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Movable Type CLI

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 03:08 AM

I've been working on a new design of this website. While in the act of this insidious task I've found that the web based template editing for Movable Type (MT) is less than adequate (I'm being extremely nice here). I thought I'd dig around and take a look under the hood at the Perl modules that run MT. It's probably the best documented piece of Perl I have ever seen. Every module is nicely commented complete with a "perldoc" section. Huge thanks to Ben Trott and Six Apart engineers on actually producing some extensible, well documented software! The whole idea behind MT is web based content management system (CMS), so I can see how they would not see enough value in deploying a command line interface. So to meet this deficiency I have written my own, I've started a Google Code Project at: http://code.google.com/p/mt-cli-scripts/. The only caveat is that these scripts in their current state need to run out of your MT installation directory. You will also need to edit each script to set the value of $MT_PATH with the path to your MT installation directory. In a future iteration I will make the scripts read an environment variable. In true open source fashion I'll accept patches.