Movable Type To-Do List

Now that I’ve made it through the hump of the Movable Type 3.14 upgrade, I’m building a to-do list of things to get done before the semester starts late next January and I again have No Life. Most of these tweaks fall into the “less work for mother” category; do it now and life will be easier down the road.

* Get cron jobs working so I can schedule posts (as of 12/26, this seems to be fixed; I don’t know why it’s working now, but after five days of messages to Six Apart and Dreamhost, cron jobs suddenly work–or at least did for one post, which is a start)

* Replace the olde-tyme mt.cfg file with the version contemporaneous with 3.14 (available from the full install package). While in theory MT should work just fine with older versions of this file (or they would include a newer version in the upgrade package, right?), I’m a twee skeptical, since I can see a few additions to mt.cfg between 2.66 and 3.14, and those changes must be there for a reason. Six Apart tech support didn’t discourage me from upgrading, As Long As I Don’t Overwrite My Settings. (I backed up ALL of my MT installation on my desktop, just in case of an unfortunate error.)

* Find a nifty suite of fonts; I’m tired of those dinky san-serif fonts. I like Maud Newton’s, quite frankly, though I’ve been playing with Garamond.

* Install MT-Blacklist, to combat the evil sp*m monster, and to enable automatically closing comments after a set period.

* Create a navigational bar for the top of the page.

* Turn the nav bar and the sidebars into modular templates so I can use them across the site.

* Redo the colors etc. for the site, and get the CSS tweaked so the fonts are unapologetically easy on the eyes. (The test blog has some experiments in that area.)

* Convert the index page to php. (Most of the site is now php–just not the index page!)

* Look for a plugin that I can use to close a lot of comments at once.

* After all that’s done and the blog is working blogariffically, see if MT-Approval can be reinstalled.