SpamLookup is an anti-spam plugin created by Movable Type engineer Brad Choate, which identifies spam based on a number of unique characteristics and administrator based tests. It includes: • IP address blacklist lookups • Domain name blacklist lookups • IP address source correlation • Lookup whitelists • Link limits • Email and Link memory tests • Keyword filtering

This plugin has been updated for Movable Type 3.2 and utilizes the feedback rating framework. Each test that is enabled contributes to the final composite score of a feedback item. The final score after all tests (SpamLookup and other plugins)...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Neil Turner and is cross-posted on Neil's World.

Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 I've dumped Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist and instead made SpamLookup handle comment/trackback spam on its own. The plugin is included by default on MT 3.2, and while it can do a good job as it is, you might like to try some tune-ups to make it more effective. Moderation and Junking

In Movable Type 2.x, comments just had one status - published. Any spam blocking system could only accept or deny comments and trackbacks. In MT 3.0x and 3.1x, comments gained an additional status - ‘moderated'. This was where comments could be held for human...

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Yes, it's another anti-spam plugin. I would have called it MT-DSBL 2.0, but the feature set grew beyond the name, so a more generic name was chosen. This is a 2.0 release however… the plugin deserves more seniority than a 1.0 release, since it was built of the carcass that was MT-DSBL 1.1.

The first beta release is now available. Please visit the project page for SpamLookup to download it.

So, what does this thing do? Well, in a nutshell: • Filters inbound comments for all installed weblogs. • Filters inbound TrackBack pings for all installed weblogs. • Checks IP address of sender against DNSBL services....

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Note: SpamLookup has been updated and revamped and is now included in Movable Type 3.2, which is a free upgrade. We recommend upgrading Movable Type in lieu of installing this plugin. SpamLookup is a Movable Type plugin for identifying and eliminating weblog spam.

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Elise Bauer's Learning Movable Type has helped countless people understand the intricacies and harness the power of Movable Type and we thought it was worth pointing out two essays recently published there.

The first, written Neil Turner (who just celebrated his three year anniversary using Movable Type), is entitled "Making the Most of SpamLookup" and is essentially the "missing manual" of the number one spam-fighting plugin now bundled with Movable Type 3.2. We'll be publishing our own docs on the plugin soon, but in the meantime it's one of the best resources for understanding how it works beyond just "perfectly"!

The second, "Understanding the Category Listing Code", was cowritten by Elise and award-winning plugin developer and MT consultant...

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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In the early days of MT 3, when I had unreg'd comments set to moderate, I really wanted to have an approval all button as I would read the comment in the email notification I received. Since then that feature request has not progressed so I decided to take matters into my own hands. As the screenshot shows, at the end of this hack you will end up with two buttons on the comments listing screen. This buttons will allow you to mass approve/moderate comments by checking the boxes of the corresponding entries.

First of all open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and find on approximately line 32 the following

'approve_comment' => &approve_comment,

and right after it

'approve_confirm' =>...

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Working with Style Catcher

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...

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Posted on 10/22/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CustomFields 1.12

UPDATE: I've just pushed out a silent update that fixes a problem with custom entry field descriptions not showing. Thanks Nilesh! A new version of CustomFields is available that fixes four bugs that people found;CustomFields...

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Smarty Docs

Now that Smarty is built into MT, you've got a whole load of new features that you can use. Just have a look at the documentation everything discussed in those docs are available to MT users, the only difference is instead of single braces you need to use double, for example where in the Smarty docs it gives you a line like this {include file="sidebar.php"}

when you implement that into MT it will need to become {{include file="sidebar.php"}}

This was chosen over the single braces because the single braces can cause problems when you start writing Javascript. None-the-less if you really wish to use single braces, find in your mtview.php template the following line (thanks...

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I find the Configure Active Plugins list on the MT front page very useful, however this list has been getting longer and longer and I install more and more plugins that register on there. Eventually this bugged me (big surprise eh?) and I decided to move that to its own page. Click the thumbnail to the side for a larger image.

First open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and find around line 40

'list_blogs' => &list_blogs,

and add right underneath it

'list_plugins' => &list_plugins,

Next around line 342 (at the end of sub list_blog) fine

$param{no_breadcrumbs} = 1; $app->build_page('list_blog.tmpl', \%param); }

and add after it

sub list_plugins { my $app = shift;...

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Newsgator Toolkit

Although not directly related to Movable Type, many bloggers I know have been asking for such a tool. The Newsgator Toolkit is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that will eventually provide you with a series of complex and powerful tools...

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Posted on 10/13/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updates to the Style Generator

At long last I've made some updates to the Style Generator to better fit with Six Apart's standard. This means that you can finally apply the tips discussed in this tutorial to stylesheets created using the style gen. Most of...

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UPDATE 09/06: Rebuild Site

One of my favourite features in MT 3.1 is the "Rebuild This Template" button that appears when you save a template. When you click that button it doesn't popup another window for you to confirm the rebuild, no, it just rebuilds then and there. Unfortunately the button at the bottom of the page doesn't do the same. Also because my template body field is huge, that bottom button is quite far down so I have to scroll for a bit. These two annoyances led me to hack the edit_template.tmpl file found MTDIR/tmpl/cms/, this hack is only available in MT 3.1 and greater. If you feel uncomfortable with hacking files but would like to have this hack, please contact me and I will quote you a price for the installation....

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Publishing Custom Pages with Movable Type

MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows...

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Posted on 08/02/2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ajax Archive Drop Downs

In this thread, Gary highlighted how to have drop downs of archives that basically redirected to the appropriate page once an archive was chosen. With this tutorial, I'll take that one step further and use...

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This hack is for versions of Movable Type prior to 3.2. This hack has been implemented into Movable Type 3.2

I'm a lazy person and hate having to click repetitively to do tasks and I get easily annoyed at having to keep hitting save and then rebuild whilst making changes to my site. So a hack later I have a Save & Rebuild button which will first save the template and then rebuild it with just one click!

Open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 1149 find

sub save_object{

and add underneath it

my $sr = 0;

Next on line 1340 find

$obj->text($text);

and add underneath it

if($q->param('sr')){ $sr = 1; $app->rebuild_indexes( BlogID => $obj->blog_id,...

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Many people wanted to know how I implemented these guicktags into my comments form. So here's a quick tutorial for that. In your comments form find

<p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML> (you may use HTML tags for style)</MTIfAllowCommentHTML><br/> <textarea tabindex="4" id="text" name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea></p>

and replace it with

<div class="quicktags"><p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML><script src="http://www.movalog.com/mt/js_quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();<...

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The second plugin in the pluginset known as Ajaxify, this plugin adds a search suggestion feature to the Quicksearch box at the top when you search for entries, comments or trackback. There's very little to talk about this plugin but I should note that it is a little buggy when handling search terms with spaces for example "MT Blogroll". I've been trying to find a fix but the javascript is unreadble! None-the-less, it works quite well as can be seen from this screenshot. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. Go grab your copy.

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MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

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UPDATE

I've had this idea swimming around my head ever since Planet Mozilla launched but never implemented it because until a few weeks ago I was under the impression that my host did not provide Python.

Anyways, announcing Planet Movable Type.

What is it?

Planet MT aggregates posts from the following weblogs: • 6A ProNet (feed) • Brad Choate (feed) • Chad Everett (feed) • David Raynes (feed) • Girlie's Tips & Tricks (feed) • Learning Movable Type (feed) • MT Forge Dev (feed) • MT Plugins (feed) • MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse (feed) • Mena's Corner (feed) • Movable Type News (feed) • MovableStyle (feed) • Movalog (feed) • Neil's World (feed) • Phil Ringalda (feed) • Six Apart (feed) • The Tweezer's Edge...

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UPDATE: Donors check your Paypal emails!

I'm incredibly proud to announce CustomFields 1.0. This is a plugin set consisting of two plugins, one for entries and the other for authors, that allow you to (finally) define custom fields in a powerful way rather than resorting to hacks. This plugin consists of: • Author custom fields - this allows you to define custom fields to allow you to rebuild proper author profile/bio pages. • Author Archiving - This author plugin in the set builds on Brad Choate's Authors plugin, which means you have all those tags available. These tags can be used with the powerful author archiving system I've built into this plugin that mimics Movable Type's current...

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This new version introduces inline editing for comments by the commenters. A cookie is set when the person hits the post button on the comment form. The cookie is set to expire in 5 minutes so the person must make any edits within five minutes.

Download MT-InlineEditor_1.1.zip. Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've used MT Tags in those...

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