Helpful Coder

Found a fix for this movabletype issue recently. I was having problems with an MT-driven site not returning search results. It would come back with a " 500 Internal Server Error " with a log message of " Premature end of script headers ". Turns out this was due to the fact that this search was running over a very large site (thousands of entries), and presumable the search was timing out. Would be nice to have more descriptive errors! Anyways, it was fixed by limiting the number of days back that the search covered via the SearchCutoff parameter in mt-config.cgi. Maybe that'll help someone and save the some time! As an aside, it may also be helpful to know that when you set the system up to include results from multiple blogs, the system does not use the template that you can modify through the MT admin - rather it uses a file that you'll have to "manually" edit on the server ( search_templates/default.tmpl by default). This is pretty clear fr...

I've been working on a few MT4 sites, and so far I'm less than impressed. For one, their "documentation" is hardly that. It's incomplete, and often times inaccurate. For example, while researching custom fields, the official docs show a screenshot of the custom fields form in the admin control panel that includes fields at aren't even in the actual product . Even better, when I click the "Help" button from within the MT4 control panel, I get a 404 error. Nice! And I constantly have problems with republishing not actually updating files on a static blog - what's up with that? I've even had one installation stop showing entries on the homepage altogether, even with the default main index template being used! The entries are still there on archive pages, but apparently on the main index can't find them for some reason. Sometimes, I really wonder if it's worth messing with all these CMSs - I'm trying to add a very simple feature to ...

Had a problem today with MovableType 3.2 - MTIfNonEmpty kept insisting that a field coming out of the database was empty. I sanity-checked it to death, and that damn string was not empty, but MTIfNonEmpty just wouldn't work. No idea why. So I tried a work around using another comparison tag (sorry it's late, and I don't remember what it was) - basically comparing the tag to an empty string... And this time it decided that even empty strings were not empty... WTF? I ended up fixing it by just having the MT template write out PHP to do the comparison, which of course worked fine. The only thing I could figure was that the fact that field I was doing the comparison on was an "extra field", that somehow screwed it up. Who knows?