Lots of technical work going on behind the scenes here at the RedMonk home offices. First, as I mentioned here we’re playing around with a wiki which I’m not entirely satisified with, but the alternative is a bit heavyweight for what I have in mind. So nothing to announce yet there. If anyone has any brilliant ideas or recommendations for a system that allows lightweight wiki style collaboration, supports HTML editing and document uploads, but offers more structure than a typical wiki, please drop me a line. Free report of your choice for anyone who sends something in that we end up using.
But we also just upgraded our Movable Type installation to 3.1. I made the decision to upgrade mainly for a few of the plugins it supports, and waited out the 3.0 developers release because like many IT folks who’ve been burned before I upgrade my enterprise systems (and yes, our blogging system now qualifies as one) rather cautiously.
So yesterday afternoon I began to upgrade our MT system, which is a fairly simple process generally speaking. Upload some files, run a few scripts, and you’re pretty much done. Except if you get errors. And of course, I got errors.
The following error, for clarity’s sake (some of machine/directory specifics are changed because I hate to make intrusion easier than it already is)
Upgrading your databases:
Running ‘update mt_author set author_type = 1 where author_type 2’An error occurred while upgrading the schema:
Can’t locate object method “no_build_indexes” via package “MT::ObjectDriver::DBM” (perhaps you forgot to load “MT::ObjectDriver::DBM”?) at /web/mvtype/mt-upgrade30.cgi line 366.
Given that my knowledge of the MT internals is about as extensive as my knowledge of the molecular biology, this was not a good message. It was in fact, a bad message. So I did what I normally do under these circumstances – turned to the community – which was abuzz with this error (not actually the one I was experiencing – that one was here) and a number of other upgrade snafus. This had all the makings of a PR nightmare for Six Apart. And then I remembered that RedMonk was actually a paying customer, and thus was entitled to “support.”
Even so, my expectations for help were pretty low. At best, I hoped that I’d get a response in 24 hours – and given the nature of the error, that meant a non-usable blog during that period – and at worst, no response at all.
Well, I’m happy to say that at least in this instance, I was very wrong. 1 hour and 31 minutes later, I received an updated upgrade script in my account. After uploading it and following the provided instructions, my installation was repaired. Had to wait till this morning to test everything out, but it seems to have worked like a charm (you’re reading this, aren’t you?).
So the bad news is that the 3.1 release seems to have a few kinks to it, the good news is that the paid support is actually worth paying for. This will come as small consolation to the thousands (tens of thousands?) of non-supported bloggers out there, but it’s important to note that the fix I received was also posted to the publically available support forum.
All in all, my first experience with MT support gets a A-. Kudos, Six Apart.
