Movalog Blog

I finally got my copy of Hacking Movable Type and finished reading it last night. Written by the biggest names in the Movable Type community, the 300 pages of Movable Type goodness guide you through getting the most out of Movable Type and really pushing what it can do with detailed tutorials to setup photo and moblogs and event calendars.

It walks you through using all the APIs available in MT including XMLRPC, Atom, Perl and PHP and provides detailed examples that are very easy to understand. One of the best parts of the book, I feel, is the plugin walkthrough which is a far better guide than the current plugin docs. It literally holds your hand showing you what is possible and if I had this book whilst writing my first plugins, I would've saved hours of trial and improvement! I've even discovered some new things from the masters and will be implementing those into my plugins!

Yours truly is mentioned once with a link to Movalog's Breaking Plugins entry (just for the record, the only plugin on that page I wrote was the Markdown with Smartypants, Textile was written by Brad Choate and PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants by Michel Fortin, I simply packaged them up to be used with MT out of the box)

There are a couple of mistakes in the book and a few broken links pointing to the old permalink style of mt-plugins.org. This book was written from 3.0D to around 3.15 (the latest version I found mentioned) so it doesn't account for any of the newer plugins or the new plugin architechture with 3.2. For example it talks in great detail about MT Blacklist, which at that time was the best spam fighting plugin available for the platform, however since then I would say (and Jay agrees) that SpamLookup is better. Also a 10 page chapter describes setting up Blogrolls which could be simplified to a link to MT Blogroll!

None-the-less, this is a must buy for those that are budding plugin developers or really want to push Movable Type to its limits. Go grab your copy if you haven't already.