MT4 Community Gotchas
From MovableType
Things that just don't work the way they seem they should
I'm creating this page because MT4.01 beta 2 is driving me nuts as I try to finalize a community site for fall term at Eastern Michigan University. Classes start in three days. All problems reported here also occur with "production ready" MT4.
Let me point out that these annoyances (and outright bugs) probably impact the small local community builder, that person who wants to create 40 to 60 blogs for a set of classes or projects. I'll list them under headings to make scanning easier. All are productivity killers.
Blog Administrators Cannot Comment on The Blogs They Administer (Case 58076)
Here's a typical scenario: You have a list of people to create blogs for and set up a prototype blog to clone and be assigned to the users as they are created. By design in MT4, those users are made administrators of the blogs in question. The users are able to create entries, and everything seems to be going along fine (well almost, see below) until they try to respond to a a comment on an entry they have authored. They discover that they do not have permission to comment on their own blog.
workaround: After creating the blog and user, explicitly go back and add that user as a commenter on their own blog.
The semantics of comment authentication are inconsistent
MT4 offers several comment authentication mechanisms: OpenID, TypeKey, MT Native, LiveJournal to name almost all of them. In the UI, they appear to be equal, likely offering the same level of authentication for commenting. However, they are quite different. Having an OpenID or TypeKey account allows you to comment on any blog on the system. If you use MT Native, you may and may not be allowed to comment on any blog in the system. If you are a system administrator, you can. If you are anything else, you can only comment on a specific blog for which the administrator has granted you permission.
At the very least, it seems that you should be able to create a role within MT where once a commenter has registered with MT, they can comment on any blog within the system.
Publishing an entry on a fresh minted new blog does not actually publish it (Case 58077)
Consider the scenario where a new user is writing an entry on a blog generated as part of creating that user. The user writes the entry and publishes it. All appears to function normally. Ping servers are pinged. The little progress bar fills in. The user clicks on the link to see the published entry. What!?! A 404 Error!?
It turns out that nothing in the site actually published even though all indications are that it did.
workaround: After creating the sites, publish the full site yourself before letting users create new entries. All then functions normally for users as it appears to.
update (Chad Everett): I would go so far as to say that this isn't just for a "fresh-minted" blog. On new blogs, upgraded blogs, and any blog I have tried, saving an entry doesn't - ever - seem to update the associated individual entry archive. The only way that I have been able to get it to update the on-disk representation is by (re-)publishing the individual entry archives (republishing the entire site will work as well, but the entries are the important part).
possible workaround 2: Try deleting the individual entry archive mappings and recreating them. That has worked for me when all else fails.
Assigning a User to a Newly Created Blog Is Broken, Don't Do It
I tried this as a workaround to the blog administrators cannot comment on their own blog problem. Don't do it. The first time the user publishes an entry, there is an error about a category of some sort not being there. Hitting the back button on the error screen and republishing seems to work but actually produces a duplicate entry. The user (blog administrator) you assign to the blog still cannot comment on his or her own entries.