The Problems With My MT 3.0 Upgrade

Well, initially there didn’t seem to be too much difference with MovableType 3.0D, but…. after I have gotten into it there is a bit of a headache getting it going in the right direction. My main problem was that the MT install and documentation said fairly clearly to refer to the documentation for installing and clearly no-one had spoken with the writers of this documentation about this. All it offered was the help that if any of these Perl modules are not installed on your server that you should speak with your hosting provider. Now this is of absouletly no help at all because I have my own server. So, its time to get to work.

First thing, I found after one of my friends posted a comment to the site I found that the page didn’t rebuild correctly, This turned out to be my error because I didn’t correctly upgrade one of my plugins. The suspect plug-in was Textile2, a handy plugin that does some cool things with text formatting. Not a contributing factor to this, but I also want to mention Smartypants, which is another text formatting plug-in that augments Textile’s functions that I use on this site.

After that was corrected, I set forth into fixxing some of the errors that I received during the mt-check function. I was told that I had the following missing files:

1. HTML::Entities :
This was not too difficult to solve. Again a few google searches and then a search on cpan for it , this followed by a few apt-cache** searches and I found it: “libwww-perl”, at least I hope that is is things got really confusing at some point and I lost track of what I was doing (sorry).
2. Image::Magick :
I had already installed this on my server because it is required by Gallery but MT insists that it is not installed. A bit odd, but I am leaving this as is for now.
3. Storable :
A quick search through the apt-cache** and bango! “libstorable-perl” and that was it for this one.
4. Crypt::DSA :
I couldn’t figgure this one out. It till remains a mystery, no help here.
5. MIME::Base64 :
This was the first thing that I chose to tackle, because it was causing the biggest problems. When a viewer would attempt to place a comment they would get this error. A simple couple of creative searches on Google. This gave me enough info to make an educated guess at what the apt-get* package name would be called. And after a few searches I found “libmime-base64-perl”. I also found a thread over at SixApart, the makers of MovableType and TypePad, that discussed this error and I put in my 2 cents.
6. XML::Atom :
THis proved to be more than difficult. I searched cpan after my brother’s suggestion. I found that this module required XML::LibXML and required Digest::SHA1 and also Datetime, finally I gave up and installed what I could of the dependencies that I could find, the only one that it wouldn’t accept was XML::LibXML and I still cannot figgure out why. Any way I found XML::LibXML on a site related to SixApart and put it into my perl directory. MT accepted this as good enought to pass it’s check. I think that I have all the appropriate dependencies installed.
7. And the rest were already there from my install of version 2.661

*apt-get is a UNIX application that will automatically downloads and installs the requested package and any dependent packages.
**apt-cache is a similar package to apt-get this is mainly used with the search option to find a specific package.

And here is the error message that I was getting because of the MIME::Base64 module being absent:

An error occurred: Can’t locate MIME/Base64.pm in @INC (@INC contains: (the various paths to perl that I am not about to display on my web server…) /lib/MT/App/Comments.pm line 487. Compilation failed in require at /path/to/my/mt/scripts/mt-comments.cgi line 21.

UPDATE: And this AM I made an entry into my LinkedArticles with the bookmarklets and revieved this error (it did build it though):

Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /path/to/my/mt/installed/cgi/files/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 762.