Finally, I think I have Movable Type working the way I like it on my linux mandrake 8.2 installation. I pretty much followed the directions indicated in the installation manual and had a few missteps. My first problem is that since I turned on virtual hosting in my apache installation, I needed apache to know that the cgi-bin dir is actually under my separate DocumentRoot directory and not in the standard DocumentRoot script directory (/var/www/cgi-bin). What I forgot to do in my Vhosts.conf file was to define a ScriptAlias directory and once I did that, everything was almost easy-peasy. The following line was added to my VirtualHost configuration:
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /absolute/path/to/new/cgi-bin/
Note both directories have a final frontslash (/) included--this is very important!
In regards to the rest of the installation, because I didn't read the installation instructions completely before embarking, I ended up adding a new blog user instead of editing the temporary first user (login:Melody,passwd:nelson). Well, I had problems trying to get rid of that second user, especially since I opted for the MySQL backend rather than Berkeley DB. Because of that I had to login to mysql server (mysql -u root -p) and then manually deleted the user described in the table mt_author and mt_permission (delete from mt_author where mt_author_id=2;). Well, that took care of that problem.
All was dandy until I had a look at the final published blog, and it looked horrendous! I realized from the html source that the cascading stylesheet was referenced incorrectly and this was because the URL I defined for the blog was incorrect--I had not only to define the website domain name, but also had to include the site's subdirectory where the blog was located. This setting was changeable in the movable type section "Blog Config" under the manage menu for the blog configuration. Once that was figured out, I edited the index.html template to include my PHP header and footer script files specific for my site, and added the correct variable for the "Syndicate this Site" link in the template file (<$MTBlogURL$>).
Other than the above problems, I'd have to say so far that the Movable Type Blog engine is so far living up to my expectations. It creates an RDF file for syndication. The output is entirely configurable. It archives my posts. The archives are searchable. Time will tell if this setup will hold out.
Posted by johnvu at December 18, 2002 11:43 PM