The back-end upgrade from MT 2.64 to MT 3.34 went almost shockingly well. Nothing seems broken, all my old entries & comments are still here, and (what I was most worried about) my templates are all still working.
So far, so good. I’ll have to wait and see how the new comment spam system works as compared to my trusty old MT-Blacklist installation.
The next stage …. the front end. I’ll be playing around with my Rome travelogue to see how the new StyleCatcher plugin works as far as skinning the site goes. If I can’t get it to work & look good over there, I may leave things as-is here. It will depend on how much hacking I need to do to the CSS and templates to make my ancient, customized templates work properly.
UPDATE: 1:56PM
As I suspected, those old templates are causing trouble. I had to completely overwrite them to get StyleCatcher to work. As of now, a new template is up and running on the Rome blog, and I’m going to try to figure out how to add some of the old stuff back in.
UPDATE 2:30PM
I got Sitemeter back on the Rome blog but have not have the nerve to do any more significant hacking. Taking a break for a while. It’s a really lovely day and I don’t want to spend it all indoors.
UPDATE 6:25PM
The Rome blog’s in decent shape now. Once I got the hang of the template widget module system, getting some customization into the sidebar wasn’t tough at all. I tried a couple of different skins but for now I’m using a very basic one (Vicksburg Desert) that’s not too different in look and tone from my old one.
UPDATE: 8:30PM
I’ve widget-ized and updated the templates for the main site. And for good measure, I installed a 3rd party plug-in called “Promote This!” to add some social bookmarking links to my entries. I’m thoroughly impressed by how easy it’s all been — easy being a relative term, of course. What’s easy for a moderate geek like me would be pretty damn difficult for a non-techie, but then, that’s what Blogger and TypePad are for.
It’s a little weird not seeing my trusty old templates anymore, but now that I’ve got the version 3.x templates installed, I can skin to my heart’s content. Probably tomorrow, though. I think that’s enough work for one day.