I have an installation of Movable Type Open source version 4.1 working nicely, and have almost finished reworking a collection of old templates (developed for MT 2 & 3) to suit.

Now I want to get access to the Custom Fields capability that comes with the Professional Pack. I'm thoroughly confused by the various offerings of MT, and I want to know how to go about this.

Specifically:

1 If I buy the Professional Pack and Support for Personal Licence (US$99.99), will this mesh with the Open Source version of MT I have?

2 What's involved in installing the Professional Pack?

Technically, yes.
Strictly speaking, for support purposes it should be installed on a Personal/Commercial copy of MT, which you'll get at the same time. However, other than a few text strings here and there identifying which version you're using, this probably won't matter at all to you unless you've modified application files. (I mean the Perl; this has absolutely nothing to do with your templates.) The actual underlying software of the core application is identical, except for those identifying bits, so no worries about something breaking.


Nothing special. It's basically a plugin on steroids. The only real difference is that it lives in the addons directory instead.

Excellent, that's just what I wanted to hear. I have not tinkered with the Perl scripts so, based on what you have written, I'll just need to copy the Professional Pack files to the server.

Thank you, Su- for answering my questions so clearly and quickly!

Well, that went well. I downloaded and unzipped the package, copied the Addon files; Movable Type immediately updated the database. It all seems to be working properly.

Painless!