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MovableType

Movable Type

HTMLExcerpt Plugin for Movable Type

March 22, 2012

With any CMS, whether it's Movable Type, WordPress, Joomla, etc., one big problem is automatically creating fully formatted HTML excerpts. The problem is that it's very difficult to know where exactly to split the HTML code without leaving an orphaned HTML tag somewhere. Many website publishers simply force their writers to manually insert a HTML excerpt into a separate field. This isn't an optimal solution, since the writer may have to have some knowledge of HTML, unless of course the excerpt field sports a WYSIWYG editor.

Post Office 2.0 Plugin for Movable Type

March 15, 2012

Movable Type has a plugin called Post Office (now maintained on Github by Endevver) which is a cool email-to-blog (moblogging) Perl-based plugin. I wrote my own email-to-blog Perl script years ago, which has some advanced features like support for both images and videos in your email attachments. However, the script would run via a Linux bash shell and executed via a scheduled cron job. Because of that, for each Movable Type user that needed this feature I need to copy the Perl script to a new .pl Perl file and change the 'static' variables (email address, MT XML-RPC password, etc.).

Techmeme + Memo Plugin = Blogger Heaven!

June 23, 2011


I came up with a cool recipe that takes the Movable Type Memo plugin, co-worker Vahid Hashemian's JavaScript RSS/ATOM Subscription Feed Web Widget, and Techmeme's RSS feed to display Techmeme's "Top Stories" of the day within the Movable Type CMS editor interface.

This has obvious benefits.
1) You can be blogging about something and then see a breaking news story or just an interesting story you will blog about next. I find just seeing hot stories from around the web and blogosphere within the Movable Type interface helps me keep the creative writing juices flowing.
2) You can drag-and-drop Techmeme links into the Movable Type editor. (see video demonstration below). Now I can quickly drag-and-drop a hyperlink to an important story right into Movable Type.
3) If you want to post Related Articles, you can easily just grab a few Techmeme related stories and drop them into the Movable Type editor.
4) I often get caught up during my day testing products, checking email, meetings, blogging here, phone briefings, etc., which then limits my ability to check out my Google Reader RSS feeds or visit Techmeme.






New CKEditor (FCKEditor) on Movable Type

March 1, 2010

CKEditor (formerly FCKEditor) is one of the best WYSIWYG editors. In fact, some of us within TMC have had an affectionate nickname for the old name due to it sounding very close to something X-rated. Dropping the 'F' (bomb?) might explain why they renamed it to CKEditor.

One of my pet peeves when using our old FCKEditor is that the Paste from Word is useless since it doesn't strip out all the extra crap that Microsoft Word puts into the Clipboard. Well, I tried out the new CKEditor on Movable Type and finally this feature works!

Related Entries with Images & Recent Assets Linked to Entries

January 2, 2009

Movable Type bloggers ♥ related entries template recipes and I've come up with what I think is one of the best ones out here. Further, Movable Type bloggers using version MT 4+ with its built-in Asset Management have also been clamoring for the ability to display not just Recent Assets (images in this case) but Recent Assets hyperlinked to the actual Entry where the image was used. I've come up with such a method, so read on...

By default, Movable Type's Recent Assets widget simply links to the image location and not the context of where the image was used. Of course, an image asset can be used multiple times in multiple blog entries, so my template recipe limits it to the most recent entry.

Facebook Connect for Movable Type plugin

December 5, 2008

Facebook Connect is appearing in more and more websites, including Techcrunch, SFGate, and more, allowing you to use your Facebook credentials to post comments on third-party websites. TechCrunch announced Facebook Connect support for their comments just a few days ago. Yesterday, perhaps in response to Google Friend Connect opening up their service to everyone, Facebook announced just yesterday that their Facebook Connect service was now open to everyone (previously invitation only). Any website can now pull personal data about visitors from Facebook and send back activity reports to their news feeds.

Calling All Bloggers! Free Blogging on TMCnet.com

November 14, 2008

This is a call out to all bloggers out there - Rich Tehrani, my boss has extended an open invitation to bloggers interested in blogging for TMCnet.com, a leading communications/telecom site according to Alexa, Quantcast, and others.

Today, TMC launches its Blog Aid program to help people out of work stay in the public eye - in order to improve their hiring prospects in a tough economy. In the last few months, many good marketers, PR people, engineers and others who have been laid off. These potential Blog Aid bloggers have a good deal of quality commentary and information to share which could be very useful to the TMC community of online readers.

TMC is offering these new bloggers - especially those working in the communications and technology industries, a venue to voice their thoughts on the spaces where they have expertise so as to allow them access to the 2-3 million global visitors who come to TMCnet on a monthly basis.
So if you enjoy writing about communications, telecom, VoIP, wireless, unified communications, mobile, etc.

Enabled Comments from AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox users

June 27, 2008

Movable Type 4.0+ has several plugins that utilize Movable Type's extensible Open ID Login framework to give a customized login experience for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, or Vox users on Movable Type blogs. The logon requirements for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, and Vox all support OpenID which makes this possible.

On any blog entry you'll see the following text near the Comments form:


Sign in to comment using AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox. Or comment anonymously.
Once you click Sign In you'll see this cool new sign-in screen with multiple Open ID providers.


If I click on Yahoo! for instance, you'll see this screen:


Some of these plugins do have further requirements to get it to work.

The Yahoo! plugin requirements:
  • Movable Type 4.2
  • Crypt::SSLeay Perl Module
The AOL/AIM plugn requirements:
  • Movable Type version 4.0 or above.
  • Digest::SHA1 Perl module.











Upgraded to Movable Type 4.2

June 13, 2008

Well, after several weeks of planning, I finally upgraded our blog server to Movable Type 4.2, Six Apart's latest and greatest MT blogging platform. Technically, it's Movable Type 4.2RC1 (release candidate 1) and still considered a beta, but close enough, I say. I was tired of waiting for MT 4.2 to launch. TMC was using MT 3.33 for the longest time and I really wanted many of the MT 4.0+ features including custom fields, asset management, performance improvements, and some better CMS management.

Everything in the upgrade went fairly smoothly.

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