Movable type and plugin installation

Tue 01 October 2013

When I decided to open a blog, I choose to use a CMS I didn't know about. The result is that it was not easy.

This post describe the main steps.

The choice of a CMS
The location of the blog
The installation of the CMS
The installation of the plugin(s)

I think all these steps should have their own post on this blog, but I want to write as soon as possible for freshness of my experience. Don't expect explanation on choice

choice of the CMS

I wanted a CMS with active community, but not the most spread one. A look inside debian packages database result in a short list. Into this short list, movabletype sounds the sexiest, so I chose it.

location of the blog

Because I've got some skills in administrating debian, I choose to put my blog on debian-powered computer. My little experience running a computer reachable from the internet 24/7 at home show me it was not a good idea to put deploy a web site on such home-located computer. So this website is running on a VPS I rent.

installation of the CMS

I thought this step would have been the easiest. I was wrong. The debian package on the testing release (the release I prefer to run) was out of date and work better when hosting only one website on the computer. After some time spent trying to solve complicated problems, I decided to follow the instructions. The few modification I made are the following:

the chmod to more restrictive permission. The only user that must access the files is the one running the web server (www-data in my case). In my installation, the user owning all the files is not www-data but the group www-datahas permissions needed.
only the cgi files are to be executed (chmod g+x). other files has to be only be readable and (sub)folders has to be writable (and executable to go into them)

plugin(s)
Once more, I thought debian's packages would have been easier to use. It's the second time since I use debian (roughly since 2007) I think debian's packages are harder to use than tarball. You can compare this rate with other OS troubleshoot you face. My advice: use plugin's instruction.
The only plugin I use for the moment is the zemanta plugin. I found latter that a firefox plugin exists. Thus, it may be useless to include it in a weblog engine. Tell me if I'm wrong, and why.
The next plugin I'll install will be to use LaTeX syntax.

Still, I'm wandering if I won't migrate this blog to something lighter (nanoblogger, blosxom, blaze,...). I just want to blog, using some syntax I know (markdown, LaTeX, ...)