Recently in hacks Category
The Custom Header Plugin for Movable Type makes it easy for users to upload and customize the header for their blog. It uses javascript and Ajax to make the customization process as seamless, intuitive and painless as possible. No knowledge of HTML or CSS is required, but the theme you are using must explicitly support this pluginFurther information and download on his site
SelectiveCloner bridges a gap left by the "Cloner" plugin that ships with MT, as SelectiveCloner allows you to make a carbon copy of a blog's settings, templates and permissions WITHOUT content. If you want to rollout multiple blogs with the same look and feel Carey's latest release should save you quite a bit of time.
More information on his site.
The convergence of the two media (mediums?) was becoming more and more apparent as software developers leveraged technologies in blogs to use in forums and other social media software and vice versa.
Connecting a blog site (CMS) with a forum isn't a particularly novel idea.
In many cases it's simply a matter of hacking the user data together to form a "bridge" of some kind so that a "user" or "login" can work in both places. However integrating the two tightly is not something you see every day and definitely not something you'd expect from an "off the shelf" solution.
The advent of Movable Type 4 has meant that innovative and creative developers have been able to get "down and dirty" and come up with some truly elegant hacks and extensions to the core software.
Mark Carey, who I've mentioned here more than once in the past, has just released his MT Forum plugin.
You don't need to be a genius to guess what it does. However what makes his implementation so interesting is the level of integration. It's not simply a matter of hooking a vBulletin install up with a Movable Type system - the forum is actually part of Movable Type once the plugin is live.
Now that is cool!
You can read more about the plugin on his site and take it for a test drive
Thanks to some help on the SixApart mailing lists the solution is quite easy !
Edit mt.js from within your MT install and comment out the line that includes the following:
hideDocumentElement('comments-form' );
It should be somewhere around line 129.
As it's Javascript the syntax would be to use double forward slashes on each line (//).
Once you've made the change simply republish or wait for your republish to run ( you did setup a cronjob, didn't you?) and you should now see the comment form !
Thanks to Anu for the tip!
Whether you want to make a minor change to your site's mappings or have moved a well indexed site from another platform to MT, you will run into niggly issues with 404s at some point.
While it's relatively easy to catch some of them ie. the most popular pages on your site for example, it's painful trying to work out exactly what everyone is trying to see. It doesn't matter which software you use to parse your server logs - you'll still end up with a lot of unusable data that will take hours to plough through.
Enter Clean Sweep.
Clean Sweep's sole purpose in life is to catch 404s. Not only does it log them in an easy to read format, including how many hits there are and when the last one was, but it also offers you a lot of control over the 404s themselves.
In order to use CleanSweep you will need to have some level of access to your Apache config OR you might be able to get it to work via .htaccess. I haven't tried via .htaccess, so I cannot confirm if that method will work or not.
First off you will need to get your hands on the code. As the plugin is still "in development" the only way you'll be able to access it is using SVN, which is a very popular version control system. Don't let the term "version control" scare you. I wouldn't know where to begin with SVN, but I do know how to "check out" (ie. download) code from an SVN repository. I'm sure you will be able to work that much out too!
Once you have the code install the plugin as normal.
When you login to MT again you will be presented with an upgrade screen, as the plugin needs to create a new database table to store its data.
As the plugin description goes:
- Clean Sweep is a plugin that helps administrators manage broken links on their blog, automatically correct the error if possible and then generate mod_rewrite rules to help correct the problem permanently.*
To do that you need to add a small bit of code to your Apache config to use CleanSweep to handle all the 404s from the plugins config screen.
You can also set a custom page to act as your 404 error page, maybe adding some text for human visitors telling them that the page has moved etc.,
Once you have everything configured wait a couple of hours (or less depending on how busy your site is) and then visit the new 404s page from the "Manage" dropdown menu.
You'll see a simple page with the 404s, the number of requests for each one, time of the last request and two options: "map" and "reset"
The "map" option is the one we are most interested in, as this allows to handle the redirection of both human and computer visitors
Find the new location of the entry or page in your site and then open up the "map" screen. You will be able to set the new location for each page that is causing a 404.
Once you are finished setting up your mappings for each 404 error click the "Generate Rewrite Rules" link and you will be given a nice little set of rewrite rules that you can add to your Apache config OR .htaccess file.
The plugin is really handy. I've been using it since early this morning and so far it's redirected several hundred visitors that I would have lost otherwise.
Of course it will also make you aware of some of the junk that is trying to get in to your site, as you will see lots of dodgy requests for pages that you really don't want people to access!
