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Over the last few major version changes, Learning Movable Type has published guides to upgrading safely, without risk of messing up your blog. The most recent tutorial was A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT3.3.

The three main steps that still hold for safely upgrading to MT4 (from MT3) are:

1. Make a back up of your database.
2. Make sure all the plugins you use for your site have upgrades that are compatible with the new version.
3. Install MT into a new directory in your cgi-bin. Do NOT overwrite your existing MT directory.

The Movable Type ProNet community has done a stellar job in outlining everything you need to know to do a successful upgrade to MT4. These instructions can be found at the MT Community Wiki in the Community Generated Upgrade Guide.

Please see the instructions at the Community Wiki for the specific details on how to safely upgrade your MT blog to MT version 4.

Jaclyn asked why she wasn't able to get tags imported to a new MT4 installation. While Movable Type 4 includes an entry's tags in the import specifications, and also exports those tags when saving the data, no prior versions have exported the tags, even though tags have been natively supported since MT 3.3x. Luckily, it's easy to get them.

First, make a backup of ImportExport.pm from your original Movable Type installation, which is the Perl module that handles the export. Do this because you want to make sure that you have a good copy, just in case something goes awry. Put this backup in a safe place, and work with the copy of the file, just in case. Ready? Good.

While it seems that the Yahoo! Small Business web hosting packages continue to offer Movable Type as an option, and there has been some talk about Yahoo! not supporting MT4, while Six Apart doesn't really seem to support MT4 at Yahoo!

Nice, huh? So what are you to do? Or more specifically, what am I to do when I have clients clamoring for MT4 and they are on the Small Business package? I have to figure out a way to make it work. Unfortunately, neither Six Apart nor Yahoo! makes it easy. The good news is that it's quite possible, once you know what you need. The first suggestion that I have - don't read that long letter that you'll get from Yahoo!, as it won't help tell you what you need to know.

Though the vast majority of installations I work with use LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) to run Movable Type, there are also a few where my client would like to place Windows in that equation. While it's a possibility to run Apache on Windows, Internet Information Server (IIS) has shipped with Windows Servers just about forever, and it's quite possible to get Movable Type up and running without Apache. I guess you might like to call this a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, Perl) installation, which fits in nicely with the old Windows, Icon, Mice, Pointers joke from years back. But I digress.

First, of course, you need Windows and IIS. Unfortunately, configuring those two is going quite beyond the scope of this article. Luckily, doing so is not particularly difficult. You'll also need, at a minimum, MySQL and Perl. If you want to use dynamic publishing, you'll also need PHP - but I'm not going to cover that here. Maybe next time. Ready? Let's go!

MT3.3 is out (Get your version upgrade here.) But before you attempt an upgrade, make sure that your plugins are all compatible with MT3.3.

MT3.3 introduces the ability to create transformer plugins which allow you to modify the MT interface. Because of this, MT is now completely incompatible with Kevin Shay's BigPAPI plugin, and all plugins that depend on BigPAPI. In addition, there are some plugins which are not BigPAPI plugins that will have compatibility problems with MT3.3. To help all of us with the upgrade process, I'm starting a list of plugins that are known to be incompatible with MT3.3, and links to their compatible upgrades if available. Note that many of these upgrades will work with MT3.3 but not with MT3.2. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. If you have news of plugins not mentioned here that were compatible with MT3.2 but are not with MT3.3, please let us know in the comments. If you have news of plugins that have been updated for MT3.3, please let us know in the comments.

I posted similar instructions a year ago for upgrading to MT3.2.

Six Apart encourages us to write-over our existing MT files with the new software files in order to upgrade to the new version of software. (As of this writing, there were no specific upgrade instructions for MT3.3 posted at Six Apart. You might want to take a look at the older Installation and Upgrade instructions for MT3.2. 40-plus pages of installation instructions for MT3.3 are available at Movable Type Documentation.) Also review MT3.3 Platform Changes for a list of things that have changed that may cause compatibility issues.

Instead of over-writing existing files, a safer approach is to create a new MT directory. That way if the install doesn't work for some reason, you can revert to using the original mt.cgi path for getting into MT edit. If you have questions regarding your install I encourage you to post them at the MT Support forums.

What do all these folders do?

This tutorial is written by LMT contributor Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

There are several folders in the default distribution of Movable Type. This tutorial will attempt to guide you through them all so that you feel more comfortable with what they do and contain.

extlib/

This directory contains perl libraries and files that support Movable Type. These are the modules that are needed by Movable Type to run (for example those modules listed in mt-check.cgi are normally found here) Some plugins also require some special perl modules to be installed, and normally you can install these perl modules into the extlib/ directory. For example, the BlogTimes plugin requires the GD perl module to be installed. Obviously you can get your host to install it and then that module would be available server wide. However, if you uploaded the files provided on the BlogTimes page into your extlib/ directory, you would have the GD module installed just for your installation without having to go to your host.

The extlib/ directory, however, can't handle everything. Many modules still need to be installed by your host for example Image::Magick or the Storable module can't be installed into the extlib/ directory as they require compilation.

You should never have to change the contents of files located in this directory if you ever apply a hack.

Co-authored by Elise Bauer and Arvind Satyanarayan.
Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

The installation instructions in the Movable Type Install Guide contain a section in the Configuration area called Enable Security Features. These instructions tell you to uncomment the Umask lines in your mt.cfg if your server is running cgiwrap or suexec. If you don't know what CGIwrap or suEXEC are, you may be tempted to skip this step. Don't. This step gives your MT installation extra security, which we will explain. (Note that this tutorial is only appropriate for MT installations on Linux/Apache web servers.)

What is CGIWrap or suEXEC?

CGIWrap and suEXEC are features installed by your web host that give extra security to your files in a shared server, or "virtual host", environment. Most Movable Type weblogs are hosted at commercial web hosts who are able to give their customers affordable server space by hosting the files of several customers on a shared server. In a shared server environment, CGIWrap and suEXEC allow your cgi files to be executed with you as the account "owner". The cgi scripts can then create files with more restrictive permissions (644) that keep others from editing your files, yet still allow you to edit them. Without CGIWrap or suEXEC, cgi scripts create html files that need to have more relaxed permissions (666) so that the account owner can manage those files.

Installing Movable Type requires uploading many files to a web server using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. The files must be loaded in the proper format and then the correct permissions must be set for each of the files in order for MT to work. If you are new to FTP then the Movable Type installation instructions can seem a little confusing.

FTP

Installing Movable Type requires that you know how to use an FTP program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. There are many FTP programs available; typing "FTP" into Google will yield several. For my Mac, I use Fetch. Transmit and Cyberduck for the Mac have also had good reviews. WS_FTP has been recommended as a good Windows FTP client, as well as SmartFTP.