It can be all too easy to get sucked into a single project and then find most of the day has disappeared. I’ve now packaged up MTPastEntries version 0.3 and put it along with an instruction page here.

The main changes are to the PHP code which I’ve now had time to test. It seems to work pretty nicely for now, though as before I’ve not tested on a large-scale setup. I’ve also tidied up the perl a little bit, and added in two new tags MTPastEntriesIfComment and MTPastEntriesIfTrackback which are taken with only the slightest of modifications from Adam Kalsey/Brad Choate’s SimpleComments plugin.

I’d like to add a number of features, such as some way of flagging up which previous entry each comment came from, sorting of comments by various parameters, and the aforementioned use of fields other than keywords, but it’s probably time to take a look at some other work for a while.

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It turned out that the first version of MT::PastEntries was riddled with bugs that were quietly filling up my logs, so I’ve just released version 0.2. This version has been tested on a small blog of three entries and worked as intended.

I suspect that on a blog of any size it would add considerable load when rebuilding static pages, so I’m going to move on to writing a PHP/Smarty version asap. Gavin suggested looking into integration with the ExtraFields plugin, so once the PHP version is in place that’ll probably be next on the ‘to do’ list.

UPDATE: I’ve had a first bash at the PHP side. I’ve not done any debugging yet, but for those who want to have a look, the whole lot is available here.

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As part of my new found involvement with the Talk Euro project (aiming to produce an online, commentable, annotatable version of the EU constitution) I’ve been considering how to use Moveable Type to keep track of different versions of a particular clause or article in a document.

The issue is that the constitution (and the other documents we hope to then use the toolset with) will inevitably be amended over time and it would be good to be able to keep track of those amendments and to present comments on previous versions of an article to those reading the latest version.

The most elegant solution I’ve come up with so far is a plugin that will scan the keywords field of the entry for notes of the form previously:xx where xx is the ID of a previous version of this article and extract all comments made on any entries located. The plugin then provides a container tag that can be used to display those comments. In practice, the user will probably want to then disable comments on the previous version of the article, and offer some link from the old version to the new one.

For those who are interested, you can download the initial version here, but note that I haven’t even gotten as far as testing it; version 0.1 is simply to illustrate how the process might work.

Before releasing it for any serious usage, I’d want to add sorting of comments/trackbacks, and a way of attaching a note to each entry to indicate which previous entry it comes from (as well as the obvious refactoring, etc). And of course once that’s all stabilised, a PHP version will follow.

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