Recent Comments bug fix

If you’re using MT’s Recently Commented On feature and you notice that some entries don’t appear there that should, I may have a solution for you. Over at the MT support forums we discovered that at least two of the people experiencing this problem were using MySQL 3.23.45 as their database. Users of later versions of MySQL weren’t having the problem, so it appeared to be a MySQL problem.

A little troubleshooting revealed the culprit. MT uses a temporary table to gather the list of recent comments and that table wasn’t being sorted correctly by MySQL. It took some serious trial and error to figure out how to make it work correctly.

The fix requires that the records be inserted into the temporary table in the order you will want to retrieve them. So a simple ORDER BY statement in the table creation SQL was needed.

To fix the problem, you’ll need to make the following changes. This assumes you are running MT 2.21. Other versions might have different line numbers and code.

Go to <mt>/lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI and open mysql.pm. (Replace <mt> with wherever your copy of Movable Type can be found.)

Line 116 reads my $dir = $j_args->{direction} eq 'descend' ? 'desc' : 'asc';. Move it to before line 97, which reads my $ct_sql = "create temporary table tempTable\nselect ";.

Now go down to line 106 where it says $ct_sql .= "where " . join ' and ', @$ct_terms if @$ct_terms;. Right after that line, add a line that reads $ct_sql .= "ORDER BY ${j_tbl}_$j_args->{'sort'} $dir";

That’s it. Upload your newly changed script and rebuild your templates. The usual disclaimer applies. It works for me, it might not work for you. Back everything up before you start and don’t blame me if your computer begins speaking in tongues or emits a foul odor.