beta BLOG dot NET - recently in MT hacks category

beta BLOG dot NET - recently in MT hacks category tag:beta-blog.net,2009-08-27://1 2010-02-17T22:47:15Z Movable Type 4.25 getting rid of MT's permalink file extensions tag:beta-blog.net,2010://1.52387 2010-02-14T00:07:42Z 2010-02-17T22:47:15Z

While designing scalable and portable web projects, it's always a good idea to design hyperlinks independently of the physical file path from where the respective request should be served then.

admin1 While designing scalable and portable web projects, it's always a good idea to design hyperlinks independently of the physical file path from where the respective request should be served then. For instance, I usually have permalinks looking like this one:

http://beta-blog.net/2010/02/getting-rid-of-mts-permalink-file-extensions

Thus I can decide later on whether I prefer to serve pages as html, shtml, php, or whatsoever - without losing the permanentness of my permalink Now, while I have choosen static publishing with HTML extension, MT creates a file such as

/var/www/beta-blog.net/2010/02/getting-rid-of-mts-permalink-file-extensions.html

so I can tell Apache how it should map my permalink to the physical file path using mod_rewrite:

# DocumentRoot /var/www/beta-blog.net
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+[^\/])$ $1.html [L]

That is, any request path not containing a dot and not ending with a trailing slash will be rewritten to the according HTML file. (Yes, that way I won't be able to serve permalinks containing dots, but I can live with that ;)

Now that's nice, but unfortunately, within MT you are not able to configure the looks of permalinks inedpendently from the file path. Nobody wants to remove the extension from the actual file, since the same directory might contain some .js, .jpg and other files mapped to their own content types as well. (And I have no idea how to set up an AddHandler directive exclusively respecting files without extension.) Therefore, the solution is to let MT add the configured extension to the actual file, but remove the extension from the permalink.

A blessing in disguise, one has to hack MT's source code itself, but it's a quite simple change to the archive_url method within MT's Entry module. Thus, applying the following patch to lib/MT/Entry.pm will remove .php/.html extensions from archive links:

--- MTOS-5.01-en.orig/lib/MT/Entry.pm   2010-02-14 01:17:24.000000000 +0100
+++ MTOS-5.01-en/lib/MT/Entry.pm        2010-02-14 01:58:58.000000000 +0100
@@ -541,7 +541,11 @@
     my $blog = $entry->blog() || return;
     my $url = $blog->archive_url || "";
     $url .= '/' unless $url =~ m!/$!;
-    $url . $entry->archive_file(@_);
+    #$url . $entry->archive_file(@_);
+    ## --> HACK: remove .php/.html extensions <-- ##
+    my $f = $entry->archive_file(@_);
+    $f =~ s/\.(php|html)$//;
+    $url . $f;
 }

 sub permalink {

Well, thats really a dirty hack and things will get more complicated with dynamic publishing. So, hopefully one day MT's developers will implement a cleaner solution and make it configurable through the webinterface. *hack*

]]> AutoSmileys:-) Plugin for Movable Type tag:beta-blog.net,2009://1.52385 2009-12-06T16:13:41Z 2009-12-15T21:00:07Z

Freely configurable automatic raplacement of textual emoticons by image tags. AutoSmileys is an easy to use and highly customizable macro environment for Movable Type. It will replace self-defined text abbreviations by image tags when your site is published or dynamically rendered, respectively. It may be applied either within entries, comments, pages, or any other part of your site.

Sebastian http://beta-blog.net Freely configurable automatic raplacement of textual emoticons by image tags.

Description

AutoSmileys is an easy to use and highly customizable macro environment for Movable Type. It will replace self-defined text abbreviations by image tags when your site is published or dynamically rendered, respectively. It may be applied either within entries, comments, pages, or any other part of your site.

AutoSmileys works with both static and dynamic publishing and has been tested with MT 4.2, MT 4.3, and MT 5.0 beta (Perl 5.8.8 / PHP 5.2.9). (Dynamic publishing with AutoSmileys requires PHP5 in either case.)

Download

http://source.beta-blog.net/autosmileys/0.9/AutoSmileys-0.9.zip

Installation

Download AutoSmileys-0.9.zip, unzip it and copy the AutoSmileys directory from the zip file into the plugins directory of your Movable Type installation.
Sign in to your Movable Type CMS.
For each blog you wish to use AutoSmileys in, select Design > Templates from the menu and open the desired template for editing.
Within each of these templates, enclose the desired parts with the <mt:AutoSmileys> ... </mt:AutoSmileys> block tag.
Republish your site.

So for instance, if you wish to have AutoSmileys replacement on your entry main body, edit the Entry template as follows:

Anyway you may also put the whole HTML body inside the AutoSmileys tag. This would also apply AutoSmileys to comments, since the Comments module template is included into the Entry template.

For general installation instructions concerning Movable Type, see http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/installation/.

Configuration

Once you have installed AutoSmileys, sign in to your Movable Type CMS and open the Tools > Plugins page. Whithin the AutoSmileys 0.9 panel, expand the Settings tab. By default, it will look as follows:

On the top of the form you may define HTML tag names whose content will be ignored in order to avoid inappropriate image tag placement. The list beneath consists of text abbreviations (tokens) and associated image source URLs.

Default smileys are taken from freesmileys.org. *thx*

You may change these entries as you like and you may also expand or shorten the list by clicking on the [+] and [-] links on the right hand side (JavaScript required).

The list may be expanded with up to 40 rows by default. You may increase the related parameter maxRows by editing AutoSmileys.pl. *hack*

Remarks

Remember that MT tags are applied after any text filter you may have set up for entries or comments. Hence, text filters such as Textile and Markdown would replace stuff like *lol* before AutoSmileys has a chance to see it.

Also, note that tokens are recognized only in the way you have defined them after standard HTML entity replacement has been applied. That is, :-) will be displayed as :-) but not replaced.

How it works

The heart of AutoSmileys is a regular expression, dynamically created from the mappings of tokens to URLs defined as above. Once having these mappings collected within a Perl hash called %mappings, it's built as follows:

my $re_pattern = join '|',
  q/<(!)--(?:.|\n)*?-->/,          # markup comments
  q/<([^\s>]+)[^>]*?(\/)?\s*>/,    # markup tags
  map(quotemeta, keys %mappings);  # smileys

On a reasonably valid markup code this will replace any tokens outside markup tags, especially ignoring the content of specified tags inapplicable for containing image tags. Then,

s/($re_pattern)/&re_callback($1,$2,$3,$4)/eg;

does the job, using the following callback function:

my $expect;
sub re_callback
{
  my ($match, $comment, $tagname, $selfclosed) = @_;
  return $match if $comment || $selfclosed;
  if ( defined $tagname ) # non-self-closing markup tag
  {
    $tagname = lc $tagname; # ignore case
    if ( defined $expect )  # within ignorance state
    {
      undef $expect if $tagname eq $expect; # end ignorance state
      return $match;
    }
    $expect = qq</$tagname>
      if exists $ignoretags{$tagname}; # begin ignorance state
    return $match;
  }
  return $match if defined $expect || !(exists $mappings{$match});
  &{$Defaults->{image_tag}}($mappings{$match}, $match);
}

Here, $Defaults->{image_tag} is the actual image tag function. That's it 8-).

]]> shorten by regex tag:beta-blog.net,2009://1.52378 2009-10-15T20:35:50Z 2009-11-29T10:39:33Z

While customizing my mt blog, I was wondering how to abbreviate long entry titles on particular places in a nice way. Well, mt provides template tag modifiers such as trim-to, but my aim was to do it more nicely, i.e. replacing anything behind the first three (or any other maximum) words by an ellipsis.

admin1 While customizing my mt blog, I was wondering how to abbreviate long entry titles on particular places in a nice way. Well, mt provides template tag modifiers such as trim-to, but my aim was to do it more nicely, i.e. replacing anything behind the first three (or any other maximum) words by an ellipsis. For instance,

"more than three words"

should be shortened to

"more than three ..."

while a three-word-sentence should remain as it is.

The solution is a simple regex, of course. In Perl style,

s/ˆ(\S+(?:\s+\S+){2})(\s+\S+)+/$1 .../

does the job, because it doesn't match on three words or less. Equivalently, within mt template tags:

<$mt:EntryTitle regex_replace="/ˆ(\S+(?:\s+\S+){2})(\s+\S+)+/","$1&ensp;&hellip;"$>

]]> utilizing mt context column values tag:mt.beta-blog.net,2009://1.52375 2009-08-29T15:56:01Z 2009-11-29T10:41:27Z

Within a Movable Type plugin routine you may access current context column values through the context stash.

Sebastian http://beta-blog.net http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/developer/the-template-context.html for a rudimental introduction to the concept of template context.

sub handler {
  my ($ctx, $args, $cond) = @_;

  if ( my $entry_stash = $ctx->stash('entry') )
  {
    # access the accordant mt_entry row, where keys are
    # column names w/o prefix, i.e. id, bog_id, etc.
    my $entry = $entry_stash->{column_values};

    if ( my $comment_stash = $ctx->stash('comment') )
    {
      my $comment = $comment_stash->{column_values};
      # mt_comment column values
    }

    # more stash blocks ...
  }

}

For instance, consider a custom entry template tag usage like this:

<mt:MyTemplateTag caption="<$mt:EntryTitle$> authored by <$mt:EntryAuthor$>">

This won't work as expected, since MT doesn't substitite template tags within template tag attributes. So, using context stash, you can insert a simple template tag substitution into plugin code.

sub MyTemplateTag {
  my ($ctx, $args, $cond) = @_;

  # some template tag attribute
  my $caption = $args->{caption};

  # check for column groups within context stash
  my %columns = map {
    my $s = $ctx->stash($_);
    $_ => (ref $s ? $s->{column_values} : undef);
  } qw(entry comment ping);

  # substitute <$mt:FooBarName$> with the column
  # value of bar_name in table mt_foo
  local *subst = sub {
    my ($match, $name) = @_;
    foreach ( keys %columns )
    {
      # map FooBarName to column bar_name in mt_foo
      $name =~ /^$_(\w+)/i or next;
      my $key = $1;
      $key =~ s/([a-z])([A-Z])/qq($1_\l$2)/eg;
      $key = lc $key;
      return $columns{$_}{$key}
        if exists $columns{$_}{$key};
    }
    $match; # not recognized
  };
  $caption =~ s/(<\$mt:(\w+)\s*\$>)/&subst($1,$2)/egi;

  # now do something interesting with $caption ...
}

of course, only template tags without modifiers are recognized. ]]>