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August 22, 2005

Hacking Movable Type

Hacking Movable Type is a book I contributed a couple chapters to that has just been released. If you've been using MT for a while and wonder how you could tweak it out just a bit more, or completely write your own MT plugins from scratch, this is the book for you. Chris over at Wiley was behind the idea from the start, figuring that every weblog book to date has been an introductory manual that often rehashes the basic blog tool documentation or merely introduces the topic of weblogs.

With Hacking Movable Type we set out to write up all the possibilities within the MT universe that no one has ever written about. The entire database scheme is explained in detail, the plugin API is exhaustively covered, but my favorite part is the last 1/3 of the book that features all sorts of ways to tweak MT and build things with MT that few have ever done before (stuff like using it as a calendar app, creating a multi-author blog similar to metafilter, etc).

The biggest chunk of my contribution was writing up how to use MTEmbedImage. I go step-by-step on how I produced my Ten Years of My Life visual archives, which could easily be reproduced with the code in the book coupled with basic MT calendar tags.

Brad, David, Ben, and Jay did an amazing job on the book, and it would never have seen the light of day without them.

Posted at August 22, 2005 03:19 PM