As part of my Movable Type 4.1 upgrade project, I noticed that depending on my template settings, republishing the whole site would get extremely slow. Movable Type sometimes catches flak for this because it’s designed to serve static pages, so the "build" time tends to be a bit slower. (A good tradeoff in my opinion.) There is much room for improvement on the rebuild times. It looks like the next release of Movable Type will focus on performance and scalability, so here’s my first contribution to that effort. After some trial and error, I discovered that the Archives sidebar widget…
The code and design for this site have pretty stagnant for the last two years. Everything was functional, but the design was old and needed some serious improvement. With the recent release of MovableType 4.1, I decided to put some time into this and get it upgraded. Many hours later, it’s done! I spent lots of time on this — probably too much — but wanted to come up with a clean upgrade process. To back up a step and look at what I was trying to achieve, these were my goals for the upgrade: Create a more useful template…