Announcing Movable Type 3.34
Last night we released version 3.34 of the Movable Type Publishing Platform. Movable Type 3.34:
- Fixes important potential XSS vulnerabilities
- Is a free and recommended update for all Movable Type users
- Enables simple use of FastCGI which yields a 15x performance increase
We encourage all of our users and customers to upgrade to this latest release of Movable Type because it addresses a hand full of important XSS security vulnerabilities. In addition to security enhancements, this release introduces a feature enhancement that has increased application performance for a number of users by over an order of magnitude.
Sign in to your Movable Type account. to download this free update.
We have been educating users for some time about the benefits of hosting Movable Type under FastCGI, a free and light weight persistent hosting environment for web applications. However, prior to Movable Type 3.34, FastCGI support could only be achieved by applying a number of patches to the MT source code. In 3.34, however, those patches are no longer necessary; FastCGI support has been fully integrated into the core application. Now Movable Type is capable of detecting when it is running under FastCGI automatically and take advantage of its unique performance benefits without the user or the system administrator needing to do a thing.
Because of the profound performance benefits of FastCGI and the security fixes made in Movable Type 3.34 we encourage all users to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type as soon as possible.
Keep reading to learn more about the specific benefits of Fast CGI and to find resources that will help you install and setup FastCGI on your system.
Why FastCGI?
Running Movable Type under FastCGI is still optional, but why do we recommend so strongly to users that they run Movable Type under it? Listed below are the primary benefits and advantages of running your Movable Type installation under this free, light weight and persistent hosting environment:
- Increased Application Performance – FastCGI has shown to increase application performance by almost 15 times. The speed increase is so dramatic because the application is persisted in memory, allowing information to be cached between page requests reducing page load time and database load.
- Increased Commenting Performance – Movable Type routes incoming comments through the application itself in order to filter out comment spam and to store them in the database for moderation or publication. Therefore, the time it takes to process a comment is greatly enhanced for all the same reasons the application performance is increased.
- Increased Reliability – Fewer resources are needed to load a single page within the Movable Type application, reducing web server loads and database load, taxing your system less and freeing up those resources for other applications and system components.
- Increased Resiliency During Spam Attacks – When a blog is undergoing a spam attack its resources are put under tremendous load. Under this kind of attack any application has to process each comment in order to determine whether it is spam or not. Under FastCGI, comment spam can be processed and filtered much faster because the Movable Type application is resident in memory lowering database load and network overhead.
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Last night we released version 3.34 of the Movable Type Publishing Platform. Movable Type 3.34: Fixes important potential XSS vulnerabilities Is a free and recommended update for all Movable Type users Enables simple use of FastCGI which yields a 15x... Read More
Thanks for the FastCGI improvements. Movable Type now seems incredibly fast!
With over 10,000 pages on my blog, i'm keen on anything which improves performance !
However, and apologies if i'm missing something obvious, but are there any upgrade instructions from MT 3.3?
Great that you have an update, but where are the docs for how to do it?
Great that you have an update, but where are the docs for how to do it?
Where are the upgrade instructions?
Happy to do the installation/upgrade - but there is no documentation on the upgrade. I tried using the technique from Learning Movable Type (http://www.learningmovabletype.com/archives/001566a_safe_way_to_upgrade_to_mt_33.php)
and, after signin, the code redirects to the wrong place.
Where are the upgrade instructions? Should I just replace the code?
Stupid question here..... how do I tell if MT is running under fcgi properly? Is there a page or something that I can go to and confirm that it's picking things up properly?
Any information for setting this up on IIS?
Dave, our documentation for Hosting Movable Type under FastCGI can be found on our wiki. There is a lot of great knowledge building there.
Arcterex - very good question. I am in the process of updating our wiki with this information as we speak.
Eric, Dave and Sanford, you can find instructions on upgrading Movable Type here. If you are upgrading from a version of Movable Type before 3.3 it might be wise to read the list of changes in 3.3 to advise you on potentials gotchas in the new version.
But please let us know if you need more help. I would be happy to provide it.
Bryne,
The link you offer is how to upgrade to 3.2.
You guys are making me nervous about MT.
Well I took the leap from 3.2 to 3.34 and the upgrade was incredibly painless, if somewhat difficult to find instructions.
Entry saving is way faster now, and comment editing is slightly faster, but try a site search and weep. Fifteen seconds plus over the usual three-ish seconds. Painful.
I don't know if it's just me, but the instructions are just a flash movie showing that an upgrade screen magically appears at some point. That's not happening over on my end! Are there any written instructions on how to force the upgrade to go through?
I wonder how exactly the benchmarks were contrived...
I would love to have some mod_perl figures. but in order to have it comparable I'd also need to repeat the FastCGI & CGI tests...
With all due respect to Byrne Reese, there are virtually no actual installation instructions on the MT page that deals with installations/upgrades. One is left to assume that the process is to upload the contents of the mt-static folder to the corresponding folder on the server, and the contents of the MT-3.34 folder to the mt folder within the cgi-bin folder on the server. However, while this may be implied, it is not explicit, and there are no warnings about overwriting files, doing a backup first, etc. Very odd.
Hey,
I've copied all the necessary files to my server. I've logged into MT, but I didn't get the "Time to Upgrade" message. So I ran the the mt-upgrade.cgi and this says my database is already the current database. I don't understand. I was running 3.33 and now I'm running 3.34 according to the message in the bottom. Is this all that needed to be done?
Regards,
Ilse
The instructions I linked to (3.2) are still valid for 3.3. Once you have installed the new files Movable Type will prompt you the next time you access the application to upgrade. If it is any more difficult than that, please let us know and we can help.
Ilse, yes that is all that is needed. The upgrade process only kicks off if there are database changes that need to be made. Given that the MT schema did not change between 3.33 and 3.34 then there is no upgrade process that needs to run. Just drop in the files and you are done.
Greg, no disrespect taken. I am sorry our installation and upgrade instructions were difficult to find. Our installation and upgrade guide can be found on our Movable Type Documentation page.
Dear Byrne,
should an upgrade screen have magically popped up as shown in the Flash video you linked first? Nothing like this happened for me.
Are you suggesting that the "Installation Guide" covers the process of manual upgrading? I can't find any description of a version upgrade in there.
Or are you maybe suggesting that "upgrading from 3.33 to 3.34" is the same as "upgrading to Movable Type Enterprise"? That is non-apparent.
Are you suggesting that one of the other links on the Movable Type Documentation page explains that, in order to upgrade, you have to replace all your existing files with those of a new install, potentially warns about making backups etc? I'd appreciate a direct link to such document.
Also. as previous commenters pointed out, no upgrade screen appeared after having replaced the files.
On a related note, where exactly have you documented the mt-wizard? I couldn't find any mention in the Installation Guide either.
Best regards, Nei
Seems like it's pretty obvious that for any new MT version, you need a link to very specific upgrade instructions right on the page where you have the download link. One shouldn't expect users to have to do a search to find an old news post about the new version, especially when the site is advertising the new version on the front page, but not the install/upgrade instructions.
I've received a couple marketing/newsletter emails from Six Apart for Movable Type in the past month or so; would it be possible, then, to let me know when a new release is available?
I used to rely on word-of-mouth from other blogs for this information, but the general enthusiasm for MT has diminished considerably since it was rechristened as a business blogging platform.