Movable Type on GoDaddy

Today I was working with a client and having a bear of a time getting their Movable Type 3.17 install working on their GoDaddy hosting account. It turns out that the way the script name was accessed had changed – and since GoDaddy runs under sbox, it was returning sbox as the name when it redirected you back to the page! So with a few small edits to App.pm, I got around this issue and made things work.

I’m still having problems with getting dynamic publishing to work on GoDaddy, but at least we’re making progress. If you are installing Movable Type on your GoDaddy host, and running into problems, take a look at our Movable Type Consulting Services to see how we can help.

Update: I think I have dynamic publishing working. First, mod_rewrite doesn’t seem to work on GoDaddy’s servers. At least for me. So you have to use the ErrorDocument approach. The problem is that this value seems to be hardcoded to “missing.html” in the site’s root directory. By changing the ErrorDocument to mtview.php, it worked like a champ, as far as that goes.

The second problem is that GoDaddy doesn’t seem to like passing a missing .php file to the mtview.php ErrorDocument. Change the name to .html and it works fine. The problem with this is that .html documents are not parsed as PHP by default. You need to add one (or perhaps both) of these to your .htaccess:

  AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html
  AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

That takes care of the heavy lifting and most files will now be able to be published dynamically.

The final issue is that if you don’t have an actual index file in the root directory, it won’t work just right. GoDaddy, by default, serves up the contents of a file called welcome.html (again in the site’s root directory). I haven’t managed to work around this as yet, but one avenue is to give the file a different name – for instance, main.html instead of index.html. This seems to work fine.