Recently in Technical Category

Six Apart has recently release Movable Type Motion, which is actually the next version of MT. Motion is the template set, and it has a lot of nice features. Features that look like Pownce.


What does this mean for the BG Views Community? Some features I already have installed, some I will be installing shortly, but much of the hard work goes *poof* with Motion. Action Streams is built in, Community Action Streams (which really are in MT Pro but not as elegant) and most importantly, Facebook Connect. Google login is also another new addition. So that makes for a really nice update to MT Pro in the near future that can't get here fast enough.

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.

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:

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.

Have you ever heard of Pigskin Podcast? No! Why not. If you are a recent BG News alumni you may know the name Joel Hammond, who is one of the guys who make up the Pigskin Podcast. Below is a link to one of their shows. And I only use it to illustrate a point for BG Views.



One thing that we will be offering is Podcasting support at BG Views, and to do that, we will be using the wonderful Podcasting Plugin from Byrne Reese.

As you can see, it includes a Flash widget on the page to listen to the podcast (or audio clip). What it also does is create a RSS feed that is ready for iTunes, with all the specific iTunes tags. A nice touch of this newer version is flags for language and suppressing the asset entirely from iTunes.

I hope people take advantage of BG Views support for podcasting.

I plan on highlighting the plugins and tweaks I make to MTCS for this site. The first of which is Bookmarks, a simple plugin we have Kevin Shay to thank.

MT4 makes it easy to get to most things, there are often-used pages in the app that take two or three clicks to get to, and when time can be saved with a simple plugin install, there is no reason not to install it.

Every user on the system has their own Bookmarks too. Some might not use it, but I do and I am sure a number of my users will as well. Later I will provide a How-To for our users to use the plugin.

Both User Profiles and Tags have mod_rewrite rules applied to them. This makes URLs much smaller, and much better for search engines.

Two "rules" generally apply. I know that not everyone will use these best practices but as authors and editors, we can do our best to set a good example.

Rule #1: Don't put spaces in your username or tags.
Rule #2: See Rule #1.

Lets take a look at some examples:

My profile URL looks like this:

http://bgviewsblogs.com/cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&id=1

But after...

http://bgviewsblogs.com/profiles/meancode

Normally Tag search results look like this:

http://bgviewsblogs.com/cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-search.cgi?tag=bg-news

But after...

http://bgviewsblogs.com/tag/bg-news

If you use spaces in your username or tags, you get %20 (a URL encoded space) such as this:

http://bgviewsblogs.com/tag/bg%20news

How this is done:
In both cases, User Profiles and Tags, I did not want the results specific to any one Blog ID, so I took &blog_id=2 out of the rewrites. When I update the templates to use the rewritten URLs, I will omit &blog_id=2 as well. For the Tags, I will have a global tags page, so I did not want to constrain the results.

In your .htaccess file, add these lines (Note: there is no line break, it is just displayed on this page as such):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^profiles/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&username=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mtcs/mt-search.cgi?tag=$1 [L]

You could of course constrain any one of those rules to your liking, adding &blog_id=2.

One small issue:
If you notice there is a big difference between the original URL for my profile and the rewritten one (Original, Rewritten). For the rewrite I am using username=$1 and using username= instead of id= causes the custom fields to vanish. This is a known issue and I hope it gets resolved quickly.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.