How can I rename the default 'Blog' in a fresh Movable Type installation?

September 9, 2009 9:47 AM

Just set up a Movable Type blog/site/whatjamacallit for the first time for someone else, and though I'm pretty tech-savvy I can't for the life of me figure out how to rename the path to the blog part of things. Help!

The main parts of the site are made up of several pages, and all of that's fine, but I want to repurpose the 'blog' part as a news thingy instead. I'd have thought this would be easy, but adding a new blog brings with it a sort of nesting arrangement. As I said, I've never used Movable Type before as a admin, and while this may be embarassingly easy, I can't figure it out. I hate to waste my AskMe question on something that seems so trivial, but there's a bit of time pressure involved so I don't have time to trial and error the answer like I normally would. Thanks!

P.S. I'm using the latest version off the website (4.31) if that helps.

posted by jaffacakerhubarb to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Bah, forgot a minor but important specific; in addition to changing the name of the blog from 'Blog' to 'News', I also need the path to change from mydomain.com/blog/ to mydomain.com/news/.
posted by jaffacakerhubarb at 9:49 AM on September 9

I don't have 4.3 yet, but in 4.1 you can find those settings under Preferences -> Blog Settings. In the General tab (on the left) you can change the Blog Name to "News". In the Publishing tab, you can change the blog URL (called Site URL) and/or server publishing location (called Site Root). You may have to click on the locks first to unlock them before making changes.

Is that what you're looking for?
posted by geeky at 11:48 AM on September 9

Geeky's got it - the path is in the blog-level Publishing preferences, and the name is in the blog-level General settings.
posted by snarkout at 3:35 PM on September 9

It doesn't seem to work. Changing the site root from /home/public/ to /home/public/news/ leaves the old site intact at the root level and recreates it at mydomain.com/news/, so the blog is now at mydomain.com/news/blog/. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?
posted by jaffacakerhubarb at 2:39 AM on September 10

I really can't say without having a clearer view of your site structure. Do you have more than one blog running within MT? You can see all the blogs by going to System Overview -> Blogs in the upper-right corner.

I can say that just changing the path of where files are published in MT will not remove the previous versions of the file. So if you move your site root from mydomain.com/ to mydomain.com/blog, the old index file will remain at mydomain.com, it just will no longer be updated. You will need to delete it yourself if you wish to get rid of it.

If you need more specific help, you can MeMail me and I'll give you the details of how I've got my blog set up, or you can hop on over to the MovableType forums for more MT experts.
posted by geeky at 12:08 PM on September 10