Movalog Blog

What's been happening since September?

2007-12-13T10:37:14Z

This summer was an exciting one: Movable Type 4.0 was released, Movalog was redesigned with a gorgeous new look and I was ready with a series of updates for many of my plugins. But after a flurry of plugin releases, activity waned. In fact, several plugins were left in a state of perpetual beta, and even more plugins were left finished, but unreleased, in my code repository. Why? In September, for the first time in my life, I set my feet on American soil as I became a college freshman at UCSD majoring in Computer Science (shockingly enough)!

But in between then and now there was even bigger news... For as long as I can remember, the ability to add custom fields to store meta data has been one of the most requested features of Movable Type. During the run-up to MT 4.0, this was confirmed with a public poll where custom fields functionality was easily the winner for the "which feature should be built in" question. With the results, Byrne Reese officially stated that it was something Six Apart was considering for a future release of MT 4.x.

Privacy 2.1 Public Beta: Read Permissions in MT4

2007-09-03T19:28:34Z

Another day and another public beta! This time for Privacy. Privacy is a new plugin for Movable Type that allows you to define "read permissions" for system objects in Movable Type (entries, categories and blogs). As a result, readers will first need to authenticate to be able to view the object. Privacy gives you fine-grained control over who can read your content.

Privacy 2.1 now makes the plugin fully compatible with Movable Type 4.0 (it integrates beautifully into the application as the screenshots no doubt show) and takes advantage of one of the major new features of MT4, the commenter authenticator framework. As a result, your readers can authenticate using the same services they can sign in to comment with. What this means is that Privacy is completely compatible with all OpenID plugins (for example the Wordpress OpenID or AIM OpenID plugins). In addition to these external commenter authenticators, Privacy allows you to require readers to enter a password or authorize Movable Type authors to read an entry (and with the Enterprise Pack, readers can even use LDAP to sign in to read a private object).

Users of the Enterprise Pack will be glad to know that Privacy works seamlessly with user groups, simply enter the group name whilst editing the Privacy configuration for an object.

So download Privacy 2.1b1 and be sure to post all your suggestions, bugs reports and thoughts to the Privacy Beta Testing forums. A word of caution, Privacy will not migrate your configurations from older versions (this includes MT Protect and Privacy 2.0).

My Blogs: A Retro Dashboard Widget

2007-09-02T15:32:26Z

Movable Type 4.0 brought with it a stunning new dashboard which contained a number of default widgets which painted a picture of your system (from posting and commenting activity of blogs to quick links to tools). Personally, being the only author of all my blogs (thus writing all the entries and receiving notifications of all comments), the default Blog Stats widget was of little use to me. What I really missed was Movable Type 3's dashboard which listed all the blogs in the system with a number of handy links to the most frequently used areas.

Thankfully, the new dashboard is completely extensible so I wrote a quick retro widget for Movable Type 4, My Blogs which brings back the old dashboard.

Download My Blogs Now!

Comment Threading in Movable Type 4

2007-08-29T17:55:00Z

Movable Type 4 introduced a neat feature, a handy Reply is now available to authors from the comment management screens. This allows authors to reply to comments from within the application and as a result also introduced some basic comment threading features. In fact, a series of template tags were created but there have been two large holes so far:

Commenters were left in the cold! The only way to reply to specific comments was from within the application, there is absolutely no way to reply to comments from the blog's entry archive.
There was no documentation - although the above tags were available, there was next to no documentation on how to use them or create comment threads.

Enter Simply Threaded, rewritten for Movable Type 4's comment threading, provides you with the template tags you need to allow commenters to reply to comments. Not only that but (as the sidebar shows), documentation guides you through the process of creating either traditional hierarchical threads or the newer styles of chronological threads.

Download Simply Threaded Now!

CustomFields 2.1b4

2007-08-27T12:33:18Z

An unfortunately boring title for what is a fantastic release of CustomFields. This second public beta of CustomFields brings a horde of new features (and, thanks to all the beta tests, even more bug fixes!). Here's rundown for what's new:

Data storage in custom tables - ever since the beginning, CustomFields has taken to storing the data you enter in the general purpose mt_plugindata table. Although this was easy for me, the developer, storing the data in mt_plugindata had more cons than pros (for example, reading data from mt_plugindata is extremely slow). So, with this release of CustomFields, you can now specify where you would like your data to be stored.

The beauty of CustomFields' approach is that you do not have to touch your database at all! Continue adding/editing your fields through CustomFields' interface and the plugin will take care of creating and updating the necessary tables. It's so easy that it has become a recommended step during installation!
Dynamic Publishing is now fully supported. All the template tags CustomFields provides (including the custom template tags you create for your fields) are all available in dynamic publishing.
Reorder Fields - in the previous beta, the order fields were displayed was extremely confusing (it wasn't alphabetically, was it the order they were created?) Thankfully this situation has been remedied with v2.1b4. A neat new sidebar widget appears on any screens which display custom fields and through a great drag and drop interface (a la Widget Sets), you can define the exact order you want your fields to appear.

And, of course, being a second beta, this includes many, many bug fixes. So, grab the new beta in the usual place and please do keep the suggestions coming!

P.S. The CustomFields user manual has been completely written. Step by step instructions (complete with screenshots!) guide you through using the major areas of this plugin.

Using the new Transformer DOM Methods

2007-08-24T06:52:32Z

Ever since Kevin Shay released the brilliantly named BigPAPI plugin, plugins have been able to change Movable Type's interface extremely easily. With Movable Type 3.3, this functionality was built into the core and this opened the floodgates for "Transformer Plugins" - as they've come to be known! All (or at least the majority) of Transformer plugins work by first looking for a marker (a few lines) in an app template page and then either adding to it or replacing it with something of their own. Now besides being extremely crude (if there was the slightest change to the marker, the transformer plugin would collapse complete), this presented the problem of multiple transformer plugins using the same marker. For example, if Plugin A was to modify a marker used by Plugin B, well Plugin B would no longer work! And this proved to be quite a nightmare for support.

In Movable Type 4, along with the new interface, the entire backend app templates were rebuilt using Movable Type's own templating system. Besides being far more powerful than it's predecessor HTML::Template, it allowed for a whole new set of API to be built. This new API implements the DOM methods native to JavaScript. The DOM can be quite complicated to wrap your head around (in fact, it took me several months to truly feel confident) so here are a few tutorials to familiarize yourself with it before tackling Movable Type's DOM:

quirksmode.org's Introduction to the DOM - highly recommend, quirksmode is one of the best sites out there for JavaScript tutorials and information
W3C School's XML DOM Tutorial
Mozilla's DOM Developer Docs

With Movable Type 4, a lot of these DOM methods have been built into the system and can (and should) be used instead of the regexes. They should be called on MT::Template objects (and thus can be found in lib/MT/Template.pm) and work by modifying nodes/elements (template tags) in the template. Lets look at how to build a Transformer plugin with these new methods.

CrossPoster Public Beta

2007-08-22T10:20:56Z

I had first started to write a plugin to crosspost my entries because I wanted to unearth my personal blog on Movable Type whilst maintain my blog on Vox. Then, as things go, I started to work on other projects and the need for the ability to crosspost entries between Movable Type installations arose too so rather than create separate plugins, I decided to toy around with the idea of creating pluggable plugin!

In fact, I even got close to releasing the plugin a few months ago (a private alpha/beta was released to ProNet) but then real life took over and I was head down for a while. When Movable Type 4.0 was released, I was secretly glad I had never released this plugin because I was able to start again from scratch and create a much cleaner, easier to use and more extensible plugin than before!

But enough of my reminiscing, CrossPoster is a brand new plugin (built for Movable Type 4.0!) that, as it's name suggests, allows you to compose an entry on your Movable Type blog and then publish it to a number of other blogs. The beauty of the plugin lies in its completely extensible nature. CrossPoster makes use of a variety of connectors that connect your Movable Type installation to your crossposting accounts. These connectors make use of the Atom API (a standard that almost all popular platforms are compatible with) and are extremely easy to create (developer documentation will be available post-beta). By default, CrossPoster can publish to LiveJournal, Vox and Movable Type accounts (I was trying to find some information about WordPress and although the Atom API was implemented in v2.2, I could find no documentation or information on the endpoints, if anyone knows of these, do leave a comment!)

As the title suggests, CrossPoster is in a beta state so there is a good chance of bugs so you are advised to take a full back up of your database before installing or using this plugin. Please post any bug reports of support threads onto the CrossPoster beta testing forums

Presenting Template Shelf

2007-08-20T13:33:29Z

I created Template Shelf because I needed quick and easy access to all the template in my weblog. I had just started to redesign Movalog and the new modular templates in MT4 caused a lot of back and forth between the listing and editing screens, what I needed was to be able to access all my templates from the editing screen directly.

Enter Template Shelf which provides a sidebar widget on the template editing screen with a list of all the templates in my weblog, a drop down menu to filter and a handy create link.

My favourite part of Template Shelf is it's dialog editing feature. Click an icon and your template will open in a dialog box. This is a great way to make a quick change to a template or edit small templates without having to leave the template you're currently editing behind.

Template Shelf is free for personal users, grab it now!

CustomFields 2.1 Public Beta

2007-08-07T11:39:16Z

CustomFields is an aptly named plugin that makes Movable Type and even more full-featured content management system. It allows you to create additional fields to store custom data for any of the types of information you manage in MT: Entries, authors, categories, even blogs themselves. Today, I'm happy to launch a public beta for the next version of the plugin which brings full compatibility with Movable Type 4.0.

As the version number suggests, v2.1 contains a few major features including:

Full compatibility with Movable Type 4.0 - the plugin has been updated to match MT4's new interface and as a result integrates seamlessly into the application. A number of new field types have also been introduced which leverage the new Assets feature in MT4
Complete extensibility - by default, CustomFields allows you to create a variety of different field types (for example textboxes, checkboxes, drop down menus and radio buttons) for objects in MT (entries, categories and authors). With v2.1, it is possible to not only add a different type of field (for example Flickr Photos, YouTube videos etc.) but also enable CustomFields to work with different objects (for example MT Blogroll could enable CustomFields so you could store custom data for links!)
You can now enter CustomFields values from a 3rd party client (such as Ecto, wbloggar or Windows Live Writer) using the format specified by the Key/Values plugin in the extended entry field

The public beta is free for all users (but commercial and enterprise users will be expected to purchase a license post-beta). Download CustomFields 2.1b3 here. Let me take this opportunity to stress that this is quite an early beta, there is a good chance that there will be a number of nasty bugs so if you decide to install this on a production server, please take a full backup regularly. This plugin has not yet been tested in large-scale deployments or under heavy load.

If you face any bugs or have any questions, please post them to the CustomFields Beta Testing Forums

LivePreview v1.2

2007-06-10T15:34:17Z

A bittersweet moment. I had intended on announcing LivePreview 1.2 today (it's already been available for quite a few days!) but Byrne beat me to it with an even bigger announcement.

But then sometimes one of the engineers will throw a curve ball. Like today, when I saw that Brad Choate, MT's lead engineer, created an honest-to-god real live preview feature for entries you are editing.

Yep, you heard me.

So now, when you click the "Preview" button from the entry editing screen, you will get to see what your post will actually look like on your blog. Awesome.

Awesome! Live preview is one of those essential features that I had always longed for until I threw it together in a plugin form. Now that it's folded into the core, it works in a much more elegant fashion than my plugin but I shall miss it, it was one of my favourites :)

For the moment, however, LivePreview v1.2 and the actual previewing process has changed (with the unfortunate loss of the slick screen dimming) to fix some of the biggest bugs with the plugin:

Text encoding was lost due to AJAX being used to save the entries
A lot of people reported LivePreview causing duplication of entries
LivePreview didn't seem to clean up after itself (i.e. all those temporary files)

Goodbye LivePreview, I shall miss coding you!

Movable Type v4.0 (Athena): A Developer's Perspective

2007-06-05T14:02:22Z

The big news today is Movable Type 4.0 has gone into beta and will be open sourced once released! Rather than talk about the new features, over 50 new features with a completely redesigned and gorgeous new interface, I thought I'd take a moment to talk about what makes my head reel with Movable Type 4.0, it's developer features.

A long time ago, Six Apart posted the Componentization Guide, an overview of one of the biggest changes in Movable Type history that would completely change the way it was offered. Rather than separate products (Movable Type, Movable Type Enterprise), the application was made completely dynamic. So now, we would have one core product and all the features (such as what you would find in the former MTE) would be available through a new series of addons called components which would seamlessly integrate with Movable Type.

In order for components to properly work, Movable Type was rewritten in large portions and introduces several new features.

Privacy: Public Beta

2007-02-06T16:17:35Z

At long last, I'm extremely glad to announce the public beta of Privacy, MT Protect's successor. I'd already talked about a few of the features but then suddenly never mentioned it again. The biggest reason was that after doing a few betas with the folks on ProNet, many, especially the folks at Apperceptive came forward with a bunch of great ideas. Today I'd like to highlight some of these new killer features.

Extensible authentication framework - a fancy way of saying you can use any login system with Privacy. Privacy comes with the password protection and OpenID authentication (this includes easy support for Typekey, LiveJournal and soon Vox) out of the box but this can easily be extended to include any other means of authentication. I have plans for creating plugins for Privacy that will allow you to use Google's and Yahoo's authentication - meaning you could simply enter a reader's yahoo username to an entry! Movable Type Enterprise users will be glad to know that LDAP is also supported out of the box. I hope to flesh out the developer docs over this beta period.
Extremely user-friendly - thanks to the advances made by Six Apart with the latest Movable Type 3.3x release, Privacy has become much easier to use:
- Automatic Installation - once you upload Privacy to your Movable Type installation, it will prompt you to finish the installation and will automatically upgrade your database (including migrating MT Protect users) as well as install the necessary files.
- Streamlined Privacy - a feature I'd already previously demo'd, the privacy settings for assets (such as entries) appear directly on the respective editing interface. So for example, whilst creating a new entry, you can also set it's privacy settings, a sharp change from MT Protect.
- Integrated Listings - MT Protect users will remember how difficult it was to get a list of entries that had been protected. Thankfully, Privacy now displays the privacy status of objects directly on the listing screens. For example, if you had a private entry, on the Entries screen, this would be shown as a lock next to the entry's name.
Category Privacy - along with entries and blogs, Privacy now allows you to mark categories in Movable Type as private. The new inheritance settings then allows entries that are assigned to private categories to also be marked private.
Templating - I've already elaborated on this before. To get your templates working with MT Protect was hellish, with Privacy, you really only need to use the appropriate MTPrivate tag!

Privacy has indeed been a long time in the making, in fact I spent the better part of 2006 on it. It has already gone through three beta cycles on ProNet but there may still be some bugs remaining so I'd recommend taking a full database backup before installing this plugin (MT Protect users, your data will - should - migrate peacefully!)

On it's release, Privacy will be a free plugin for personal users, supported by donations. Commercial and Enterprise users will be asked to purchase the appropriate license after a 30-day evaluation period.

So, grab the beta. I'd love to have your thoughts, concerns and bugs!

Announcing EnhancedEntryEditing 1.2

2007-01-11T16:23:17Z

EnhancedEntryEditing 1.2 not only fixes several incredibly annoying bugs but it also introduces a few new features. Here's a brief overview:

Fixed the bug where the WYSIWYG editor would distort the new/edit entry screen
The formatting buttons (and textarea resizer controls) are automatically hidden if the WYSIWYG is enabled for the textarea.
A new toggle button allows you to toggle the editor on and off. As a result, you no longer need to set the text formatter to WYSIWYG to use the editor, however the text formatter is higly recommended to prevent any conflicts.

If you are upgrading from a older version of EnhancedEntryEditing, follow these steps to ensure a smooth upgrade:

Go to System Overview > Plugins > EnhancedEntryEditing > Show Settings and click the Reset to Defaults
For each blog that uses the plugin, go to Blog Settings > Plugins > EnhancedEntryEditing > Show Settings and click the Reset to Defaults

This ensures you get the latest settings. EnhancedEntryEditing remains a free plugin for personal users. Commercial and Enterprise users are asked to purchase an appropriate license after a 30-day evaluation period. Go grab the latest version!

Apologies: Mass Notifier Emails

2007-01-02T19:47:34Z

It's come to my attention that a lot of emails were sent out by the MT Notifier plugin to everyone who's subscribed for email updates for Movalog. I'm yet unsure how this happened and it looks to be a bug in the version of MT Notifier I am using and the plugin has been duly disabled until I can further investigate. I sincerely apologize for the inconvinience caused.

In the meanwhile, you can subscribe to Movalog through the RSS Feed in your reader of choice:

Simply Threaded 1.0

2006-12-10T10:56:49Z

Movable Type's flat comment listings often make it hard to track multiple conversations (or threads) and even harder to specifically reply to a comment. Simply Threaded is a quick plugin, inspired by Vox's smart comments, I threw together that attempts to tackle this problem.

As the screenshot demonstrates, Simply Threaded adds a Reply link to each comment which can be used to directly reply to a comment. You can then use a simple container template tag to show this relationship in your comment listing.

Simply Threaded has been installed on Movalog so feel free to give it a try in the comments on this entry!

Simply Threaded is a free plugin but you are encouraged to support it by making a donation of at least $5.00.