F*&%#ng Movable Type 3.11
For the last three hours or so, I’ve been struggling with Movable Type 3.11 over the following error:
Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 770.
It appears every time someone tries to post a comment to my photoblog, or when I try to post a new entry or rebuild the individual archive pages. Not the monthly or category archives, mind you — just the individual entries. I’ve scoured the templates for the three different archive templates looking for some difference between them that might be causing the problem. I’ve updated my plugins to the most recent, sure-to-be-MT3-compatible versions. When that didn’t work, I deleted all the old plugins that I’m not really using from the plugin directory and uploaded all the ones that didn’t have an update available… just in case. I re-uploaded mt.pm in case it got corrupted in my transition from 3.0D to 3.11. Still, no change.
Google tells me that there are some other people who’ve had the same problem, but I can’t find any specific advice on how to fix it. Well, Ken Edwards over at Breaking Windows fixed it by scrapping all his templates and starting from scratch, but I’m not up for that. Besides, it’s the specialized templates that make it a photoblog, as opposed to a regular blog, or an Ashlee Simpson fansite, or a toaster oven.
Can anyone out there help me? I’m submitting a trouble ticket to the TextDrive support gods as well, but if there’s some kind reader out there in the blogosphere with the answer to my questions I’d much appreciate an assist. I’m eagerly awaiting WordPress 1.3 in the hope that I can move my photoblog to it and solve some of these problems permanently…
Updates:
- TextDrive support has confirmed that this is, in fact, a bug with MT that can be fixed by upgrading as suggested by Brad below. Thanks, everyone, for your help.
- 11/17/2004, about 5:30pm — Finally made the upgrade. Photoblog is alive and kicking just in time for my new camera to arrive tomorrow!
Yes, and the MT support through their ticket system suggested I just go with the default templates that MT 3.11 gives you when you start a new blog. Here is the exact words from the last bit of communication between me and 6A reguarding this issue:
Pain in my ass if you ask me. There is/was a lot of custom coding on my old templates that I really want to bring back. My category templates, for example, look like hell right now because I do not have time to re-code them. I have even had one reader complain about them. I will get to it some day.
Comment by Ken Edwards — October 31, 2004 @ 7:50 pm
Oh, another common thought on that error code is MT plugins. It might be a plugin that is throwing that error on template rebuilds. I do not know what plugins, if any, you are using.
Comment by Ken Edwards — October 31, 2004 @ 7:52 pm
May I suggest trying out 3.121? I believe it corrected this problem, but if not, it will be easier to diagnose and/or get official support if you’re running the latest release.
Comment by Brad Choate — October 31, 2004 @ 9:21 pm
I didn’t know there’d been an upgrade since 3.11. Thanks for the tip, Brad — I’ll give that a shot when I have some time.
Comment by Adam M. — October 31, 2004 @ 10:24 pm
Ken, thanks for the pointers (and the sympathy). As for plugins, I’m only using MT-Macros (now compatible with 3.x) and RandomEntries. Not sure it could be the second, since the random entries appear in all the templates and only the individual ones refuse to rebuild!
I’m going to try the upgrade Brad suggested sometime this week, but a MT upgrade is no small undertaking so it’ll have to wait until I have more time.
Thanks again, guys! MT may be a bear sometimes, but I’ve learned that you can always count on the great people in the community to help you out.
Comment by Adam M. — October 31, 2004 @ 10:36 pm
Onward to WP 1.3!
My test blog has moved from Movable Type 3.x to an alpha version of WordPress 1.3……
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