Not a developer? Go to MovableType.com

MovableType.org
Documentation
Home / Documentation / Appendices Appendix: Release Notes

Movable Type 4.2 Release Notes

This version of Movable Type was released August 12, 2008.

The following are the list of known issues and known work-arounds with Movable Type 4.2 and Movable Type Pro 4.2. For other versions, please the Movable Type Release Notes Appendix

Important Notice

  • February 26, 2009, 5:29 PST - We have issued Movable Type 4.24 as an update to all customers to include the following:

    • Security Patch This release amends a bug we discovered that lead to exposure of author profile data.
    • Improved Password Recovery The “Password Hint” field is now obsolete. A unique email address is all an author needs to reset their password.

  • August 21, 2008, 4:22pm PST - We have issued Movable Type 4.21 as an update to all customers. This update fixed two important bugs:

    • Custom fields data. If you are upgrading from Movable Type Commercial or Enterprise 4.1 to Movable Type Pro or Enterprise 4.2 and you are using custom fields on any object in Movable Type and there are more than 100 rows in the table for that object, some of your custom field data could be lost in the migration.
    • Archive mappings. If you create a new blog on your Movable Type 4.2 installation and you delete an archive mapping from one of the archive templates, this action will remove the rest of your blog archive mappings inadvertently.
  • August 20, 2008, 6:48pm PST - Users of Movable Type 4.1 that also utilize custom fields are advised not to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2 until MT 4.21 is made publicly available. A bug has been discovered that could result in loss of custom field data during the upgrade process. We expect to have 4.21 deployed to customers soon. A patch is available. Stayed tuned to the community blog for more information.

Known Issues

  • The “Address Book” feature has been deprecated. Users wishing to re-enable this feature must add the following line to the end of their mt-config.cgi file: EnableAddressBook 1
  • Several themes have been removed from the download to reduce the size of Movable Type. These themes are still available via Style Catcher. They are simply not packaged with the distribution.
  • Users are recommended to keep the number of widgets in a single widget set to less than 20. This is because the list of widgets associated with a widget set is stored as a string containing a comma delimited list of widget IDs. This field is limited to 255 characters. When the number of widgets exceed 255 characters then widgets will get “dropped.”
  • Users should be aware that when refreshing blog templates that template IDs may change. This may result in widget sets appearing to drop widgets. This will be fixed in a subsequent release.
  • The batch edit Entries mode does not respect the DeleteFilesAtRebuild directive. This means that files whose publish status is changed from Published to Unpublished will not have their files removed from the server.
  • The MTArchiveNext and MTArchivePrevious template tags do not work in the ‘About’ widget under dynamic publishing when dynamic caching was enabled. They work fine under dynamic publishing without caching.
  • Toggling from Rich Text, to Markdown and back to Rich Text may result in corruption of content. This is a result of a bug in Markdown that will be fixed in the next version. Complete details can be found in the bug report.
  • Using Regular Expressions for searches does not currently function properly. This will be fixed in a future release.
  • GetVar and SetVar template tags have been deprecated. Users are recommended to use <mt:var> instead. Note: it is unlikely that support for these tags will be removed for some time, but users are encouraged to update their templates nonetheless.
  • Custom fields are not cloned when cloning a blog with custom fields.
  • There have been issues associated with restoring a backup file that contains only a single blog due to broken dependencies between userpic and other global assets that may somehow be associated with another blog (the one not being restored that is). The workaround is to create a backup of all blogs.
  • Users are given a less than descriptive error message under the condition when you enable archive root option without specifying the archive root paths.
  • Users should be careful when restoring a backup file for a blog relying on Multiblog republish triggers. The restored triggers may need to be reconfigured and mapped to the correct blogs.
  • The type of the Keywords field on edit entry screen has been changed from multi-line text input field (3.35) to a single line text input field in 4.x. This means that some keywords may not be visible if the keywords include a line break.
  • The blog selector control found at the top of the screen exhibits odd behavior with regards to sorting when a user has adds the 11th blog to the list. When the 11th blog is added, the sort order of the blogs in the list gets reversed. This will be fixed in a subsequent release.
  • The Import/Export operations have been removed from the system level menus. Starting in Movable Type 4.2 you must first select a blog, then select “Import” or “Export” from the Tools menu.

  • The meta variables __even__, __odd__ and __counter__ do not respect their nested context nor do they display as one might expect under threaded comments. The following template code can work around this issue:

    <MTComments><MTIfCommentParent><MTElse>
<mt:if name="is_even">even<mt:else>odd </mt:if>    
<MTCommentID> <MTCommentDate>, <MTCommentAuthor>
<MTCommentReplies>   
<mt:if name="is_even">even<mt:else>odd </mt:if>    
<MTCommentID>    <MTCommentDate>, <MTCommentAuthor>
<MTCommentRepliesRecurse></MTCommentReplies>
<mt:if name="is_even"><mt:setvar name="is_even" value="0">
<mt:else><mt:setvar name="is_even" value="1"></mt:if>
</MTIfCommentParent></MTComments>
  • Using the <mt:Entries> tag to aggregate content across multiple blogs requires the lastn attribute to function properly in date based archive formats. When aggregating content using this tag in an archive template please set lastn to a properly large value to ensure you aggregate all of the entries within the specified date range like so: <MTEntries lastn="9999" include_blogs="all" sort_order="ascend">
  • Dynamic publshing does not work for community forum templates on enterprise database. To work around this issue one needs to remove all sort_by="score" references in the default templates. This is due to a limitation in Oracle and SQLServer databases support for the “SELECT DISTINCT” clause.
  • Users are unable to create custom fields with template tags (a custom field basename) that contain dashes. This will result in an error. To work around use underscores.
  • Custom Field template tags created while using FastCGI will not be recognized by the system with a web server restart. It is recommended that users create all the custom fields they need and then issue a single restart at the end of the process to minimize potential interruption to users.
  • Values specified in custom fields are not shown on a live entry/page preview screen until you save an entry. To work around issue, save page/entry in an unpublished state, then preview prior to publishing.
  • Movable Type 4.2 changed search behavior by trimming whitespace off the beginning and end of search terms. This disrupts searches in which the user intended to search for whitespace. To work around this issue one can do a regex search, e.g. “MySearchTerm[ ]” which will produces results that contain the term “MySearchTerm “.
  • Movable Type cannot process large FOAF docs (over 100k) to extract profile data. This occurs in LiveJournal in some cases which can produce FOAF documents of this size.
  • Upgrading Community Blog template set requires users to refresh global templates. This can also have impacts to other blogs in your system. Please consult our Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade Guide for additional information.
  • Movable Type users using dynamic publishing and wishing to display userpics for their users should make sure that PHP has been configured with support for GD. GD is an image manipulation library that will convert large images into smaller thumbnails.
  • Refreshing your blog templates in MT 4.2 will/can result in new archive templates being installed, but without archive maps (urls) being assigned to them. Publishing immediately after a refresh can then in some instances result in a publishing error. To resolve this issue, create the appropriate archive maps to your newly installed archive templates, and delete obsolete maps.
  • Associations with the ‘newly created user’ virtual user are not restored during backup restoration.
  • Some phrases in mt-check.cgi are garbled in an environment using Perl 5.6.1. These “garbled” or nonsensical characters are innocuous and do not indicate an error.
  • Upon completing an upgrade to Movable Type 4.2, users should physically remove the Widget Manager plugin, or disable it.
Back