04.15.2005

Workflow for Movable Type released

Workflow, a new plugin for Movable Type 3.1x, has just been released by David Raynes. While we don't usually feature new plugins as part of our news about the Movable Type platform, we thought it was worth pointing out because Workflow adds a powerful new area of functionality, and also marks a milestone for the growth of our plugin community.

First, the features: Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to...

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I am going to describe the basics of Movable Type in a short introduction. You do not have to know anything about Movable Type for understanding it. However, when following this three-part introduction, you will learn to know the most important components and gain a good overview. • Movable Type Basics / 1 • Movable Type Basics / 2 • Movable Type Basics / 3

Templates

In the previous part we explained that entries are stored in a database. However, you will not find the website's HTML in the database. Instead, just the attributes of an entry are stored as columns in a database table. But how does Movable Type create HTML out of this?

In Movable Type there are a number of...

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This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

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12.22.2004

MT-Blacklist v2.03-beta

As part of the ongoing efforts against comment spam, Jay Allen has released Blacklist v2.03-beta. This release is designed to take advantage of the improvements in Movable Type 3.14, and the combination of the two is an excellent way to manage comment spam while not imposing too much of a burden on your web server.

If you're using an older version of MT-Blacklist, it's strongly recommended that you update to this new version. And just to review, MT-Blacklist, despite the name, MT-Blacklist offers a wide variety of techniques to manage or moderate comments or block spam, in addition to its namesake Blacklisting feature.

Posted by Anil in Plugins at...

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Many Movable Type users have wished for the ability to define additional custom fields for entries. A future version of MT may include such functionality. This plugin is a stopgap measure until we have a version of Movable Type that allows custom fields. It lets you define custom fields on a per-weblog basis, by creating one or more SQL tables to store the additional data (this plugin has been designed to work only when using MySQL as your MT backend; see below for more on this).

Some users have managed to add custom fields to their copies of Movable Type by modifying the field definitions within MT. See this page and this thread and this thread. However, this approach has several...

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My favorite part of developing Workflow was implementing a plugin system for it. Now it is time for me to tell you folks about all of the ways you can extend and customize Workflow for your specific situations.

Workflow Callbacks

All Workflow callbacks can be added to through the add_callback method of the MT module: MT->add_callback ('Workflow::CALLBACK_NAME', $priority, $plugin, &subroutine_ref);

Creating a Workflow plugin

To add your own custom code to Workflow, simply create place your code in a .pl file in the /plugins/Workflow/plugins/ directory. What code are you going to put in that file? I will cover that next.

Adding a permissions setup option

The list of permissions setup...

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I've put up a page listing MT resources provided by users of the system. This list is in no way comprehensive, but rather a work in progress - if you have a resource to suggest, then please contact us. Please note that I will also be setting up another page that contains tutorials that do not required any system code modifications or additional scripting.

Version 2.2 introduced another promising feature - plugins. (More info)

We're quite pleased to see that two Movable Type plugins have already been developed: MTWordCount and RSSFeed. Links to their development pages can be found on the external resources page. Keep an eye on this page for additional plugins as...

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07.27.2005

Dynamic Publishing support for PostgreSQL and SQLite

It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and...

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Well, it looks like this weblog is becoming just a Movable Type how-to blog. Well, in keeping with that theme, here's a little "part two" companion piece for Doing your whole site with MT (one of my worst blog titles, ever).

Now that you've got your whole site MT-powered, what about your RSS feed? Chances are you, have one for your weblog, but what about one for everything? I've created one for my site, called sitewide.rss. It lets folks keep track of every update that happens to my site, whether it be part of my weblog or not.

To get it to work, you have to do a little bit of...

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This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

continue reading ...

Award-winning plugin developer Tim Appnel's just announced the public beta of MT-Feeds, his new plugin for syndicating feed content into Movable Type templates. It's the successor to the very popular mt-rssfeed plugin that Tim had created, and adds a number of cool new features such as Atom support, smarter caching, and OPML import.

Take a look at the latest version, and if you've used mt-rssfeed in the past or are planning to use MT-Feeds, you'll want to throw a few dollars towards the donation or commercial license payment buttons to support Tim's great development work.

Tim has also announced that he's taking over maintenance of Adam Kalsey's excellent stable of plugins, now that Adam has become...

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05.31.2005

Movable Type Cheat Sheet

One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet...

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With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show you how to create the library javascript that allows you to browse themes, it simply shows you how to make your themes discoverable by StyleCatcher. In this tutorial, I shall use the example of Vicksburg, the default theme with 3.2.

Every style or theme should be in its own folder (with no subfolders) which should contain: • The css stylesheet. • Two thumbnails named thumbnail.gif and thumbnail-large.gif. These two files are used in StyleCatcher as previews of...

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Sometimes you would like to display the age of an entry as compared to a specific date. In the case, of my daughter's blog, I've displayed her actual age at the time of each post, based on her birth date and the authored-on date of the entry.

Updated to support time difference too.

Updated to correct date_delta function's accuracy.

This is a Movable Type/PHP tip. I haven't...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a pair of template tags that allow you to filter a listing of categories by specifying the categories either to include in or to exclude from the listing.

Installation

To install the FilterCategories plugin, upload the file FilterCategories.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you do not already have a plugins directory, create one before uploading the file. For more information about Movable Type plugins, see the documentation.

Contact

Please address questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, interesting usage examples, etc., to mtplugins [AT] staggernation [DOT] com, or post them in the Plugin Development area of the Movable Type...

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10.29.2004

Firefox on the March

Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

Posted by Anil in at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.29.2004

Advice to the bloglorn

Metaforix President Lois C. Ambash has some advice for those afraid of business blogging. It's a solid set of guidelines, but we also loved the praise for TypePad:

As a novice blogger, I chose TypePad for my own blog, and I couldn't be happier. The...

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12.22.2003

Movable Type 3.0

We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed).

The next version of Movable Type...

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MainMenuRecent is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, MT's Main Menu will display the three most recent entries for each weblog.

Requirements

MainMenuRecent requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the MainMenuRecent distribution.

MainMenuRecent is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher. However, the Settings are only available under MT 3.2.

Installation

To install the MainMenuRecent plugin, upload the file MainMenuRecent.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If BigPAPI.pl is not already present in your plugins directory, upload that as well.

Terms of Use

MainMenuRecent is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license....

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying the first letter of a section of text as a "drop cap." A drop cap is a large initial letter of a paragraph that spans more than one line of text. The CSS2 standard lets you create drop caps using the first-letter pseudo-element. However, this will not display properly in older browsers, and it also doesn't allow you to use images for your drop caps. This plugin is designed to let you do drop caps the old-fashioned way, by using an HTML table or image with align="left", which will cause the paragraph to wrap around the drop cap.

The DropCap plugin currently only formats the first letter of the entire piece of text you...

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November 2005

11.02.2005

New plugins for Movable Type

As many of you know, there are hundreds of plugins in the Movable Type plugin directory through which you can completely customize and modify the way that the application works. This has always been a great strength of the Movable Type platform and we put great effort in every release to give plugins even more ways to enhance the system.

What you may not know is that since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, dozens of plugins built...

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