Helpful Coder

This is an object lesson in the importance of the sanity check. I was working on reskinning a MT blog, working on the CSS files when suddenly the posts dissapeared! Well, post actually - it had just been set up, so there was just a single test entry in the system, sitting on the homepage. Mystified, I undid my changes. Still no entries. I returned everything back to its original state - still no entries. I looked closely at the code to display the code, everything looked fine. I checked on the admin side, and the entry was still there and hadn't been changed at all. I even tried using some demo entry display code from the MT site - nada. Mystified, I told the client that something weird must have happened, although I had no idea what. That's always I fun thing to tell a client! I couldn't see how it could have been something I'd changed, since all I'd touched was css code... I asked him to have the IT people restore the blog to it's original state. Of course, a...

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?