Getting started with multi-post publishing from Radio to Movable Type

These instructions are for Radio programmers and will be refined before publishing for general consumption

5/7/04; 3:50:05 PM The next version, currently in testing, will support categories via the MetaWeblog API.

Cleaned up the save operation and saving everything to the non-upstreamed archived directory.

Added recovery of old posts and "insert new item" at the top of the outline.

1. A "weblog page" is a single outline containing all of your posts for today. Each top-level headline and its children will be converted to one item in MT. The top-level headline is the item's title and the children are the description. More here and here.
2. This tool has been tested against Movable Type (v2.64) but in theory it will work with any tool that supports the metaWeblog or Blogger APIs.
3. Download myWeblogOutliner.root and install as directed in the Dave's instructions.
4. If you're replacing an existing installation of myWeblogOutliner, you may have to create a new windowType for myWeblogOutlinerWindowTypes.weblogPage by inserting a row into user.tools.windowTypes (see also http://radio.userland.com/windowTypes#installingAWindowtype). Check user.tools.windowTypes for the weblogPage type and insert a row for it if it isn't there, using the weblogPost entry as a template.
5. Remove the <rule level="1" to "1"> from user.myWeblogOutliner.prefs.rules
6. In general DO NOT embed rules in your working outline. Put them in user.myWeblogOutliner.prefs.rules.
7. In general, avoid typing in the outline window while your post is being saved. Until we come up with something better, you can check progress by watching the Radio status window to see when tcp.httpClient is done with its network writes. The issue here is that the save script needs to update the live outline with post ids returned from MT, so it contends with you for the outline data. I've coded things to minimize the potential for contention, but the script still leaves its mark by "selecting all" on the current headline once when it starts and once when it ends. If you're typing when this happens, you may accidentally type over the current headline.
8. If you want to share outlines between machines using a single Radio account and upstreaming, set pageWebsharingEnabled to true in the setup menu. Archives will be stored in the myWeblogOutliner subfolder of your www folder. You must have upstreaming enabled in order for this feature to work (you probably do already). When you switch machines during the day, the refresh will happen automatically on a machine that doesn't have today's archive. If today's archive already exists (you went from Machine A to Machine B back to Machine A), you can overwrite today's archive by selecting "Refresh Today's Page From Web" from the Tools -> My Weblog Outliner menu.
9. You'll have to modify Movable Type if you want to be able to publish title-less posts:
   • You will be making two changes to lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm in your Movable Type directory (my version: 2.64)
   • In sub newPost, change

     $entry->title($item->{title} || first_n_words($item->{description}, 5));

     to

     $entry->title($item->{title} || "");

   • In sub editPost, change

     $entry->title($item->{title}) if $item->{title};
     to
         if ($item->{title}) {
             $entry->title($item->{title})
         } else {
             $entry->title("");
         }
     

Thoughts, plans, to dos

• [DONE] Give the ability to open old pages. Rewrite todaysPage() to wrap a nearly identical function that takes three arguments: year, month, day. Add these parameters to the window attributes for later consumption when saving. Menu items will be: New Weblog Page, Old Weblog Page (which solicits date for page)
• [DONE] Give the ability to refresh the local archive from a web share. I thought about writing code to do this automatically but this can get tricky. It might be simpler to have the operator select a "Refresh Weblog Page" option from the menu when they want to edit something originally authored on another machine. (Note: need to watch out for different machines overwriting each others' stuff)
• [DONE] NEED to figure out the Radio shortcut (if one exists) for "new headline at the top of this window". This is because each new post will appear at the top of the MT weblog, so we may as well try to have the outline resemble the MT page. Update this is accomplished by calling op.firstSummit followed by op.insert. If a shortcut for this exists, what is it? If not, we can add it to the tools menu and assign a shortcut to it.
• Sends Weblogs.Com pings if there is at least one call to metaWeblog.newPost() upon saving.
• [DONE] Save everything, local saves and Web refreshes, to the non-upstreamed Archive directory. This will be gentler on the upstreamer and make debugging easier. It will also make it harder to accidentally lose data on systems with Web sharing enabled.
• [DONE] Make the Save operation smoother. Instead of updating the live outline with remotely generated post ids, store only locally generated ids in the live outline, mapping the remote ids via window attributes. This will help to minimize the need for updating the live outline, which we should skip whenever we can. Also, wire up "new post at top" (Ctrl-5) to generate a local id when each new line is added.