Back in the geek. Apologies to those coming for stories of Chuck, discussions about politics, whining or stories of Leta. Thanks so much for all the comments about PHP and all the rest.
Upgrading to Movable Type 3.11 was painless. Dynamic publishing is awesome, URLs appear the same (we’ll do the de-cruft in 5.1) and template rebuilds are much faster. If the instructions are followed, you don’t have to sweat anything. If you can install Movable Type, you can definitely do the stuff you need to do to turn on dynamic archive generation. Great work has been done bootstrapping PHP into Movable Type.
What you will have to sweat are plug-ins. The plug-ins will make your life miserable and cause your wife to look at you in an utter panic as if you’ve killed a child and you’ll end up reverting back to static pages immediately. The big offenders (so far) that we are using are Textile, Supplemental Categories (for filtering categories) and PreviousNext Category (for the fun Previous and Next buttons on individual archive pages).
I haven’t yet tried files available here. Some people are reporting success with these, but after seeing Heather’s face when she saw error-ridden archive pages, I’m going to make sure that we’re good to go before we jump in to dynamic publishing. What I’ll probably do is reconstruct dooce on another server (local!) and get it running first before moving over.
I just did another rebuild of the static site. I’m hoping it’s one of the last we’ll have to do, but at this rate, I predict at least a few more panic moments and a few more panic rebuilds. Maybe it’s time to get that FreeBSD server up and running in the basement…