Helpful Coder

I recently started working on reanimating an ancient site I had just sitting around as a backup. It was built on a very old version of Joomla, and while some of the content is still relevant - much of it is not... So, rather than trying to figure out how to import all this content into some more modern CMS and then delete the old stuff, I decided to use this as an opportunity to play around with Pico - a PHP-based flat-file CMS. The idea is that you can easily create content by just creating markdown files in the 'content' directory, and they magically show up on the site. Organization is as simple as subdirectories inside content. Themes are just twig template files. I'm not a huge fan of twig (remember, PHP was originally a templating language... so why do we need something else for templates?) but I'll give it another try - I haven't used twig in at least six years, so maybe it's better. So far things have been going pretty smoothly - I can just copy...

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 ...

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?