Learning Curves

Hello All

I will be discussing the learning curves in here. I like code hacking and learning new things. All if this involves learning curves. I enjoy doing that, and will be posting about the learning curves on this blog. Here goes the first one, th blog installation in itself.

For the first time, i configured a movabletype blog for this purpose(learning curves involved here too!!). It was not a piece of cake as wordpress. I almost did it 1 hour back, and ran into cross site scripting issues, as i was loading the static files (css, js) from files.jatspeak.com and other stuff from blog.jatspeak.com. When i was about to write something, blog was screaming permission denied. Finally, everything from the scratch, and all went on fine :)

Following was my process...

1. Download movabletype from http://www.movabletype.com/downloads/blogger/MT-4.23-en.tar.gz
2. Untar it.
3. Fire up mysql. and create a new database, say "learning"
   
4. Locate cgi-bin in your httpd.conf, in my case it was at /usr/lib/cgi-bin.
5. From the untarred folder, copy everything else apart from mt-static folder, and put it somewhere on cgi-bin
6. Fire up http://<yourpath to cgi-bin>/mt.cgi.
7. It will generate a new mt-config.cgi file now.It will ask about the presense of mt-static folder. You will need to provide both filepath, and weburl. It is stores in StaticFilePath and StaticWebPath properties in mt-config.cgi.
8. It will take you through a series of nicely decorated, curve cornered windows in the process. After it says all is right, it will ask to crate a admin user (i got stuck at this point first)
9. After you give a user, it asks for publishing path. This is fairly simple.
   
10. You are done after this.It will take you to dashboard.

Pitfalls

1. There is somebug while writing mt-config.cgi file. If you did not provide a proper path, and submit details, an ugly looking page will greet you. This means that javascript and css have not loaded due to absense of a path. In case you use firefox, install firebug. It will complain saying "getById()" not found. These errors are due to incorrect StaticWebPath and Weburl etc. You need to fix them. Most probably, your mt-config.cgi file is improper.
2. Your dashboard comes up and you try to do a new post, but on clicking the editor nothing happens. This is die to cross site scripting prevention in firefox 3. You are most likely to face this problem in firefox 3 only. The firebug error would be "Permission denied to property w.App". Unfortunately, either live with it and use a different browser, or else simply reinstall everything. Remeber there are three different paths
   
1. Path to mt.cgi, in cgi-bin
2. Path to mt-static, which is asked while configuration
3. Path for publishing, which is asked sometime after you have creating admin user.
3. All 3 paths should be in same domain/subdomian. In my case, the domains were same, but subdomains were different. 

Following links helped me out.

• http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/kb/upgrading/upgrade_script.html
• http://forums.sixapart.com/lofiversion/index.php/t54953.html
• http://forums.sixapart.com/lofiversion/index.php/t64577.html

Cross site scripting error just came to my mind.

In case you are stuck while installing MovableType, i'll be glad to help. Mail me at ashish[at]jatspeak.com

Next steps -

1. Create a new user
2. Put some nice theme
3. Starting doing real work.