Announcing MT blogroll generator

Indigo Jo — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:58:03 +0000

As someone who’s been using Movable Type since 2005, I found that the biggest loss when upgrading to version 4 of that software was the lack of a blogroll manager, which had been available as a plug-in for version 3. This facility is standard on WordPress and Textpattern (and probably many other content management systems) and there is a plug-in called Web Links which provides the same functionality for Drupal. The developer of MT-Blogroll produced something called Link Roller, but it was inadequate for my needs as it did not support categories, using tags instead. Since upgrading to MT4, I have been using a static version of what MT Blogroll generated, although I had to change it significantly when changing my theme recently.

Well, I’ve produced a blogroll generator for Movable Type 4, which might even work with previous versions. Rather than a plug-in, it’s a script which you can include as a widget or module, and can load by including it in any template. It then loads a blogroll file, which must be coded in XML. The plan is to develop a client which will produce these files, so unless you fancy hard-coding a blogroll in XML, this announcement is chiefly aimed at any developers who might be reading.

The PHP code can be downloaded from this address, while an example blogroll, demonstrating the format, can be found here. I intend to post more detailed instructions within a few days.

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Announcing MT blogroll generator