Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

Can I pick your brain about this a little bit? I’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t really seen any compelling reasons to counteract the time sink. What motivated you to switch and how bad was it?

I upgraded in large part because MT4 had been out long enough that I felt at least somewhat confident in its stability (I’m usually hesitant to leap into the first release of anything, especially if large amounts of data are at stake). And I had a little bit of free time last night so I figured what the hell.

The install process was fairly simple, actually. I’ve had MT since version 2.something, so I heeded their advice to do a clean install, copying all the MT4 files into a new folder rather than copying them over the old files. Then I told the install script where to find my database, and everything was good to go. It used the existing database, making some modifications, and preserved all my templates and settings. Then I re-installed my plugins (same process as before, just FTPing the files to the plugins folder).

The interface is quite different, and it’s a bit too soon for me to say whether or not I like it. I’m having a hard time finding things, and the jumps between blog-level settings and system-level settings get a bit confusing. (I understand the hierarchy and what they’re trying to do, but the implementation doesn’t quite work the way I expect, like when I’m looking at blog-level information, click a link and suddenly am presented with the same information, but in the system-level view.)

Overall, it seems like they’ve taken some cues from the WordPress admin interface, for better or worse. I do like the dashboard view, which seems to owe a bit to MeasureMap. (And there’s a cool plugin to add a tab for pageview data, pulled from your Google Analytics account.) I also like the blog entry interface. Preview mode is especially cool, because you get to see how your post will look on the page. (Also cool: autosave.)

So far I’m not a big fan of the “Assets” system. I understand and like it in theory (it makes sense to have some kind of visual way to look through all the images, videos, etc. that you’ve uploaded into the system over time, with searchable metadata), but, again, something’s missing in the implementation. The “Upload File” feature ties into Assets, and it’s really irritating me that the code it suggests I put into my blog post has a bunch of extra inline style code, when all I want is a basic, clean IMG tag with the URL of my image. I may have to do some tinkering to make it do what I want.

I also need to tinker a bit more with the comment filtering, as my updated whitelist plugin doesn’t seem to be working (hence your comment being moderated and shunted to the spam folder).

My next step will be to figure out whether and how to migrate my templates to the new style of MT templates, where everything seems to be modularized, and to take a look at what new template tags are available. They don’t offer flat template files like they did for previous versions of MT, which means I need to take the time to dive into the documentation.

Wow, thanks for all of the info. That was great.