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April 07, 2004
Doing the Obvious
One of my ongoing projects at work has been allowing the HTML-impaired to update web content. Thus all the blather about lightweight/personal content systems.
I’ve already shimmed one MovableType “blog” into a quarterly newsletter where the TOC for a given issue is the Monthly Archive Index, the individual stories are the Individual Entry Archive pages (ordered by manually adjusting the authored-on date), and the Main Index is just an HTML redirect to the most recent Monthly Archive Index.
Right now, I’m getting ready to allow our Public Information guy to post news releases and stories - both internal and external - to our home page. The challenge has been the mixing of internal and external content. On the home page, we simply want a list of titles - and selecting the title should take you to the apropo content. That’s fine for internal content, we just enter the story into MT and it generates the pages - it’s easy for MT to generate that list. But what about external content - where we want the title selection to take the user to some external site? MovableType most always just wants to link to its own stories.
Thanks to a pointer from Caius, I found Brad Choate’s plugin for MovableType: IfEmpty. Simple, really - IfEmpty allows you, within an MT template, to test if a field is (or is not) empty, and tailor the output based on that. That was the piece I needed.
So now, when an entry is simply a link to outside content, my content person leaves the EntryBody blank and puts the URL in the Extended portion of the entry. The code knows that, if the body is blank but the extended portion isn’t, it should use that extended portion as the link URL when generating a list of entries. Voila.
I’m pleased. It’s simple and reasonably elegant, the user doesn’t have to jump through hoops. If you don’t spend time geeking on thing like MT, then you’re probably saying “What’s the big deal?”. Exactly. It shouldn’t be a big deal - and I’m pleased that it’s been solved in a way that isn’t a big deal.
Posted by jim at April 7, 2004 10:57 AM