Notes on installing Movable Type version 5.11 on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)

Recently migrated my blog to a new server Windows Server 2008 R2 (also changed the painting) and had to re-install Movable Type. Whenever I have done this I usually hit the following two issues:

First Issue:

HTTP Error 502.2 - Bad Gateway
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are "Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC (@INC contains: lib D:/Perl/site/lib D:/Perl/lib .) at \\nas-005\winspace\10-ademar.name\www\mt\mt.cgi line 11. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at \\nas-005\winspace\10-ademar.name\www\mt\mt.cgi line 11. ".

Movable Type directory layout

p. To solve this you need to convert the folder containing the Movable Type installation into a virtual directory. Lets say you are installing it in folder mt, then you need to create a virtual directory with the same name pointing to the folder in question.

Second Issue

p. Plugins fail to load. In my case Movable Type had problems loading plugins like MarkDown,SmartyPants and Textile. In the logs messages like the following could be found:

bq. Plugin error: \nas-005\winspace\10-ademar.name\www\mt\plugins\Markdown\SmartyPants.pl Can’t locate \nas-005\winspace\10-ademar.name\www\mt\plugins\Markdown\SmartyPants.pl in @INC (@INC contains: \nas-005\winspace\10-ademar.name\www\mt\extlib \nas-005\winspace\10-ademar.name\www\mt\extlib lib D:/Perl/site/lib D:/Perl/lib .) at lib/MT.pm line 1396

p. To solve this I modified MT.pm by substituting lines 1396,1397 (as of version 5.11)

eval "# line " . __LINE__ . " " . __FILE__
        . "\nrequire '$plugin';";

by the following:

eval { require $plugin };

p. I’m not sure how wise is that change but it solves the problem.