Continuing to pre-plan on the MT311 conversion.

Neil Turner has Nine steps to a quicker MT3.1x installation -- though by that he means speeding up your MT site, not installing it more quickly. Interesting stuff.

Phil Ringnalda has a very good piece on why folks shouldn't worry about all their .html files being turned into funky .php files if they go with dynamic archives -- (though it would have been easy enough to find ways around that if you Google "php .html extension"). If I read it correctly, losing the Google and (more importantly) internal links to various posts here should not be an issue. Huzzah!

Biggest issue with dynamic page generation in MT3 are that some plug-ins won't work (Perl stuff won't work; it needs to be PHP or run through the Smarty template package or something like that). Fortunately, I'm not one of those plug-in crazy sorts, but I do have a few that I use. It's not clear to me, from how the MT Plug-ins page is set up whether "works with 3.0!" certification includes working with dynamic archiving.

• MTBlacklist: The sine qua non of MT plug-ins. The version that works with 3.1 looks faboo, and I would have seriously considered not upgrading if it weren't available.

• Smartypants - This extension does things like translate quotation marks into the appropriate "curly quotes" make em-dashes and keen things like that. Keen. Alas, I don't seee any sign it's been ported (on the MT Plugin page) to dynamic-capable. There seems to be a PHP port of it here that looks to work with Smarty (the PHP thingamabob engine that MT ships with, and, no, I don't know what I'm talking about), so that might be an answer. Impact: trivial functionality, significant aesthetics.

• Blackliststats: Generate stats from MTBlacklist. No indication of dynamic capability, but since it seems to add in a new tag, I think not. Impact: trivial functionality, zero aesthetics.

• CatX: Supplemental category tags. Used in WIST (to go between the lettered categories). Approved for 3.x, but may not work with dynamic. Impact: moderate functionality, minor aesthetics.

• Doublespace: Converts two spaces (which HTML will treat as one) into a space and a non-breaking space (which HTML will display as two). Designed for typewriter-trained dinosaurs like me that insist upon such fripperies. Impact: trivial functionality, minor aesthetics.

• Filtercategories: Allow category lists that include only specificed categories, or exclude others. I use it in WIST a lot, but not much else. Impact: moderate functionality, moderate aesthetics.

• Lastmodified: Displayed the date the entry was last modified. I don't use it on this blog, but I used it in the Catspaw blog during writing. Tested as 3.0-compatible, but does it work dynamically? Impact: moderate functionality, trivial aesthetics.

• Pingedentry: Provides tags for the title and link of a pinged entry. Without it, lists of recent pings only give you the pinger info, not the pinged post (unless that's been expanded in MT3x's native tags). Impact: moderate functionality, no aesthetics.

• Smartypants - This extension does things like translate quotation marks into the appropriate "curly quotes" make em-dashes and keen things like that. Keen. Alas, I don't seee any sign it's been ported (on the MT Plugin page) to dynamic-capable. There seems to be a PHP port of it here that looks to work with Smarty (the PHP thingamabob engine that MT ships with, and, no, I don't know what I'm talking about), so that might be an answer. Impact: trivial functionality, significant aesthetics.

• Wordcount: Provides the count of words in a post. Used in my novel blog and that's about it. Impact: significant functionality, no aesthetics.

Based on the above, I will probably only convert DDtB to dynamic archiving (the others are too small to be worth worrying about it). That limits the damage to only a couple of things. And, frankly, it's worth it to beef up the rebuild speed with dynamic entries.

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You know, most of those are default features in EE and you don't have to worry about whether your plugins will work with EE's dynamic nature. MT Blacklist isn't needed and Word Count is available as a plugin if you want it.

Just sayin' is all. :-)

Heh. I'll bear that in mind.

Hey, I would be SEB if I didn't needle you over something.

That should be WOULDN'T be. Dammit.

Heh.

An important note from Seki .

Another good article on dynamic pages.

A couple of follow-up notes, for the record:

LastModified is actually obsoleted by a new (MT 2.65) tag.

BlacklistStats is obsoleted by the stunningly-improved MT-Blacklist interface.

Wordcount and MT-Pingedentry went in without a hitch.