Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Trouble Shot

Even if the following fixes are only useful to one or two people, posting them to the blog makes them differently available for searching and bookmarking. Since I installed MT3.34, I ran across a couple of small snags. Nothing too off-putting, really. Just bumps along the up-gradual way.

First, the new tagging features in MT3.3+ are, as I've said before, really slick. But I was having trouble with the interface that allows me to merge tags. Say I have two tags I want to merge, like "method" and "methods." Okay? I click on one or the other and I the tag becomes editable. After I apply changes, I can select "Rename," in which case it will summon the database to see if the new tag already exists. If it does exist, a java popup asks whether I want to proceed with the merge. If the revised tag doesn't exist, it goes ahead and applies the change. The other option, "cancel," does just that. Simple, eh?

Only, when I first attempted this process from Firefox, my browser of choice, of course, the tag-revising process works the first time. Fiddling with subsequent tags doesn't work. The java popup wouldn't appear. So I thought, it's java. I reinstalled the java add-on. No change. Must be one of the browser extensions interfering, right (Greasemonkey? Notefish?)? I disabled all of them. And one by one, closing and re-opening the browser between each try, I re-enabled each one. Nothing. After a couple of days of thinking that it didn't matter that much (I could always use another browser for the process), I tried switching to the default theme. And that did the trick. The theme I was using (Azerty II) seemed to be conflicting with the java routine. I don't have a technical explanation, but it's fixed. So that's that.

The other snag was really more of a limited feature. I was using the MTkeywords2tags script to convert, that's right, keywords to tags. But rather than running the script on an entire installation, I only wanted to run it on my exam notes blog. Being somewhat of a perl dunce, I went ahead and emailed the author of the script. And he was nice enough to get back to me with this solution.

In the .cgi file, replace

my $iter = MT::Entry->load_iter;

with

my $iter = MT::Entry->load_iter({ blog_id => [5,8] });

The numbers in the square brackets match with the blog IDs to be converted. There. Two troubles, both of them troubleshot.

Posted by Derek Mueller at February 6, 2007 4:40 PM to On Weblogs