I've been thinking about blogging more than I've been doing it. My thoughts have lead me to find more ways to equip our little group to blog more effectively.
There are some new features that have been in testing on my blog and on a resident beta tester's. Between the two of us, we've gotten most of the things working efficiently.
There are basically five new plugins available.
The first is a spam blocking system. You'll notice an extra line about that when you receive a comment notification. Just follow the instructions in the e-mail and you'll be good to go.
The second is called MTMacro. Just like macros in other applications, this little set of template tags lets you define reusable bits of code that will run on your entries. For example, on my blog I've been posting about books and plays I've read and movies I've watched. The entries look like nice little cover images with the title and current Amazon price underneath. In reality, there's really only one small bit of markup that looks like this:
<book_info asin="#####">Book Title</book_info>
Any time I put that markup in an entry it is replaced by a the book's information from Amazon. Finding and replacing the markup is done by MTMacro. The actual generation of the content is done by the next new feature here.
NOTE: You have to have this macro set up in a Template Module. If you want the code for this, please let me know. I'll likely post it on my blog after the first request (if not before).
The second to last feature is similar to MTAmazon, but with fewer features. It's called, MTWair (Wair = What am I reading). If you search for MTWair on Google you'll find that Jbo (our beta testor) has gotten it working on his blog and also has example code.
The last, but certainly not least: MTList. This plugin works great with the MTWair plugin. Rather than creating a seperate MTWair tag group for every book you've read, you can create an MTList, wrap one MTWair tag group with an MTListLoop tag, and output a seperate MTWair book for each loop. I'll post example code for this one soon, Lord willing.
So, that's the skinny on the new features here at Ben's Friends. Sorry, there aren't more code samples. If I had been keeping up with blogging as well as adding features, there wouldn't be this wonderful backlog of blogs needing to be written. Oh well, still learning discipline.
Enjoy the toys. :)
Posted by TheIdeaMan at September 5, 2004 08:22 PM | TrackBack