September 2008 Archives

Thanks to Chase Masters, one of our Graduate Assistants - and a huge help on this project - we now have some snazzy community icons to distinguish the different parts to the community parts of the site. Check them out!

I have been eating my words a lot lately. First I said we were going to use reCaptcha, then decided we would try out the new AntiSpam plugin. At first I said that a Facebook Page for BG Views might be a little overkill, and now I am telling you about our new Facebook Page.

Why? Simply because you can do a lot more with a Facebook Page. You can add Facebook Apps to it, you can add events (thought they finally added that to Group Pages now, too). That and we needed a Facebook something for the new site. So please join our new Facebook Page and keep up to date with the new site!

With the shell complete, it did not take much to get the system templates and the community blog templates finished. The reason this took such a short time is because I had already taken the time to "Globalize" my install of Movable Type Pro.

What does this mean? Moving everything that is not required to be local to the blog becomes a global template:

• All template modules
• All Widgets

This also makes updating things in the future that much easier. Thanks goes to Mark Carey's ConvertToGlobalTemplate plugin, which makes "Globalization" that much easier.

Next is to finish the CSS classes for the body DIV so they match our style guide, and this will be one more item checked off the list.

Richard Benson has created the best Rich Text Editor for MT4. Thanks to the ability to switch out RTE, there have been many released, such as FCK, etc. The benefits are two fold. It outputs clean HTML (wish Six Apart would fix that in the native RTE) and is much easier for users to, you know, use.


The best ability the YUI Editor has is the inclusion of the block level tags, P, H1 to H6. The other great thing about it is the inclusion of many directives to change defaults (in config.js), and it is extensible beyond belief using the YUI Editor framework.

But at the end of the day the real reason the YUI Editor for MT4 works is because it makes posting articles that much faster. That in itself is as important as all the things you can actually do with it.

Things are coming together really well. I need to give a personal thanks to John Nelson for his help in getting our existing design working in MT. With so much to do, in such a small time frame, it is great to have someone to help that is competent in HTML and CSS. So thanks John.

So the shell of the Blog, Community Blog, and Forum templates are done. Now the only thing that needs completed on the CSS side is to make the interiors match that of our Polopoly site design. That should not take much time at all.

You may remember that I recently stated that we would be using ReCaptcha. That is a nice Captcha provider, but if I could avoid force-response all together I would really be happy. No, seriously, very happy.
TypePad AntiSpam (TPAS for the geeks among us) aims to be one better than Akismet in the false-positive department. And if Anil Dash says it will work, well, then it will work, right?

I am willing to give it a shot. Anon comments are still going to be moderated, but if this plugin, now built into MT 4.2 (for free) could become better than what Akismet has accomplished.

What? I can dream, can't I? So this means no force-response for our blogs and community blogs. I like the sound of that.

While our site in CP5 will be using AddThis, I much prefer ShareThis, so will be using ShareThis for our social bookmarking/sharing. Mainly because I like the "Email This" form of ShareThis a lot more. That form in AddThis is so tiny. Anyways if you have never seen ShareThis, it looks like, well, this:

We now have \40 people in our LinkedIn group. Not bad at all. I thought I would point out that LinkedIn Groups are starting to play catch up with Facebook. They just recently added Discussions and Updates tabs. I wonder if anyone will use them. I will start a discussion to see how it looks.

Anyways, if you are a BG News alum on LinkedIn, click the image to visit our LinkedIn Group!

Spam comments is a big problem for blogs. It is an even bigger problem for blogs and sites written using Word Press or Movable Type.

There are a few options for this issue in MT. You can use Akismet, that is a great tool to use. As much as I hate force-response systems, I find reCaptcha to be the easiest one to read.

It is funny, and ironic, but most Captcha systems are brutally difficult to read. The thing I do not care for with Akismet is that is sometimes classifies painfully obvious good comments as spam. I don't want our users to have to deal with that. So we will be using reCaptcha in all of our community sites. If you are unfamiliar with reCaptcha, take a look:

MTCS has changed quite a bit since I last worked with it. Oddly enough, my one and only post on the subject stirred up the MT-hating Internets. Well I have news for them: pretty much all my complaints have been addressed. MTCS is now MT Pro. For one, it is a heck of a lot cheaper for the 5 user/5000 profile license (as in, 1/3rd the coin) and is a much more robust toolset.

For starters, MTCS did not seem to grow on the same branch (sorry, programming joke). It lacked many, many nice additions MT 4.1 had. The latest and greatest version of MTCS I had installed actually was from the MT 4.02a code base, Even though it said MT 4.1 CP 1.5, PP 1.1.

Now we have feature parity, thank god.

While MTCS did hit a good update to be in line with MT 4.1, I had abandon it. Not because it was unusable, but because the project was (I thought) moving in a different direction.

But here we are, first week of September, and I am back working in MTCS, now MT Pro, sporting a much updated Community Pack 1.6. Why am I back here? Well, that's an easy one. Our partner College Publisher/mtvU told us in March that they would be able to handle all the community features inside their brand new CP5 platform. No, actually, they cannot. I found that out about a week ago when I asked where the community features were in the Polopoly interface.

Therefore, MT Pro is going to handle our Community Blogs and Forums, and MTOS is going to handle our individual blogs. Which is what I started working on six months ago.

Not exactly pleased about the fact that I could have had three more months to have worked on this project.