Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

MTSETUP Alpha Testing

New on the list this week is a lit­tle project I’ve been think­ing about for a while, but never started work on (until this weekend).

When I first dis­cov­ered Mov­able­Type, I mar­veled at its abil­i­ties, at the free­dom it gave to its users. I was then per­plexed at its lack of any kind of auto­mated setup script to assist folks who might not be too com­fort­able with edit­ing even a few lines of a con­fig­u­ra­tion file. The thought crossed my mind to cre­ate on myself, if only to help speed the process of set­ting up mul­ti­ple MT instal­la­tions, but since that wasn’t a process I was actively engaged in at the time, the idea was shelved.

Fast-forward to the present: Web­graph is using MT for quite a few per­sonal and com­mer­cial projects (pay­ing the licenses of course), and we’re doing more instal­la­tions than before — enough to make me revisit my idea.

This week­end, I set about cre­at­ing a basic script that would take input from an HTML form, and write out a basic mt.cfg file. It is in very early alpha stage, but I believe it is ready for some brave alpha testers, since my input alone will result in a project which serves only our spe­cific needs, and I believe this sort of util­ity is best made in the pub­lic interests.

Thus, I present to you MTSETUP 0.1a — the ini­tial ver­sion has been built in PHP (since we use it on all our servers), though I intend to port it to Perl and ASP once the fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity have been decided upon.

If you would like to add your name to the list of alpha and (future) beta testers, please send me an email and I’ll get you started.

I’ll set up a sep­a­rate page for MTSETUP soon, but in the mean­time, a quick descrip­tion of its cur­rent behavior:

MTSETUP 0.1a / PHP Edi­tion
MTSETUP uses a stripped-down ver­sion of the stan­dard mt.cfg file dis­trib­uted with Mov­able­Type, elim­i­nat­ing all the com­ments, and leav­ing only the con­fig­u­ra­tion lines. All comments/instructions are moved to the HTML form. The form ini­tially hides most of the set­tings (via the DOM) and every set­ting that is dis­abled (com­mented out) by default in the stock mt.cfg file has its input field dis­abled by default in the HTML form (this is intended to pre­vent new users from enabling a fea­ture by mis­take). After sub­mit­ting the form, the script writes the con­fig file to a new sub­di­rec­tory, ready to place in the default MT directory.

A few notes of inter­est: I am not a mas­ter PHP devel­oper, so there are many items at this stage which can (and will) be opti­mized (for one thing, I’m sure there are quite a few oppor­tu­ni­ties for using arrays). Also, cur­rently the script only writes a new file, it does not read in exist­ing CFG files (this is planned for a future release). Finally, the script does require that it’s con­tain­ing direc­tory is set to world-writable (chmod 0777) so it can cre­ate the sub­folder and CFG file.

I’m com­pletely open to com­ments and sug­ges­tions, and even PHP tips for those of you who may be so inclined.

“To Infin­ity, and Beyond!”

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Monday, September 15th, 2003.

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