Stylecatcher Plugin Notes That Worked

Hi, all I’m by no means an MT expert I have been running my blog pretty vanilla for a few years on my personal Linux server at home to give me another project to hone my IT skills that I don’t use on my normal IT job. I’m posting to try and give back to the very nice Movabletype community.
I recently migrated my MT 3.2 from one system to another. I had StyleCatcher set up on my original system but never had it working all the way. Setting up my new system in parallel allowed me the time to play with things and acquire some additional familiarity with the Movabletype software. I now have StyleCatcher working on my new system beautifully the way it’s intended to work. I select a style hit apply go to my blog site and it has been properly applied! I was so excited I lost it and went looking for Style libraries on the web for a while instead of finishing my sites!

Previous Issue:

The issue I had with StyleCatcher on my previous system was that it would grab the Style I wanted and then say it was successfully applied and then when I went to look at my blog page it was blank! T o find out what was happening I had to go and look at what files were being changed and time stamped after applying the StyleCatcher settings.
I would then find that it had copied the accompanying “.css” file in my static files directory $WEBROOT/mtstatic/. I would then edit styles-site.css in my blogs root, $WEBROOT/, directory to point to the new theme in my “mtstatic” directory. It was a real pain figuring this out since I was not really familiar with css files or a web site developer!

Resolution:
I’m leaving my paths in “/var/www/html”= my web root =$WEBROOT
“/var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/” = My Blogs root home

I have several blogs and have recently discovered there are global settings for all of the plugins if you go to System Overview you can see the plugins also have global settings. StyleCatcher was using these global settings I was unaware existed!

(How to get to global StyleCatcher settings)
Main Menu -> System Overview -> Plugins -> Show Settings

The global settings look like this:
************************************************************************
StyleCatcher Settings
Top of Form
You must define a global theme repository where themes can be stored locally. If a particular blog has not been configured for its own theme paths, it will use these settings. If a blog has it's own theme paths, then the theme will be copied to that location when applied to that weblog. The paths defined here must physically exist and be writable by the webserver.
Theme Root URL: /mt-static/
Theme Root Path:/var/www/html/movabletype/mt-static/themes

This is most likely where your files are ending up and these settings override anything if you don’t make the following setting changes for your individual Blogs here:

Main Menu -> “Blog-name” -> Settings -> Plugins -> StyleCatcher -> Show Settings ->
(my StyleCatcher blog settings)
************************************************************************

Theme Root URL: http://www.dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes/
Theme Root Path: /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
************************************************************************

The other thing that has to be done is create the themes path if it doesn’t exist and then change the permissions to be writable for your webserver.
mkdir /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
chmod 777 /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
or
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
By the way my mt-config.cgi static setting is:
StaticWebPath /mtstatic/

*Note May wish to chmod 755 for security after getting everything set up.