At Long Last Success!
Nov 3rd, 2005 by Karen
I’ve been working very diligently here to get Movable Type up and running so that all the weblog would be dynamic and easily manageable. Additionally, we’ve been testing to see how much we can lock down the Movable Type server without breaking Movable Type. Today I was finally successfully in getting a completely dynamic site working. The biggest challenge was getting PHP properly installed and configure with Apache 1.3 on the Linux server. Thank goodness that the Head of Computing Systems and Networking is knows more about Linux than me. (I’m terribly sad in terms of Linux skills but I’m painfully learning!) I’ve never installed anything from source before and frankly it is pretty darn daunting. However, if you have someone to help you if goes faster. The most difficult thing is figuring out exactly how you want to install. Ie what do you want to include when you compile. So first we were missing suexec, and mod_rewrite, then we were missing mod_php. Grrr… it just goes to show that you need to make meticulous notes in order to replicate the proper settings! Having gotten things installed right on the Apache 1.3 test system, now we have a much better idea about what we will have to step it up on the production box. We also managed to get suexec to work and use it to lock down the system somewhat. Part of my still feels like things are a little too wide open for my liking. Wordpress seems like it can be made more secure. But that is because all of the Wordpress pages are generated on the fly and even setting Movable Type up with all the pages as dynamic still creates some files in the individual blog directory.
Tomorrow I’ll work on getting my customizations transfered over and in place on the working instance and make sure that they don’t break anything. Once that is done, my staff will need to finish up the blog creation script that they have been working on. Then we can set everything up on the production server. I’m pretty excited about the whole thing. Hopefully if I push we can get it up and running Monday. I’ll have to see what the server guys schedules are like though. Overall its been a good experience and if you are trying to get Movable Type set up yourself, feel free to drop me a line. I’d be glad to help if I can.
