Essential Blogging

Installing Movable Type

Movable Type is free for personal use; if you’re using the system for commercial purposes, a license fee of $150 is required. The software is donation-ware, meaning that a donation is appreciated. There are incentives for donating; for example, if you donate $20, you will receive a key, allowing your site to appear on the Recently Updated List on http://www.movabletype.org.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the process of installing Movable Type can be time consuming, and the actual time spent installing the software will vary based on the amount of prior experience and familiarity you have installing server-based scripts. Users unfamiliar with the process of setting file permissions will no doubt have a different experience from those who are comfortable working in a command-line environment. However, as long as your server meets the requirements and you follow the instructions below, you should be able to get up and running without too much trouble. Let’s get started.

Requirements

Does your web server meet the requirements for installing Movable Type? The system is a server-based application comprised of CGI scripts, Perl library modules, and frontend display templates and images. Data is stored in Berkeley DB databases, which provide a solid data repository for all your important blog data.

To install and run Movable Type, you will need:

A web server

The application itself is around 2 megabytes, but we suggest you have at least 25 megabytes of disk space ...