Installing Movable Types on OS X

As you may have seen, I decided to change the way I post information on this blog. I was not happy with the way RapidWeaver lets me manage draft posts, and I have found an hindrance to have to wait until a post is fully incubated before posting it. A solution used by many is MarsEdit, which I'm using right now to edit this post (well, to be completely truthful: I'll use MarsEdit to publish the post, right now I'm writing it in TextMate using Markdown syntax). MarsEdit seems to be a very simple application (I'm sure it's very complex under the hood) that lets one manage blogs and posts on these blogs. However it does not work with RapidWeaver, so to use it I'd need to switch systems.

Yesterday, I went to MarsEdit forums and asked about this, and Daniel Jalkut (the current developer of MarsEdit) suggested two platforms: Blogger and WordPress. Blogger did not really appeal to me, and WordPress requires installing MySQL (more on this later). Moreover, one site I really like, Daring Fireball, uses MarsEdit and ... Movable Type, and I found a very interesting post comparing the three and choosing the latter. The nail in the coffin was discovering that Movable Type supports a sqlite backend, which is included in OS X Tiger. As I only have a command line access to my web server, installing MySQL felt a little too much work, so I decided to go with Movable Type.

So here are the steps I followed to get this working. I was lucky to find a very useful tutorial at MacZealots, but as it was for an older version of MT, I had to change a few things.

First of all, one great thing is I did not have to touch the Apache configuration.

I downloaded DBI and DBD-SQLite and went through the usual for each of them:

perl Makefile.PL
make
sudo make install

I also (later) downloaded and installed Mail-Sendmail to have my machine send me some mails when necessary (typically to approve or reject a comment).

I downloaded MT (version 4.01) and uncompressed it (the tricky bit was realizing that it was gzipped twice...). I then moved it to the CGI directory, changing its name to "mt":

mv MT-4.01-en /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt

I took the mt-static folder that was inside it and moved it to my document root (as by default these files are not accessible under the CGI-Executable directory). I created a folder to hold my database in the CGI mt folder.

Now a very important step:

sudo chown -R www /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt
sudo chown -R www /mywebroot/mt-static

Until I did this I kept getting an error when finalizing the installation: MT was telling me that there was a dbi:driver problem and that it could not find my database.

I next check that I could access the cgi by going to http://yourwebsite/cgi-bin/mt/mt-check.cgi

I then created a directory where the files would be published, and made sure it was owned by www as well.

I finally ran http://yourwebsite/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi which created my configuration file and my site.

If you find this useful, or if you find there is a mistake here, don't hesitate to leave me a comment. And they don't use Haloscan anymore ;-)