More MT 4 configuration notes

Whew. I spent another bunch of hours here and there throughout the day fooling around with this blog. I researched and then tried Movable Type 4.01's dynamic publishing. Errors - "/blog/ not found" - but with the correct header and footer template modules. I researched more and still couldn't get it to work - kept getting "quot;/blog/ not found"quot; errors. So, I reverted back to static publishing.

Then I discovered pages on the site were broken - well, not broken, but gone! MT had renamed all files with a .static extension (example: index.php.static). So, I removed all the *.static files, re-published all (and waited at least 45 minutes...).

Then I discovered MT had reverted to 30-character basenames instead of using full entry titles for filenames. So, I removed all entry files, re-set the Entry template's filename format, re-published all again (and waited at least 45 minutes...).

Then I discovered that all templates were set to "Enable dynamic publishing for this template" so I unchecked that box for each template and re-published all again (and waited at least 45 minutes...).

Then I discovered that filenames were using underscores when I remember them being dashes (hyphens) yesterday. So, I researched that - and find it amazing that MT doesn't just offer users two more filename choices: full titles with dashes and full titles with underscores. Ack! I found the DirifyPlus plugin, installed it, configured the template filename format, and then...yes...re-published all yet again (and waited at least 45 minutes).

Now that I've unsuccessfully tried MT's dynamic publishing, I have two options to make updating the sidebar and making changes to styles, templates and template modules:

Reconfigure the widgets and template modules to output to a file and then use PHP includes (which is how I did things before MT 4 - but I hoped to use more of MT's features, such as widgets and MTIncludes).
Try to figure out WordPress - again.