MT upgrade in progress (3.16 to 3.31)...

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I'm updating my blog engine, Movable Type, from version 3.16 to 3.31. It's still a work in progress that promises to be a bit painful, as I'm already facing a big problem with a character encoding issue. I thought I had solved it almost two years ago, when I converted this blog from Latin 1 to Unicode, but now it's back to the same mess again. Not fun, since I did a simple upgrade, in place, without changing anything, and the previous blog was already served as UTF-8. If someone has faced the same issue, I'd be happy to get some hints on what's going on. The prospect of converting the database again isn't fun, knowing that I've already got a mix of encodings in there (someone just placed a comment on my French blog, forcing a rebuild with a mixbag of Latin 1 and Unicode chars).

Oh, and for the poor who'll face the same issue: if you get kicked out and forced to login again and again with MT refusing your previous credentials, delete your MT cookies and don't forget to check the "Remember Me" option when login again. I wasted one hour on that silly bug.

And a personal help call to the Six Apart luminaries who would happen to pass by (hello Jay!): I keep being banned from the ProNet mailing-list, with Mailman pretending that my email address is bouncing. I've got not clue what's going on (it's not bouncing anything on my side and has been working well for years on several lists), and none, absolutely none of the options provided by Mailman will work (the links cause an error and the mailing-list owner email address is rejected as non-existent by the 6A mail server). I'm stuck.

P.S. ok, char encoding issue fixed, not sure exactly what happened beyond a messy mix of unicode and Latin 1, or Latin 1 stored in a unicode table, or, well, it looks like fixed now (fingers crossed). Next step: getting rid of those years old ugly templates coming straight from my initial MT 2.x installation...

P.S.2 Mmmh, the template refresh has caused some funny things to happen in my RSS feeds, like doubled items, strange sorting (in NNW the first item is an old post back from April). Sorry about that. I also found a bug in MT3.31 around authentication, where MT confuses login names with commenter names (i.e. the MT author "Voilà" is confused with the commenter "voila").