I just read an interesting post about Movable Type and plugins (specifically Workflow). In a nutshell, the argument is that Movable Type is a product - one which costs money - and having to buy add-ons to provide what is perceived as core functionality isn't a good thing. It's an interesting argument, and one that I can understand as a consumer.

When that equation flips around, however, is when there is an issue. The developing of plugins really doesn't take that much time. I can write something that works on my system in a flash, and then pack it up so that anyone can download it.

What kills me is the testing and support time required. Not everyone uses the same setup as I do, and...

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Question

I want to create a plugin for Movable Type. Where can I find more information on doing this?

Answer

See Developing with the Movable Type API in the Users Manual.

Please note that assistance with plugin development is not covered by Basic Support; however, there are other resources available for assistance: • Our Community Forum offers a section dedicated to Plugin Development, where you can post for assistance or feedback about your plugin. • Our Professional Network offers a Members-Only Mailing List suitable for the discussion of plugin...

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We've already shown you how the powerful new listing screens in Movable Type 3.2 let you easily select any item or range of items, just by clicking anywhere on a row. And you can even shift-click to select a range of items such as comments, TrackBacks, entries, weblogs or authors. But once you've selected your items, you're not just limited to the menu options built into the application.

With the new plugin functionality built into Movable Type 3.2, any plugin can add its own menu items to the list of available actions on a listings screen. For example, we can demonstrate a simple plugin which allows you to transfer an entry from one blog to another with just a few clicks. This...

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I'm happy I could provide this plugin to the MT community.

This plugin, BigTemplateWindow, is for a really big template editing window. The size of template editing box is only limited by that of your monitor. :) First I developed this just for a big template box. In the process of doing it, several useful features was added. I hope almost all MT users could be a little happy by using this.

Continue reading "BigTemplateWindow" »

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Development version: • feedburner-0.8.1.tar.gz • feedburner-0.8.1.zip

FeedBurner tracker

Recent Development Activity: • FeedBurner plugin 0.8: While it is not yet 100% feature complete, I wanted to get a version of it out there once I got most of the basic functionality working well enough. Hop on over to the FeedBurner plugin page, download it, unpack... • FeedBurner Feed Creation in a Plugin: I just successfully created a FeedBurner feed with the FeedBurner plugin. It's as simple as browsing to the plugin settings for the blog, clicking the create feed link, and then completing the form and submitting it. I will (finally) get... • FeedBurner Plugin Preview: In addition to access to the statistics that FeedBurner tracks for your feeds, one of the most exciting features of the FeedBurner plugin will be giving users the ability to create a FeedBurner feed directly through the Movable Type......

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The BigPAPI plugin offers a lot of opportunity to do some exceptional customization to the Movable Type interface. In fact, it can do everything an alternate template can do - and much more!

So the question: would you rather deal with an alternate template or a plugin? If you're not already using alternate templates, the plugin has the advantage that no setup is required. Aside from that, though, I can't see that one offers any benefits over the other. What do you think?

If you found this article useful, please consider supporting this site through a donation.

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The Movable Type Plugins Directory has relaunched as an official Six Apart website, featuring a whole new look, a simpler organization, and a list of plugins which have been tested with Movable Type 3.0.

Take a look through the new site and see all the creative ways the community has expanded Movable Type's functionality. And if you find yourself inspired by what you see there, you'll want to check out our documentation on how to write a plugin along with Hello World as an MT::App CGI, a good overview of the basics of creating a plugin application within the new Movable Type architecture.

Trackbacks:

Niall Kennedy's Weblog - Six Apart Professional Network - August 31, 2004 11:03 AM...

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Required: MT26x, MT3x

This one was hard for me because I was hung up on the whole plugin thing. But it turns out to be stupidly simple.

Start with Brad's MTMacro plugin. This page is about 10 miles long and scared the crap out of me. In the end, all I really needed was this part:

To install, place the "macros.pl" file in your Movable Type "plugins" directory. The "macros.pm" and "postproc.pm" (the "postproc.pm" file is only necessary for Movable Type 2.21) files should be placed in a "bradchoate" subdirectory underneath your Movable Type "extlib" directory. Your installation should look like this:

(mt home)/plugins/macros.pl (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/macros.pm (mt...

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Movable Type 2.6 incorporated my Sanitize plugin. So if you've upgraded to MT 2.6, you no longer need the plugin files. So here's what you would do to remove them.

Again, these steps are only necessary if 1) you installed the Sanitize plugin on your pre-MT 2.6 blog; 2) you've since upgraded to Movable Type 2.6 or later. • Locate the ‘sanitize.pl' in your Movable Type plugins directory. Delete that file. • Locate the ‘sanitize.pm' file in your extlib/bradchoate directory. Delete that file.

Now, you may be wondering what to do about the sanitize="..."

attributes you have...

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Chad Everett's another popular Movable Type plugin developer who's considering the cost not just of developing plugins, but in supporting them as well. In a thoughtful post on his blog, where he says, "Add all that time together, and the development of the plugin is definitely not the great consumer of time. It's what I'll call the 'support' of the plugin."

One of the reasons we've been encouraging the ecosystem of services and support around plugins to grow (whether paid or free) is the increasing recognition that Movable Type's professional user base is willing to pay for quality code and support. In many cases, the paid commercial use of a plugin or application can let a developer...

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In an attempt to provide a proper environment for support, I've created the Plugins Forums, I was getting too many support and feature requests in Trac's bug tracker. Please use these forums to get some help on the plugins, they're also the best place to request for new features. The exams are nearly over but my time is still limited, as always donors receive priority support, if you wish to donate use the button on the sidebar.

Although the forums are powered by PunBB, I've hacked a lot of the files so that you can use Typekey to login and use the forums. I'll be releasing the hack sometime in the near future!

If you do face a bug in any of the plugins, please file a ticket so that I can address it more appropriately....

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In order to provide extra functionality to Movable Type users not tied to normal release cycles and to provide solid examples for developers of use of the Plugin API and best Movable Type prorgamming practices, we will from time to time bundle plugins with Movable Type.

With Movable Type 3.2, there are three included plugins which we will detail in their own sections. • Nofollow • SpamLookup • Template Backup/Refresh

Like the Movable Type application, these plugins are supported by Six Apart. If you experience any problems using these plugins and you are a paid licensee, you can submit a help ticket with our Technical Support staff....

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This page lists all plugins which specify weblog-level configruation settings. From here, you may configure the way your installed plugins act on the weblog in question.

Note: This page does not list all plugins installed on the system. For that listing, go to the System Overview » Plugins section of the application.

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Arvind Satyatanarayan, author of Movalog and creator of MT-Blogroll, has released a new Movable Type plugin - MT-Protect - which allows you to protect individual weblog entries via password or via a Typekey identity. This plugin may prove especially useful for those wanting to charge for access, or to restrict access in some way, to specific parts of their blog.

Arvind has also initiated a Drop-Cash campaign to help support his efforts as a developer for this plugin. Even if you don't plan to use the Protect plugin, I encourage you to make a donation, now! Arvind has spent several hundreds of hours providing useful tips, hacks, and plugins for the Movable Type community. I believe...

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Much to my surprise, there's another plugin named " Smilies." It was released on the same day as my version (or close to it.)

So I need a new name for my plugin. Besides, "Smilies" is a poor name for what all it does now! Want a tease? Have a look at some of these screenshots!

The screenshots give a lot away! • Use any smiley, emoticon, or picture in the smiley bar. It's as easy as uploading the image to your webserver - and you're done! • Do you want to use a lot of icons and have a larger screen? Move the icon bar to the right of your entry and extended entry. A scroll bar appears if necessary. • Let your commenters add...

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Question

I'm using a plugin, and the output does not change when I refresh the page.

Answer

Most Movable Type plugins are static, which means they only change when the templates are rebuilt. If you want something that will change every time your browser refreshes, you need a dynamic solution.

Examples of dynamic solutions are PHP, SSI, and Javascript. If you are using the MySQL backend, you can also use PHP to connect directly to the database.

With the implementation of dynamic publishing in version 3.1 of Movable Type, more and more plugins...

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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'sql.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins'...

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The "Warn/Die" plugin lets you control the Movable Type build process. The 'MTWarn' tag lets you output messages from your templates during the build process. These messages might be used for debugging purposes or might just be informational. The 'MTDie' tag lets you halt the build process.

Availability

You can download this plugin from here: mtwarndie-1_0.zip

Examples

<MTWarn>Building...

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There are gobs of plugins available for Movable Type. I'd bet that most people who use version 3.2 are using the SpamLookup and Nofollow plugins, and many of you probably have at least a few others installed.

Of all the plugins you use, what are the three most essential? (Yes, you have to narrow it down to three!) Which ones make your site run the way it does, provide you the options you want, or otherwise improve your Movable Type installation?

My favorite three? • SpamLookup is essential for keeping a site spam-free. It does a great job, but you probably already knew that. • SmartyPants provides typographically-correct punctuation: curly quotes, ellipsis, and em-dashes...

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Some people like Movable Type to separate words in a post's friendly URL by using hyphens instead of underscores, since some search engines seem to prefer hyphens to seaparate words. Good news from Cal Henderson: he's made dashify, a Movable Type 3 plugin which lets you simply use dashify="1" instead of dirify="1" in your archive path settings to make your URLs dashier.

Update: Oops! I forgot to mention Ian Fenn's DirifyDashes plugin that he'd made back in June. Along with DirifyPlus and Dirify for Unicode, most of your dirification needs should be well covered.

Trackbacks:

Warnadunia.NET Plug - Dashify - October 5, 2004 01:30 PMCal's dashify plugin. (via)...

Neil's Smaller...

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