Adam Kuban: Kublog

Ugh. Seriously. I get this message in my inbox and I’m like WTF!?

We’re using Movable Type Enterprise Version 1.53 to run Serious Eats, and since I’ve been using MT for almost five years, I’m familiar with its quirks and what not. But for a multiuser affair like SE, trying to telegraph all its quirks to the various contributors (all with varying levels of blog- and web-savviness) is tedious.

Here, the problem is that the File Uploader (right) allows a user to upload images into the root directory, where all the index files and MT guts live. That directory needs to be as clean as possible so our web developer can work in there quickly and efficiently. It’s a constant battle to keep everyone uploading images into the seriousats.com/images directory.

This should not even be a possibility, first, because why would you want to crowd your root-level directory with file uploads and second, because there should be an easy way to set up a default directory for all images to upload to. As far as I know, there is no way to do this.

Furthermore, even if a user does know to upload to the “images” directory but misspells “images” (say, “imags” or “imaegs,” I have have been known to do), the system sees no problem with creating a new typoed directory instead of returning an error: “Sorry, ‘imaegs’ is not a directory on this server. Are you sure you’re uploading to the correct place?”

Serious Eats is in the process of moving to MT4, and I can only hope that these issues are addressed in that package.