Movable Type

David Raynes has released Workflow, a plug-in for Movable Type that adds fine-grained editing capabilities to weblog authors. As Anil Dash explains: 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 any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer ownership of a post to other authors ... (read more)

Avoiding Movable Type's Comment Date Bug

I was reminded today of a nettlesome Movable Type template bug with how comment dates are displayed by the MTCommentDate tag. As noted by Michael Hanscom, if you place an MTCommentDate tag inside an MTCommentEntry container, it displays the date and time the entry was published, not the comment's date and time. A workaround is to place the tag outside the container, even if you have to use two MTCommentEntry containers for the same comment. Here's template code to display the 10 most recently ... (read more)

Linking Plain URLs in Movable Type Comments

I run an active Movable Type-driven site where visitors include hyperlinks in their comments using HTML markup like this: Read more on <a href="http://ekzemplo.com">Ekzemplo</a> A lot of people don't know HTML, so they paste URLs: Read more on http://ekzemplo.com This is less useful and causes presentation problems when a long URL takes up more space than the site's tables can handle, pushing the right margin off the edge. I needed to turn plain URLs into hyperlinks without messing ... (read more)

Weblog Software Priced to Move

A factoid from a Ben and Mena Trott interview for anyone starting a mom-and-pop business selling commercial weblog software: Mena Trott: For the two years that we were just Ben and myself, the donations and commercial licenses supported Ben and myself to run the operation, and we never had to use our savings to pay for our rent or anything; this covered our costs. And we've had a lot of downloads and we've had -- numbers have been really large, but the average price, I mean the average -- Ben ... (read more)Ben Hammersley: "The combination of comment spammers, and the database calls made by mt-comments.cgi and MT-Blacklist, is putting so much load on servers that the admins are having to pull sites down to save the others." I haven't used MT-Blacklist for my Movable Type sites, because I am loathe to trust third parties to provide up-to-date and correct blacklists. I'm having good results so far by simply closing old entries to comments and trackback. ... (read more)

You May Already Be a Winner

I received around 25 entries in the Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition book giveaway. Chosen at random from received comments and trackback, the five winners are Elise Bauer, Richard MacManus, Harrison Brace, Christian Crumlish, and Judi Sohn. I'm also sending one to Hanna for the shameless heart-wrenching tale of hard luck in her contest entry: I could mention that I'm ridiculously poor, being disabled and a ward of the state. But that would be demeaning, wouldn't it? I'll be fighting the ... (read more)Before you install MT-Workbench to close old Movable Type entries to feedback, take a look at Conversation Killer, the plug-in I wish I knew about before I did all of that coding. ... (read more)

New Movable Type Tool: MT-Workbench

I have released beta version 0.1 of MT-Workbench, a PHP class library that can close all weblog entries to comments and trackback after they become one week old. The open source library was written for a Movable Type weblog that uses a MySQL database. The library's closefeedback.php script can be run daily as a cronjob, closing old discussions so they can't be abused by comment spammers trying to boost their Google PageRank. So far, the results have been heartening on the Drudge Retort, which ... (read more)

Rebuilding Movable Type Entries by Cronjob

Thanks to a tip from Richard Eriksson, I've completed the Movable Type utility to close comments and trackback on all weblog entries after they become a week old. I will be releasing it tomorrow under the GPL, assuming it runs properly as a cronjob and closes these seven-day-old entries to new feedback. I couldn't get the script to work until I used Timothy Appnel's mt-rebuild utility to republish individual entries after they have been closed. I tried to use Ed Dumbill's excellent XML-RPC for ... (read more)

New: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition

Hot off the presses: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, my new 410-page book on the current edition of the weblog publishing software. I wrote the book to encourage Movable Type webloggers to get into the advanced publishing capabilities of the software, such as template design, plug-in programming, and XML syndication with Atom and RSS. For the book, I spent six months combing over the Movable Type documentation, support forums, source code, and database. I stalked several coders who use ... (read more)