Resetting entry_id Values For Movable Type

Since I slipped up yesterday and inadvertently posted an entry destined for my ‘Hits, No Misses…’ links blog on the main blog I encountered the problem of a small blip in the sequential numbering of my entry IDs. Thankfully this is fairly easy to correct and stuck me as a good little mini-tutorial for anyone who may not know how to do this.

Using my own situation as an example let’s say you just posted an entry to your blog and it is recorded in the database as mt_entry number 439. You then notice you posted it to the wrong blog. Oops.

MT Entries table Statistics — MT Entries table statistics in MySQL

To remedy the situation you re-post the entry to the correct blog (this is easy with ecto) which then leaves you with two entries. Next you delete the first entry (the one posted to the wrong blog) leaving the second entry with an ID of 440.

If you were to look at the mt_entry table for your Movable Type install using something like phpMyAdmin you’d notice the last two entries were now 438 and 440 and the next autoindex value would be 441. Clearly there’s a blip in the system, but it’s an easy fix.

Un-Blipping The System

To get things back to normal you’ll need to have access to your MySQL database through the command line or something like phpMyAdmin. Start by looking at the mt_entry table. Note the last entry ID (based on the example, this will be 440) and change the ID to the missing ID. In this case it would be 439.

Now that the IDs are back in sequential order there’s still the matter of the autoindex value which, if left alone, will result in the next new entry to have an ID of 441. In order to fix this, we have to reset the autoindex value so the next ID will be 440 instead of 441. To do this, simply execute this query on the me_entry table:

ALTER TABLE mt_entry AUTO_INCREMENT=1

You can now safely rebuild your indexes and archives to see the changes reflected in your site.

Alternatively, you can probably avoid at least part of this procedure by not double-posting the entry to two different blogs and simply change the entry_blog_id value and rebuild. Note to self for next time this happens…