July 2004 Archives

Didn't break down and buy a seersucker suit and bow tie for the occasion as threatened last year. As always I enjoyed some of the horse names. Here are some that were on the program the two days we were there:

• Angelina J - Me likey Angelina J too even though she was married Billy Bob
• Nosupeforyou - Someone watches too much Seinfeld.
• Quayle - Sired by Deputy Commander and Oblivious. NAMING GENIUS!
• Lusty Latin, Motel Affair & Shoot the Wad - Proving racing is not for kids
• Boom Bah Yay
• Darn That Girl
• Coconut Popsicle
• One Tough Dude - Ran againsts Charming Jim and Charismatic Rob to proove nice guys don't finish first.
• Run for Mom
• She'sbubba'sdelite
• Rosie's Big Boy
• The Chelsea Comet - A longshot we bet on it because of my wife's business. Our big winner of the trip.
• Brassy Kitten
• Rumba Numba
• Mombo Loco
• Dont Knock America - Supporters of Dubya?
• Maximus C - Funny if you know our friend Craig Matthews.
• Classy E.T.
• Source - Because I'm a nerd.
• Calypso Band

Invigorated by my contest win I wrote a plugin over lunch and documentated while only mildly interested in a session I was sitting in.

Entry Edit Link (EEL) enables a weblog to dynamically inserts an Edit This Entry link that will take the user to the MT edit screen for the entry they are viewing. This link is displayed using JavaScript and only is displayed if the user is logged into the MT system that they are publishing the site with.

CAVEATS: EEL only checks if the mt_user cookie exists. Currently it does not check if the cookie is valid or if the author has permission to edit the specific weblog or entry. See the TO DO section in the docs for future directions.

You can download it here

I learned (in person) that I took second place in the SixApart plugin contest last night. I'm floored and honored. Congratulations to my fellow developers who placed.

I only released one of my entries (Tiny Orwell) the other day. That wasn't the winning entry though. The winning entry had two parts. The most relevant to all is Plus 1.0. Plus is a advanced MT entry search engine built on Plucene which allows for a lot more sophisticated and faster searching of content. (Plus is derived from PLUcene Simple a module I relied on to rapidly tap into Plucenes vast functionality.) MT has a built in search, but it only covers the basics and has an akward template and configuration process. Another feature of Plus comes from the second part of my entry that my fellow plugin developers may be interesting. Its called XSearch (eXtensible Search) and its a framework for creating pluggable search facilties in MT. (Plus is just an implementation of one of these search functions.). The built-in search is hardwired and is not extensible which makes its functionality and tags useless to developers like myself. Like so many good works of software, XSearch was scratching my own itch as a MT developer for hire who found myself in situations were I need more control over how the search behaves and needed to seamless integrate with a sites look and feel.

Want to get your hands on it? Wondering were the link is to it? To avoid any confusion I'm going to hold off releasing it and wait for it to come out in Plugin Pack Six Apart is going to be releasing. Besides, having such an unmovable deadline my documentation needs work. I wouldn't want to inflict such frustration on the world. If you really need it now contact me and I'll see what I can do.

As I've been mentioning almost all year, I've been quite busy with coding tasks and other life issues. More recently I focused a great deal of time on my contest entries for the Six Apart plugin developer's contest. I worked right up to the wire and got two entries in. Today I thought I'd make one of them avilable to the public here

Tiny Orwell is a simple TypeKey-like authentication system written in the spirit of the Trackback reference implementation and blosxom. This script provides an alternate to TypeKey for small groups using MT 3.0D or any other tool that supports the TypeKey API with a minimal amount of fuss. It is completely standalone and doesn't require MT at all. How crazy is that for a MT developer's contest?!?!

Users will want to note that currently Tiny Orwell does not have a profile mode nor does it support forced email disclosure the TypeKey API 1.1 (the required use of a token). These are all things I intend on addressing in a future release.

If you are looking for something more commercial grade contact me. I do Movable Type consulting and can help you out.

cromatic lays out his 7 Rules of Just Doing It in his O'Reilly weblog. I agree and they are something we developers should all live by. An interesting read into the psychology of programming for those who don't. Sadly, I break a lot of these rules with a glut of unreleased code and planned features sitting on my desktop. (sigh.)

My favorite: Simplicity gives you more options than complexity.

Over on the MT support boards sethtrain asks:

I am just starting to get the hang of making plugins. I have gotton some info from a couple of different articles on the web (the o'reilly article, how to make plugins her on MT) but I am wondering if anyone has information about the different (I really don't know what you call them) .pm files that hold information about all of MT. I really don't understand all of the MT::Template::Context stuff. So I was wondering if someone could explain this to me. Thanks.

(I hyperlinked the articles I assumed he was speaking about.)

I posted a reply and I thought I'd share here were it may be more easily found by others.

The .pm files are Perl Modules – code libraries that CGIs and other perl modules can use for functionality. In MT's case these modules are objects though perl modules don't necessarily have to adhere to the object-oriented programming model. (Object-oriented perl takes a bit of getting used if you've programmed in another object-oriented programming language.)

So your question is a rather big one. If you want to learn specifically about OO perl and modules, I would suggest you pickup Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules. If you are new to Perl you may want to start with its predecessor Learning Perl. The Perl Cookbook and the Perl Pocket Reference are never far from my side when I'm coding. (My selection of books has nothing to due with my association with O'Reilly.)

Most of the modules in MT have embedded documentation to its purpose, usage and methods. These docs are in POD format and can be extracted with tools like pod2html pod2text that ship with perl. You can do something like this to extract them into a file:

 $ pod2text MT.pm >MT.txt
 $ pod2html MT.pm >MT.html

(There are other ways to do this operation – in Perl there is always more then one way to do it.) The first command (presumably executed from mt/lib) create a plain text version of the documentation in the MT.pm module. The second a HTML version. SixApart has been really good about documenting most of their modules though it has been my experience that occasionally a method or two goes undocumented in which you'll have to read through the code. The application modules are not documented because they really are meant to be extended like the others.

SixApart also posted the documentation here. Presently these pages are for MT 2.6x.

Hope that helps get you started.