another directory called something like mt-static. This directory with the images is called your "static directory", which just means it stores files that are served to your web site's visitors, instead of scripts that are run by your web server. If you have a static directory, just make a note of the location of both your application files and the static directory so you can refer to them in the future. One example of what this can look like:

• Application directory: /usr/example/cgi-bin/mt
• Static directory: /usr/example/htdocs/mt-static

Advanced Stuff: You'll need to make sure the FTP user you log in as has the right to change permissions on files (which is called CHMOD) that have been uploaded. If you aren't sure about this, and you've successfully installed Movable Type in the past, you're probably fine. You will also need to know where Perl is installed. (see Finding Perl on Your Server) The Perl application is usually at /usr/bin/perl but other locations can require some custom setup. Again, if you aren't sure about this, and you've successfully installed Movable Type in the past, you're probably fine and don't need to be concerned with this setting.

For optimal performance, you'll want to make sure you've got at least 10 megabytes of storage space available on your hosting account. You may want to know how much storage space you have left on your hosting account. Movable Type only takes up about two megabytes of space when installed, but your entries and web pages can take up a lot of space. This doesn't include your entries and web pages.and things can get erratic if you're very close to running out of space. Take a peek at your control panel and make sure you've got at least 10 megabytes of storage space available.

Backing up your Movable Type data

To get started, you'll need to back up your current data. Many times, people treat this kind of recommendation with the same nonchalance as advice to floss one's teeth or to rotate one's tires, but it's extremely important and you'll be glad you did. You can also keep this backup file to refer to in the future.

We've provided detailed instructions on how to fully backup your Movable Type data depending on which type of database server you're using:

• MySQL
• SQLite
• BerkeleyDB
• PostgreSQL (coming soon)

These instructions will preserve all of your templates and detailed configuration settings, but if you just want to do a quick backup of your entries so that they're safe if something goes wrong with the upgrade, you can do so using the Export function that's built into Movable Type.

Not sure what type of database you're using? Most people use either Berkeley DB (sometimes called Sleepycat or BDB) or MySQL. If you don't remember setting up any kind of database when you installed Movable Type, you're probably on Berkeley, otherwise you're on MySQL. If you use a different database, you already know which one you use and why. If Movable Type is already running okay for you now, you won't need to change anything here, so don't fret if you aren't sure about this. Just follow the directions below to make sure you've got a backup.

Backing up your Movable Type application files

Before upgrading Movable Type, it's always a good idea is to store an intact copy of your entire Movable Type installation before you've made any changes. If anything were to go wrong, you would want to restore everything to its pre-upgrade state. Without the MT application files, this would be impossible. So while this step us optional, it only takes a few moments and the peace of mind from knowing that you have a complete back-up is always good.

To make a backup of your Movable Type application files, start your FTP program and download your entire Movable Type directory to a safe place on your computer.

If you have command-line access, you can simply compress a copy of your entire Movable Type directory using:

tar cvfz /path/to/mt-backup.tar.gz /path/to/mt/directory

If your static files are elsewhere, you can do the following:

tar cvfz /path/to/mt-backup.tar.gz /path/to/mt/directory /path/to/mt/static/files

Remove Outdated Plugins

Older versions of certain plugins or patches can cause a conflict with Version 3.2:

Nofollow plugin: If you were using the first release of this plugin, you should remove the old version first to avoid having two copies installed that may conflict with one another. This plugin began shipping with versions 3.16 and higher, and is located in the plugins/nofollow/ folder. After you're finished upgrading, view the README.txt file in that folder for more information on activating and using the plugin.

Mail Fix plugin: If you were using a version of Movable Type prior to 3.15, and you had installed the plugin version of the fix for this vulnerability, then you need to remove the patch-20050124-mail.spam.pl file from your plugins folder; otherwise, the code in this file will override certain bug fixes in higher versions.

MT Blacklist plugin: MT-Blacklist is not compatible with Movable Type 3.2 without some modifications. More importantly, thanks to the bundled spam protection in v3.2, it is no longer necessary to protect your installation from spammers. You should make sure to remove all plugin files related to MT-Blacklist in order to avoid conflicts with your installation.

SubCategories plugin: Version 3.1 integrated the SubCategories plugin, so if you have it installed, you must remove all related files before beginning the Movable Type upgrade. You may also need to migrate your subcategories data if you were actively using the plugin.

SpamLookup plugin: The SpamLookup plugin now ships with Movable Type. If you are a previous user of SpamLookup, you should be aware that your settings will not be preserved. If you are using the wordlists feature in particular, you should copy those to a safe place before upgrading. After upgrading, you should make sure that your Junk threshold is initially set to 0 on your Feedback settings page. You can change it later, but you should start with the default value because it's most likely the correct one.

Starting the Upgrade

The first thing you'll want to do once you're ready to upgrade is to uncompress the Movable Type application on your computer. If you have the .zip format, both OS X and Windows XP let you automatically uncompress the .zip file just by right-clicking on the file and choosing to extract the files. This will give you a new directory with all of the Movable Type application files in it.

Next, you'll want to log in to your web server via FTP, and navigate to the directory that has your Movable Type application files. This will often be a /cgi-bin/mt/ or a /mt directory under the location where your published web pages are located.

Once you've logged in, download mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi from your MT directory to your computer so you can refer to them. mt.cfg is the configuration file which lists settings for your installation of Movable Type and mt-db-pass.cgi contains your database password if you're using MySQL or PostegreSQL.

In Movable Type 3.2, both of these files are replaced with a new file called mt-config.cgi. (Note: mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi will work without any changes under 3.2, but it's strongly recommended to switch to mt-config.cgi for future compatibility) This file is distributed as mt-config.cgi-original to ensure that your configuration information isn't overwritten in a future upgrade, so you should first rename it to mt-config.cgi.

Then, copy your settings from mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. This process should be straightforward, except for perhaps the database password which should be entered on the line for DBPassword in mt-config.cgi. Again, if you are using any database other than MySQL or PostgreSQL, you won't have a database password to transfer from mt-db-pass.cgi. For further information, please see the Knowledge Base article entitled "Convert To Using The New Configuration File".

Upload the application files

Now you're ready to actually upload Movable Type to your server.

Open the directory that has the Movable Type 3.2 files you uncompressed, and select all of the files and directories it contains. Use your FTP program to navigate to the location on your server where Movable Type is installed (usually /mt or /cgi-bin/mt and then transfer all the Movable Type files from your computer to the server, right on top of the existing application files.

If you are using a static directory for your Movable Type image and javascript files above (mentioned above in the section "Collect your web server information"), there's one extra step here. You should upload the entire mt-static directory from the Movable Type 3.2 archive into your static folder. If you've forgotten where that directory is, you can look in mt-config.cgi for a line containing StaticWebPath.

During the transfer, your newly-uploaded Movable Type 3.2 files should overwrite the files for your older version of Movable Type. Most FTP programs will confirm that this was really what you wanted to do, and you can confirm that this is the case. This should also automatically result in your new application folders inheriting the permissions that were applied to your old installation.

If you'd like to check that the permissions are correct, just make sure that all the files with a .cgi extension in your Movable Type folder on the server have Execute permissions; Most servers list this as 755 permissions, but it might also be listed as -rwxr-xr-x. Again, there's probably no need to change this, but you can check just to be sure.

Finishing the upgrade

After all of your application files are in place, you simply open up your MT admin interface (the URL ending in /mt.cgi) in your web browser. The system may prompt you for permission to execute some database upgrade steps, after which you will be fully upgraded.

Congratulations! You're now running Movable Type 3.2!

A note about template upgrade

Once you have completed upgrading the system software, you may wish to also upgrade your templates in order to take advantage of the latest capabilities of the system. While Movable Type attempts to maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions, some behavioral changes may result in incorrect display of your published content.

If you'd like to restore any of your templates to the default settings in Movable Type 3.2, you can use the template refresh functionality provided by the "Template Backup and Refresh" plugin.

• You can select individual templates to refresh from the weblog's template listing screen. Select the option "Refresh template(s) from the dropdown in the action bar and the selected templates will be updated to the latest.

• If you want to refresh all templates in a blog, you can do so via the System Overview weblog listing. Just select the weblog from that listing and the dropdown option "Refresh template(s)" and all existing templates in your blog will be refreshed to the latest.