Click images for desktop size: "My Home Planet" by Macwindows I managed to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2.
It was the easiest Movable Type upgrade I've ever done. The only things it broke were a couple of plug-ins. That was my fault. I always upgrade to a new directory and save the old one for the expected emergencies.
The main joy in the upgrade is the increased speed in generating the html pages. It took it 4 seconds to regenerate all the indexes on this and my puppy's site. It used to take a few minutes.
Other than that I was sort of disappointed in the fact that the interface didn't go through any changes at all. I don't much like the colors, so I was semi-hoping. (Not big time. I don't want to wear out my hoping muscles or use up any luck on the mundane.)
The only other thing to note is an odd tic. Now when the search engines crawl the site it generates an entry in the activity log for every tag as it crawls. Very peculiar.
Its more than a touch aggravating as I note that Yahoo and Google both still heavily reference the old WordPress php url's. Which, of course, now sends people nowhere. The only reason I notice is that, and I'm embarrassed about this, Microsoft's clunky search engine is the only one that's become accurate.
My feeling is that if Microsoft can do it, it must not be that difficult.
The dozens of activity log entries are mildly annoying. I'd expect it to be fixed soon. It could just be the way I've set up my tags.
One of the biggest positives is that Comment Spam has become almost non-existent. It still happens but from 500 to 600 a day to two or three a day is pretty exhilarating. It also means I won't be so aggravated as to accidentally delete the real comments when trying to weed through the enormous list.
I don't use the web interface to post so I can't speak to it.
Nothing else seems to have much changed.

Click images for desktop size: "Death" by UnknownMaybe it was thinking about all my kids competing at NFL camps around the country and the handful of kids in China, but installing the upgrade sent me into a nostalgic mode about an old web app called Coranto.
Coranto was a perl based "news" writer. I installed it on the kids web site (since down, the host that donated the free lifetime service went bankrupt. A sad time for a kind man). The beauty of Coranto was that in the days of CSS 1 I could give the kids a password and they could go in and write a news story, upload a picture with the story and "wham" have it appear on the web page all neat and prettily laid out with their byline! And they could do it all from their browser and never had to learn any html code or layout! A lot of big time news agencies used Coranto for their web sites too so we looked like we were competing.
It seemed pretty miraculous at the time . . .
Of course Coranto and all the other news writers rapidly evolved into blogs, which rapidly evolved into CMS and, now, social networking sites. (Another feature of Movable Type I'm not interested in so I can't say how well it works.)
I liked those old days of excitement. The excitement of seeing something you typed actually show up and for some one else to actually read it! A couple of my kids had the moxie and chutzpah to use their little stories on the web site to promote themselves jobs in the press.
I'm as proud of them as I am of my kids who are struggling with the NFL camps right now.
I've been up since before four. Couldn't sleep. My friend worked another 14 hour day. I hope she's coming to the end of the project, at least that the project ends before her health does.
The dogs have all come in, one at a time to see what's up with me. My puppy came in first, then she left to let the others come in and now she's wrapped around my feet. She doesn't look worried. She just looks happy.