To track down if the issue is indeed with Image::Magick, you may like to specify an alternative image driver inside your mt-config.cgi file.

For instance you could try adding:
ImageDriver GD

Or:
ImageDriver NetPBM

Try this and let me know!

Also, how have you upgraded? I hope that you've first removed your previous installation files and then uploaded the new files, not overwriting the previous files.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
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Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/

You could judge that by taking a look at:
http://bugs.movabletype.org/

Also, if you take a look at this post:
http://www.movabletype.org/2011/10/status_of_movable_type_development.html

You would understand that Six Apart Japan is deeply involved on this project.

For instance, they are planning to release v5.13 around the end of this month.

As for melody, is seems that the project didn't have a future because there was no company behind it. It was created by a number of developers which are always busy, and its main scope was to continue the v4.x architecture, which is having blogs without parent websites.

Now, that at my request Six Apart Japan is going to allow having blogs without a parent website, the scope for creating Melody disappeared.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------

Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/

So my conclusion is that they've started to brake the assets by type, that's why we could see there images, audio, video and for any other file types "assets".

We didn't see that custom field because we were looking for a type of asset that is now handled individually (image, audio, video).

Thanks, and sorry!

However I am now thinking that it is not some kind of a cache collision issue as I have suspected. Now I can reproduce it when publishing the main template alone, either from a PERL script by calling $mt->rebuild_indexes() or from the MT UI.

I think it is more about having finally hit some resource limit which now breaks quiet consistently after processing the same number of entries in the template. Our business users have just added the last straw(= MT entry) it seems. ;-)

This template is quit heavy mind you, running a lot of recursive look-ups and filtering up and down the category tree for each entry. Turning on DBI trace shows that there is substantial DB communication going on. Leading me to believe that it may be DBI, or UnixODBC or FreeTDS underneath which freaks out after a while. The database (SQL Server) seems to be fine though, there is no connection leak and the resource consumption is within a reasonable amount. The Perl process memory usage is also within a reasonable boundary (~160M) when it fails. That's why I have a gut feeling that it is FreeTDS or UnixODBC on top which unexpectedly interrupts a long running busy active connection causing DBI to come back with an undef result, which in turn bubbles up as an undef PERL array from DBI.pm->search(). This undef return value from search() is then interpreted at various places (Entry.pm->__load_category_data(), Proxy.pm->load_objects())
as an anonymous array with a single undef element in the next for-each loop and ... bang!

I have tried to trace FreeTDS, but not being able to change the trace level (ignored every env var and config file I threw at it) I gave up as there was just too much stuff logged.

With pressure on me from the business users to reestablish their CMS I had to abandon debugging for a while and I put in a lastn=">" hard limit into my outermost template iteration. For now it is fine but I will still have to come up with a way to process every item.

I think I will just have to bite the bullet and rewrite the core of the template in vanilla PERL and do the joins with a few DBI calls of my own instead of letting MT's Object mapping framework do the same for me. That way I hope to avoid hitting whatever resource limit is causing this.

cheers,
Istvan

Apart from the advice that Dave gave you above regarding excluding entries that belong to a specific category, let me try to give you feedback on your other question.

There is no plugin to do that because there is no need for such a plugin. To reach your goal, you could surround your tag cloud coding with the following:

<mt:If name="category_archive"><mt:If tag="ArchiveTitle" eq="Family">
... then have your tag cloud coding here ...
</mt:If></mt:If>

Where "Family" is your category label, just as on Dave's sample above.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------

Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/

I believe you can exclude a category from a list of entries by using the category attribute on the mt:Entries tag. See http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/entries.html#category for more information.

Example from the documentation page:

<mt:Entries category="NOT Family">

Does that make sense to you?

--Dave Aiello

I'm always aware of that!

This issue is a bug on movable type v5.12 and I've been able to reproduce it on a fresh installation running v5.12 pro.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

Anytime you are dealing with Custom Fields or anything that has to do with metadata in Movable Type, it might be helpful to for the development team to know if the problem is occurring in a brand new Movable Type instance or if the database being used has been upgraded from previous versions of Movable Type.

It also might be helpful to know if you created and deleted Custom Fields within the Movable Type database and subsequently created other Custom Fields.

There were problems with the integrity of metadata in these situations in Movable Type 4.3x. See the following pages of documentation:

http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/release-notes/432.html#102303-deleted-customfield-prevents-other-cf-from-being-saved

https://movabletype.fogbugz.com/default.asp?102303

I saw two forum entries that may be related to these problems today alone.

--Dave Aiello

Sorry for the delayed response. I didn't see this question until today.

When I worked directly for Six Apart, I spent some time on Custom Field metadata integrity problems. There were bug fixes in 4.31 and 4.32 to address these problems, see:

http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/release-notes/432.html#102303-deleted-customfield-prevents-other-cf-from-being-saved

https://movabletype.fogbugz.com/default.asp?102303

Would you mind taking a look at these documents and letting us know if these errors in 4.3 could have anything to do with your problem?

Thanks,

--Dave Aiello

You're welcome!

I've finally creating it, thinking that you might be busy.

Will keep you posted on this!

Thanks,
Mihai

I see you already submitted a bug report. Thanks for that, and for the fast response. Let's hope this is a quick fix.

Bill

It seems that I've misunderstood your issue!

Leave them all set to "Static", excepting eventually for the Entry Listing archives, which anyway are using most of the processing power, and which could be set to "Via PQ".

Reading again your issue, I could conclude that the reason why some templates aren't rebuilding is that they require too much server power and the publishing process brakes at some point.

Maybe that is related to the MultiBlog rebuild trigger, if you've complicated that much.

Also, you may like to consider creating some Index templates for common portions and call them as php includes, as an alternative to the MultiBlog rebuild trigger strategy, especially if your server doesn't have a very strong setup.

Thanks,
Mihai

All my entry templates *are* currently set to publish "Statically," though I usually use the "Scheduled" option when I save a new entry so my cron job can publish them at a future time.

Is my problem perhaps that I need to set my entry templates to "Via Publish Queue" also?

Thanks,
Bill