I spent enough time on this earlier today that I figured an entry was due.
Most of the support forums were a disappointment, too, so let this serve as a reference
for desperate souls like me who are hunting around for clues about how to
integrate the Movable Type Custom Fields plugin in their weblogs. What
follows will probably only be of interest to MT users. It’s not entirely
self-serving, though. I think we’ll soon be using custom entries for
CCC Online, and I wasn’t having any luck getting it to work here until now.
The first problem I encountered was that the plugin was old. I had
MTCustomFields 1.12 on the system rather than the updated v. 1.2. It’s a
fast upgrade; takes just a minute or two to get everything in place.
Here’s what I wanted to do: Basically, I wanted another field on the
input screen that would allow me to designate Technorati tags for selected
entries. I am already using the Keywords field for del.icio.us tagging.
But I don’t want anything to show up with entries where I’m not using any tags
at all. To accomplish this, I have to have the following plugins in my MT
installation:
MTLoop, MTGlue,
and MTCustomFields.
And I’m running MT 3.2.
With these plugins, I concocted a sequence of tags that would link directly
to my del.icio.us account. With the following code, I can enter a string
of tags in the Keywords field, separated by spaces, and get a list of links to
the corresponding tags in del.icio.us. The catch is that after posting the
entry, I have to post the page to del.icio.us and copy/paste the same tags into
the keywords field in del.icio.us. That way the links on my weblog match
up with the tags in del.icio.us. Here’s an
example.
We’re using the same system for
CCC
Online. And here is the code from the index template that makes all of this
happen. If you want the tags to show up in other templates (individual,
monthly, category, etc.), just copy/paste this code there as well:
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryKeywords">Tags: <MTGlueContainer><MTLoop values="[MTEntryKeywords]"
delimiter=" ">
<a href="http://del.icio.us/dmueller/<$MTLoopValue$>"><$MTLoopValue$></a><MTGlue>,
</MTGlue></MTLoop></MTGlueContainer><br></MTIfNonEmpty>
The MTIfNonEmpty enclosure tells MT to ignore everything here if I haven’t
entered any tags in the Keyword field. No permanent elements will show up
the individual entry. Everything depends upon there being tags. No tags,
no mess.
But I was after something else. The del.icio.us tagging is a good fit
for the way I use it, particularly when marking notes that I want to integrate
with the other tagged items I drop into del.icio.us. How could I add a
second layer of tags, a layer that would tie directly into Technorati? For
this, I needed another entry field. So I installed MTCustomFields.
Everything was fine. The expanded interface is intuitive. I was able
to add "Technorati" as an extra field. Still, I couldn’t find many
examples of the code to use in the index template. There were several
examples of wonky, dysfunctional code. I was only able to learn the basic
code for the enclosure and the field specification. It looks like this:
<MTEntryData>
<MTEntryDataTechnorati>
</MTEntryData>
It was a start. But I still wanted to integrate it into the scheme I
was using for del.icio.us which allows me to enter a string of tags and lets the
MT engine do the rest. I’m not a die-hard Technorati tagger, but it would
be nice to have the flexibility of simply keying in a tag or two (teaching-carnival
or Academy2.0) for certain
entries. For others entries, it’s fine that they publish untagged (or
untagged by anything beyond my only semidescript category labels). By
whisking together the two chunks of code from above, I was able to get something
to work:
<MTEntryData><MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryDataTechnorati">Technorati
tags: <MTGlueContainer><MTLoop values="[MTEntryDataTechnorati]"
delimiter=" "><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/<$MTLoopValue$>" rel="tag"><$MTLoopValue$></a><MTGlue>,
</MTGlue></MTLoop></MTGlueContainer></MTIfNonEmpty></MTEntryData>
Note that "Technorati" matches with the name I used when I set up the extra
field using MTCustomField. What’s peculiar is that the first tag reference
doesn’t use "MT" whereas the second tag reference does. But it works (and
with a bricoleur-shrug, I don’t mind why right now). If I enter a
list of tags in the Technorati field, they turn up at the bottom of the entry
with live links. The entry interface looks like this:
Useful to someone else, maybe.