Helpful Files for Movable Type

With all the trouble I had getting Movable Type up and running, I found nothing much of use on the Dreamhost Knowledge Base pages -- except for a link to these instructions from a fellow Dreamhost user. They were very clear, and I was glad to have found them.

The "Troubleshooting" section of the Movable Type documentation was not much help.

The best thing I tried was running the CGIs from the command line. To do that, you have to use PuTTY to telnet in to your Dreamhost account. You cd (change directory) to the directory where you stashed the Movable Type files, then type perl filename.cgi for whatever file is not working. That's how I figured out my first line (/usr/bin/perl) was incorrect.

But enough whining. Now that I finally have it running, Movable Type is very satisfactory. The templates are much easier to work with than the ones for Greymatter.

Installing Movable Type

After much struggle and pain, I have installed Movable Type on my Dreamhost server. The main problems: (1) Thinking that I needed to delete "#!" before /usr/bin/perl on the .cgi files. (2) Not realizing that I had to set permissions differently because "As a security precaution, suexec REQUIRES that all cgi scripts AND THE DIRECTORIES IN WHICH THEY RESIDE *NOT* be writable by anyone but the owner user. Otherwise, another user on your machine could go into the directory, edit your script to do something, then visit it from the web and they would then have access as though they were you! Then, they would essentially have full access to your user account, and that's bad!

"SO, suexec requires that you change the owner (chown) and change the group (chgrp) to be your user and group (don't worry, these are the defaults when you upload or create a file), AND that you chmod (change permissions) that file AND THE DIRECTORY it resides in to be not-writable by the world."

That comes from this Dreamhost Knowledge Base page.