We Eat Bricks :: Web Development Blog

I’m a list junkie and Remember the Milk is where I get the hit…

If you ‘re the same you can download a simple Adobe Air application I put together with the Remember The Milk website inserted in an iframe. Plus a little extra.

Why bother

Doing web development work my browsers and WinXP taskbar can get messy. In a typical setup, I’ll have Firefox running(with several tabs), Internet Explorer 7, possibly 6 too, an IDE EG Aptana Studio or Editplus, probably a few explorer folders and 4 console windows too.

Yes messy I know.

Now you can imagine what that taskbar looks like, and in the midst of this boiling cauldron, in a Firefox tab will lurk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/. It can be a pain to find it.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could keep the http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ seperate from the rest of the Firefox tabs? Perhaps with a distinctive easy to locate icon too.

Ideally I would have http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ running in system tray, not visible in the taskbar and it would disappear back to the system tray when I minimise it, waiting ready to be restored again at short notice…. if only…..

Da Ding!!

Here it is….

BTW the systemtray feature is WinXP only. Perhaps a dock version will appear shortly

Note: This version has not been tested extensively. Use at your own risk. Tested on Movable Type 3.34 and 3.35. Does not work properly with Movable Type 4.

Scenario

I needed to set up 30+ users and blogs in Movable Type. I was faced with the prospect with spending all day doing this manually though the Movable Type interface. I would need to create the blog, then create the user than assign the user to that blog. Clicking and filling in several forms per user/blog. I would then need to repeat this 30 + times.

Instead I wanted to automate the creation of the bunches, batches or a multiple users and blogs in one go through PHP scripts. This is the result.

Conclusion

So if you have a group of user and blogs you would like to create in Movable Type 3.34 or 3.35 you can use this set of script to speed up the process. You can create up to 5 users/blogs per go in the current version of this script.

Backup

This is a mandatory step as the script inserts directly into the Movable Type database.
Back up your MySQL database. See here for instructions.
Back up you Movable Type files in the cgi-bin directory just in case.
Back up your Movable Type blog directories.

Install

Download files
Copy the MTBatchBlog directory to your web server.

Configure

Edit the config.php.

$dbhost = “localhost”;
$dbuser = “enter_your_mt_database_username”;
$dbpassword = “enter_your_database_password”;
$db = “Enter_name_of_your_mt_database”;
$sysadminemail = “enter_your_email_address”;

How to use

Go to http://your_url/MTBatchBlog/index.php
Log in with the username and password you put into the config.php
Next fill out the forms for each user/blog pair. It needs the same info as you would normally input when creating users and blogs through the normal Movable Type interface.

Warning

This set of scripts is provided as is. Use at your own risk. It has worked fine for me though.
I recommend you remove the MTBatchBlog directory from your web server when finished.

Good luck

Any comments, question or suggestions email me
If people would like to see additional features and support for newer versions of Movable Type please email me.

A quick note to those users who use ScribeFire extension (formally know as Performancing for Firefox) and the Firefox browser. There appears to be a problem with the second last update. So if you find ScribeFire running amok. Update the Firefox extension.

That’ll sort it.

If you are running Wordpress on a chrooted Apache you may find that the email notification facility in Wordpress no longer works.

Why is this? Wordpress uses the sendmail binary to send those emails. When Apache is chrooted that sendmail software is not longer visible. Hence it fails.

This becomes a problem when you first install Wordpress because Wordpress fails to email the blog username and password to you. Wordpress is installed but you can’t log in.

In this scenario you will need to to reset the admin password via mysql with this method.

You can then log in and use the blog but unfortunately since the email notification does not work you will not know if comments are left unless you check manually.

Solution

Install the wp-phpmailer plugin for Wordpress to enable Wordpress to send email via SMTP instead fo the sendmail.

Sorted!

A list of the Firefox extensions and plugins I use:

+ ScrapBook: With a click to save webpages and off line browsing later which you can easily browse through a side out panel on Firefox. It also allows you to download the webpages and the linked pages to a user defined depth. Handy.

+ Sage RSS Reader. A panel on the left of you firefox browser. You can drag n drop rss feeds into it. I like the fact This works just fine for me a at the moment though I will try out the Google offering in the near future.

+ del.icio.us: Allows you to add a bookmark to del.icio.us with a mouse click without needing to log into the del.icio.us website. I have gotten much use out of del.icio.us at present though this may change.

That’s pretty much it. The Performancing Firefox plugin does not work, it gives a username, password error unfortunately. Has anyone managed to get Performancing for Firefox working with Movable Type?