Professional Network member Kevin Shay wrote the following tutorial to introduce the community to his exciting new plugin and its development potential.

The BigPAPI plugin for Movable Type allows you to create plugins that can easily add features to Movable Type's interface. This article explains the background behind the develpment of BigPAPI, and walks through the creation of a simple working plugin.

Why BigPAPI?

With each new version, Movable Type has become friendlier to plugin development. The earliest plugins could do little more than add tags to the platform's templating system. Now (as of version 3.2), the Plugin API allows plugins to define not only template tags...

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I'm really excited to be able to finally post about our new version of Movable Type and the innovative way we are launching it.

As I said in my previous post to Mena's Corner, the plugin and developer community is one of Movable Type's greatest strengths. This is a sentiment we've seen echoed around the Movable Type community, as well, along with the question: if Six Apart recognizes that the developer community is one its strengths, what are they doing to foster that community?

I addressed some of what we're doing in my previous post, but I want to expand on that.

As I said above, today, we'll be releasing the Developer Release of Movable Type 3.0.

It will be available to...

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Note: This tutorial was first published on October 29th for members of the Professional Network. If you'd like to get access to the benefits of membership in the network, sign up now.

Our last tutorial covering dynamic publishing provided a high-level technical overview of its implementation. In this tutorial, we will examine the way you create plugins for the PHP dynamic publishing model. It varies a bit from the Perl model, since we have built the template processing on top of Smarty, a popular and powerful templating engine for PHP.

Use the Source, Luke!

To get you started, there are a whole host of MT tags that have been ported from Perl to PHP. These would be the core...

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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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Timothy Appnel has published a fantastic guide to developing plugins for Movable Type. He discusses adding simple tags to the templating system, creating text formatting plugins, and using the data persistence framework to store plugin data. This is a great tutorial for beginning plugin authors, and will hopefully open up plugin authoring to a new group of developers.

In other plugin-related news--if you haven't seen it recently, mt-plugins.org is the best resource for finding and using MT plugins. A bugtracking system was added recently to get users in touch with plugin developers about problems with the plugins.

Previous Entry:...

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Developing with the Movable Type Perl API

Problems

You want to extend Movable Type and develop an extension to the base system.

Solutions

Six Apart provides numerous resources to get you started with developing including tutorials and MT source code documentation.

Discussion

Movable Type's open code base and APIs (Application Programmers Interface) make the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of publishing applications. Here are some pointers to that will get you started.

Perl API

The Movable Type code is written in an...

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Another new feature for those brave enough to play with the bleeding edge of MultiBlog: Entry Transfer. A single entry can be transferred from one blog to another. Grab the development release and give it a shot. If you dare!

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MultiBlog Development Release 1.9.1 is available for download now. Just snag it from the MultiBlog page and unpack the archive into your main MT directory. If all goes well, the multiblog-config.cgi file should be setup as an executable now by default (though you might want to double check just to make sure).

New features in this release: • Category transfer from one blog to another

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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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Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition is finally here, and we've got a lot to say about it. Mena's explained the thinking that went into this new version over at Mena's Corner, where you can get the full story. First, information on our new licenses, new prices, and our commitment to a free version:

As I hope you already know, today we launched the Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, what you may not know is that with this release we are also making major improvements in our licensing and support policies.

And, if you've noticed the $20,000 in prizes we mentioned above, you can find out about our commitment to developers:

[W]e are also announcing a contest, called "Plug into...

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Now that school is nearly finished, I have finally found some time to work on MultiBlog, and though I was a little rusty at first, I soon found my stride and put together four tags that I have been bouncing around in my head for some time now:

•

MultiBlogInclude

A tag I hope will be useful for sites that end up splitting into multiple blogs (like mine, for example). MTMultiBlogInclude will allow template developers to include a template from another blog easily, in addition to giving them an easy way to do local customizations for the current blog. The current blog is checked for a template with the given name first, followed by the default blog given in the tag.

For...

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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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The hundreds of plugins available for Movable Type are what define its power and flexibility for a lot of users, and we've tried to do justice to the creativity and innovation of our plugin developers in version 3.2.

Movable Type's plugin architecture dates back three years to version 2.2. In that version, we added the ability to create custom template tags, and version 2.6 built on that framework by adding custom text formatting plugins and the ability to store data for use by plugins.

In version 3.0, we radically revamped the plugin architecture to support the creation of full applications on top of the Movable Type platform. And version 3.1 extended this power with...

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Plugins are bits of code that, once installed, extend the functionality of Movable Type. The word plugin is often used by software developers to describe a third party application that "hooks" into a main application to extend its functionality. Movable Type hosts an active plugin developer community whose plugins have greatly enhanced the capabilities of Movable Type. You can find a directory of MT plugins at http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/. To use a plugin, you will need to use an FTP program to load the plugin files to your server. When you upgrade your MT version, you must be careful not to overwrite your plugins file. Either that, or reload the plugins after the...

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This is a question I've seen a lot, through emails, bug reports and on the forums. First a little general background information.

The 'Plugin Envelope' method was something introduced with v3.0 and one of the first plugins to use it was MT-Blacklist. This is where a plugin creates its own subdirectory within the main plugins/ directory, for example MT Blacklist has plugins/Blacklist, MT Protect has plugins/Protect and so on.

The problem many people are facing are the hundreds of errors that these plugins spit out and look similar to this: Plugin error: /home/.../.../cgi-bin/plugins/Blogroll/Blogroll.pl Can't locate Blogroll/Blogroll.pm in @INC (@INC contains: plugins/Blogroll/lib...

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02.17.2003

Text Formatting Plugins Available

As we mentioned in our original post on Text Formatting, we hoped that Text Formatting plugins would make it easier for non-technical users to author and format weblog content. We released 2.6 just last week, and already plugin developers have implemented some exciting new Text Formatting options: • Timothy Appnel released a beta of his TikiText text formatting. • Brad Choate released version 1.1 of his Textile plugin. • Gregor Purdy released a POD text formatting text formatting plugin. • And, since we forgot to mention it previously, Adam Kalsey released MovableJive, a "port of some classic text filters".

Posted by Benjamin Trott at...

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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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Ben and Mena Trott, founders of Six Apart, announcing the winners of their recent developers contest at the BlogOn Conference. (Photo by yours truly).

Congratulations are in order for all of the developers who won prizes for their Movable Type plugins for the Six Apart Developers Contest. Special congrats to Jay Allen for winning the well-deserved First Prize for his MTBlacklist 2.0 plugin.

At the conference new features for the soon-to-be-released-to-the-public MT3.1 were also announced, including post scheduling, subcategories, and PHP-based dynamic templating.

Links: Chad Everett on MT 3.1 Arvind Satyanarayan on MT 3.1 Movable Type 3.1: What's New - update from Six Apart Have you found the tutorials at Learning Movable Type helpful? Please consider linking to LMT at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!...

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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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Yes, I realize Movable Type is not a general-purpose content management system, but if you're in a pinch it can do wonders. Especially with this plugin, which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates. (Click the more link for more information.)

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtkeyvalues-1_53.zip

Installation

To install, place the...

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