[MTOS-dev] 4.1: Some Random Usability Observations

[Byrne Reese]

>  * The "dashboard" seems to be required per blog, but it's
>    to be located under /mt4-static/support/shared. I hoped to have
>    /mt-static read-only.

I have updated the installation instructions on mt.org to make explicit
reference to a step to check that mt-static/support is writable by the web
server.

> 
>  * A clear description of what can be read-only, and what must be
>    writable, does not yet seem to exist. So far, I run with a partially
>    writable /mt-static...

Any directory you publish to, and the mt-static/support directory (and all
of its subdirectories) are the only directories that must be writable.

>  * Relocating an MT4 installation on the file system w/o exporting
>    everything and importing after the move (trashing the database as
>    you go) seems to be impossible, or at least, it isn't too well
>    documented. I had expected some field in the "Manage Blog" dialogue
>    and a knob in the admin interface like "reconstruct", or "fix up
>    installation", or similar, after discovering that absolute file
>    system paths are stored in the database. Relocating an individual
>    blog seems to suffer from the same problem.

This would be a great topic for learningmovabletype.com. The short end of it
is:

* do a physical move of all your published files
* then update the database via the MT admin to reflect the new
location/paths of your files

Done.

>  * The flash thingy for blog stats might be nifty, but it does not work
>    well for me on my Debian amd64 box (using Gnash). The Flash
>    apparently gets rendered with higher z-axis to obscure the drop down
>    menues. Also, the Flash seems to require better than Flash 7, but
>    Gnash seems to barely support that. In any case, I only see a grey
>    bar (but then, the blogs are empty - don't know what I should be
>    seing there). The obscured menu items seem to be clickable
>    nevertheless, as I can see their links displayed in the status bar
>    of my browser when I move my mouse around. I'm not sure whether this
>    is a website bug, a browser bug, or a problem with this specific
>    plugin.
>    Maybe creating some images instead is a solution/could be a
>    configurable item?

That is one solution. Although I think users like the interactive nature off
the widget.

BTW - Gnash is not a supported browser. Which is not to say that it
shouldn't work - in theory every browser should work, but that is rarely the
case. :(

> 
>  * Using inline Ajax popups that shade the rest of the window (eg. on
>    "notify administrators on registrations") is dog slow and blocks my
>    desktop for some 20-40 seconds. For some reason, X11 maxes out my
>    computers for several ten's of seconds to eg. open this select box -
>    on an otherwise idle 64 bit dual-core machine, that is. The server
>    remains completely idle the whole time, so the problem exists purely
>    on the client side. This may be a client system problem - I don't
>    know how many of you see it, too.

Do you think you could try reproducing this issue in a different browser? I
would like to know what different aspects of your setup might be
contributing to the issues you are seeing.

> 
>  * There does not seem to be an easy option to call "Create Blog for
>    this user" after the user has already been created, nor is it
>    obvious how to make a user manager for one (or a specified list of)
>    blog(s) which were independently created, but for nothing else.

This is a great feature request, would you mind submitting it:

http://www.movabletype.org/feedback.html

>  * I've just read Jay's post about "updating Perl modules", but since
>    the docs, emphasize to stick with the included modules, I'm a bit
>    wary about breaking things (still a newbie, right?). Maybe
>    mt-check.cgi could be beefed up to check compatibility and/or for
>    possible upgrades?

Can you point me at that doc so that I can clarify?

Byrne