Helpful Coder

I've been working on a few MT4 sites, and so far I'm less than impressed. For one, their "documentation" is hardly that. It's incomplete, and often times inaccurate. For example, while researching custom fields, the official docs show a screenshot of the custom fields form in the admin control panel that includes fields at aren't even in the actual product . Even better, when I click the "Help" button from within the MT4 control panel, I get a 404 error. Nice! And I constantly have problems with republishing not actually updating files on a static blog - what's up with that? I've even had one installation stop showing entries on the homepage altogether, even with the default main index template being used! The entries are still there on archive pages, but apparently on the main index can't find them for some reason. Sometimes, I really wonder if it's worth messing with all these CMSs - I'm trying to add a very simple feature to ...

Spent most of yesterday on this problem. A client needed a way to add a checkbox to his user registration form to opt in to a mailing list on an MT4-based website. Seems like this is exactly the kind of thing a CMS like MovableType should allow, right? Well, not so much. Or at least not any way that I could find short of actually modifying the base MT code itself. Sure, you can modify the user profile fields (through "custom fields") - but that's what the user edits after creating the account - he wants it as part of the initial account creation process. It really seems like this should be totally and easily doable - I find it hard to believe that no one with an MT4 site has ever wanted to do this before! Perhaps I was just using the wrong google terms or something to find it - so please if anyone has any tips drop a comment or something! Incidentally I find it kind of ironic that I spent more time trying to do something simple in a CMS than it would have taken to just ...

Combine a huge new botnet that's sending 500k pieces of spam a day with the fact that many of the captchas protecting sites like gmail and hotmail from automated spammers - and you get a spam bonanza. Yummy!

Had a problem today with MovableType 3.2 - MTIfNonEmpty kept insisting that a field coming out of the database was empty. I sanity-checked it to death, and that damn string was not empty, but MTIfNonEmpty just wouldn't work. No idea why. So I tried a work around using another comparison tag (sorry it's late, and I don't remember what it was) - basically comparing the tag to an empty string... And this time it decided that even empty strings were not empty... WTF? I ended up fixing it by just having the MT template write out PHP to do the comparison, which of course worked fine. The only thing I could figure was that the fact that field I was doing the comparison on was an "extra field", that somehow screwed it up. Who knows?

This is a system I've been working for for probably a couple years now total. It runs on a fairly busy site, and is meant to prevent comment spam. The comment system itself uses flat files, and is a custom-coded ColdFusion system, built to order. I'm not a huge fan of ColdFusion - it seems like everything I try to do with it is about twice as difficult as it should be - perhaps I'm just too used to PHP and Perl. Anyways, I'm going to give a general overview of the system. I can't post code, because the code belongs to the client. But perhaps the general idea of the system will be enough to be helpful to someone out there. So, when someone leaves a comment, it's immediately visible and an email is sent to the admin, so he knows and can take action if the comment is spam. That worked fine for far longer than you'd expect, but eventually the spammers found it and started bombarding him with crap. So, the first line of defense we added was quite simple - it bloc...