MT Protect 1.1

Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now more or less completely dynamic. In the process I had to port several plugins to the PHP side including CodeBeautifier and Dashify. In the coming days (I have more improvements planner for Protection and some for InlineEditor which I shall release first) I shall release those too!

19 Comments

Jenna said:
on May 23, 2005 9:12 PM | Reply

Wow!!

You are my hero. I'm installing now. I'll let you know how it goes. :)

badly dubbed boy said:
on May 23, 2005 10:19 PM | Reply

Damn... I contributed but I can't get my blog to use MySQL.

Any chance you can do a version using Berkeley DB ? :)

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on May 23, 2005 10:29 PM | Reply

I'm terribly sorry that you've contributed and unable to use this plugin, however at this moment I don't think I'll be creating a version that would be compatible with BDB. I'm relying on MT's dynamic database code to query the database, at the moment this is only available to MySQL and eventually will open up for the other SQL databases.

Sorry!

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on May 23, 2005 10:33 PM | Reply

To expand on that, even if I wasn't using MT's dynamic db support, to have PHP query a Berkeley DB, you would need to have BDB linked into PHP, and this can be done in several versions according to Brad.

I would advise you switch to an SQL system, preferably MySQL, it is more stable and I noticed MT ran faster when I switched.

Jenna said:
on May 24, 2005 4:27 AM | Reply

Hi Arvind!

It seems that the plugin is unsuccessfully calling four files (AuthTypekey.txt, typekeylib.txt, typekeylibdynamic.txt, mt-pass.txt) directly from your server. I tried to put the URL into the browser and was given a "File not found" error. I'd love to donate to your project, but I want to make sure it works first since I had a problem with the original hack.

Jenna said:
on May 24, 2005 4:28 AM | Reply

Also, the Typekey sign in on your archive pages doesn't seem to be working for me.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on May 24, 2005 7:01 AM | Reply

That problem with the files should be fixed. What's the problem with Typekey you are experiencing, all your comments so far are Typekey Auth'd

Jenna said:
on May 24, 2005 6:11 PM | Reply

When I click on "sign in", I go to the Typekey website where I log in. Then I get redirected back to Movalog, but it doesn't show me as signed me in. I still have to enter my name and email address to post a comment and the green box that says that I can sign in is still there.

Joach said:
on May 24, 2005 7:31 PM | Reply

When I go to "Plugin actions: List Protected Entries, Version 3.16" to have a look at my protected entries I'm getting an alert:

Can't call method "id" without a package or object reference at lib/Protect/CMS.pm line 471.

Thanks for advice and for the great plugin.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on May 24, 2005 7:41 PM | Reply

Hi Joach,

I would try re-uploading CMS.pm because my line 471 reads like this

foreach my $e (@data) {

No mention of "id"

badly dubbed boy said:
on May 26, 2005 2:50 AM | Reply

Alas, upgrading to MySQL isn't as easy as it would seem. Especially when I don't have TELNET access to my server.

My friend/sys-admin tried to create a MySQL database for me but it just didn't work out...

jerm said:
on May 27, 2005 10:39 AM | Reply

I don’t know if this plug-in or another plug-in but I am noticing hundreds of Plug-in error messages in my activity log.

Plugin error: /home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/Protect/Protect.pl Can't locate Protect/CMS.pm in @INC (@INC contains: plugins/Protect/lib ./plugins/Blogroll/lib plugins/Blacklist/lib ./plugins/Blacklist/lib ./lib /home/username/public_html/cgi-

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on May 27, 2005 10:41 AM | Reply

I've written Six Apart about this problem and have yet to hear from them. The easiest fix is to replace the use lib line in Protect.pl with the following

use lib '/full/path/to/plugins/Protect/lib';

Tami said:
on Jun 9, 2005 9:28 AM | Reply

I really like the idea of this plugin, but I'm still unclear about a few things. Does my MT weblog have to be all PHP and use MySQL in order to use this plugin?

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Jun 9, 2005 9:37 AM | Reply

Your MovableType installation must use MySQL while any pages that display entries must be PHP (or dynamically published)

Tami said:
on Jun 9, 2005 9:46 AM | Reply

Nevermind, I found my answer:

29a8040db3ed792db274a8203c32126a
  • MovableType? 3.1 or greater
  • MySQL as MT's database
  • Static PHP Templates (i.e. templates that require to be rebuilt with file extensions .php)

I'm not sure how I managed to miss this earlier, but nevertheless, there it is.

I'm good on the MySQL part, but I still use static pages (html/shtml). I've been thinking about switching to PHP a long time, but dreading the idea of really taking it on. Do you know of any good articles about switching from html pages to PHP pages? I've installed PHP scripts for use on my website before (I can follow directions), but at this point, that's about as good as my knowledge of PHP gets. Do you think any donations could persuade you to make a static page version of this plugin?

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Jun 9, 2005 9:50 AM | Reply

Have a look at Learning Movable Type: Converting to PHP. Unfortunately I can't think of any way to get this to work with non-PHP publishing unless I was to use javascript.

Tami said:
on Jun 9, 2005 11:21 AM | Reply

Thanks for the link to the "Converting to PHP" article! The switch sounds a lot easier than I thought it would be. The article does a great job with the directions. You know I love those detailed directions. The article even provides a link to information on using includes, which is something that I was concerned about, because I use SSI right now. So, I've decided to make the switch. I'm so happy I'm going to make an MT Protect donation right now. Hopefully that will give you a little incentive to keep working on good things like this. I'm thinking I'll also make another donation after I get things up and running to show my appreciation. Thanks again!

elise said:
on Jun 23, 2005 9:56 PM | Reply

Thank goodness for Sarah Hughes (author of the converting to PHP article).

On a separate note, as much as I LOVE MT-Protect, it is still pretty funky in Safari. I have to empty my cache everytime I go from the main index page to the full entry on the indiv archive.