Movable Type and MySQL now tango!

Ok! Finally up and running with Movable Type!

Not getting MT 3.17 to run until now was definitely a MySQL configuration issue - but not wholly. I've solved the overall issue that prevented MT running at all, but I don't really know what the heart of the problem actually was. And the solution is a workaround and not the right long term solution.

The error I kept getting every time I ran the mt-load.cgi script was puzzling. But that was only one part of the problem. The other part concerned the MySQL Administrator and saving user settings in User Administration. What happened was that no matter what I did, I couldn't save any settings: every time I tried, I got this error:

Error while storing the user information. The user might have been deleted. Please refresh the user list.

A helpful pointer in a post in the Movable Type Community Forum took me to a bug report at MySQL with many users commenting on this error message. A bit of digging from there took me to a discussion thread in the MySQL Forums, where I tried the offered solution - uninstall the version of MySQL Administrator I had (1.1.0-rc) and download and install an earlier version (1.0.21).

So I did that - and saving user settings now works. So I was able to assign the MT schema privileges to the user I'd set up, and actually save those settings.

Yet running mt-load.cgi again still produced the same error message as before:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user
'mt_user'@'localhost (using password: YES)

Then I tried something else - I edited the mt.cfg file to show the user as 'root.' And this time, running mt-load.cgi produced a successful result, showing that system initialization is now complete. Next, running mt.cgi was successful and I was able to log in to my new MT installation on a local PC. Fantastic!

So there's still something with 'mt-user' where it's not configured correctly somewhere. I will look into that, but at least I can now get moving with Movable Type.