Hi, I'm new to MT, but have developed with other CMSs. I'm looking for a small bit of information to get started. I'm wondering if MT has a generic content class and table that custom content types can be built off of -- like nodes in Drupal or such. I'm also hoping to do as much of my development in PHP. I've found the plugin docs, which don't come at things from quite the angle I am describing - so I wonder if perhaps there is an existing plugin that creates a custom content type that I could look at, and mimick, and wonder if there is any documentation about how do to this all in PHP, or how much can be done in PHP.
Thank you in advance.
W
Reported on Movable Type 4.25
first, sorry for the double post about this
ok so ive found some information that is a bit interesting. first is that the key table to be looking at is mt_entry/ second is the column in that table entry_class which is kind of like a content_type flag.
further it seems that all content in MT needs to live within a blog, thus the entry_blog_id column in mt_entries.
Anyone?
Seems like the two included Entry types [Entry, Page] have a lot of code baked into various parts of the system, that the entry type is not abstracted in things like search or archives or whatever.
this is helpful
http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/developer/creating-your-first-object.html
in reply to Mike T who wrote:
so I wonder if perhaps there is an existing plugin that creates a custom content type
Please be more specific. What do you mean by "creates a custom content type?"
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what i mean is implementing another Entry type like 'Page'. This looks like it would not be that hard (i could just copy Page code for the most part), except that 'Entry' and 'Page' types seem to be baked deep into various parts of the codebase, that there is not the flexibility for easily adding additional Entry types.
Why would you need to do that? You still haven't fleshed out your use case to explain what you want to do.
Why would I want a custom content/entry type? I have blog posts, pages, and I want another content type that isn't those two that will have its own special display qualities, but I want it to be able to access the various meta features that augment Entries, such as Tags, Categories, etc. This is pretty common reason to build on a cms - to get the peripheral services of the cms without having develop everything new for a new content type and not having to develop a duplicate schema to store common data like created_on, author, last_modified_on, etc. its a lot cheaper faster smarter to extend a base 'class' like Entry than roll a whole new one.
You still have not given an example of a specific new type you want to create. What can you not build using either pages or entries and custom fields?
so the answer is no i gather. i dont want my page and entry lists polluted with this other content or visa-versa. why bother having the "type" param in schema/app declarations that use the mt_entry table if it can't really be used? this strikes me as a design flaw. the type could be abstracted out making the whole thing much more modular and streamlined, rather than having some content types defined in the mt_entry table and some defined by meta data in custom fields.
my specific type is acme-widgets, naturally.
There is nothing stopping you from subclassing MT::Entry in a plugin and writing some code to modify the editor. It would all have to be written in perl save for the php smarty tags. What I wanted to know was why you felt the need to use a plugin.
Hi Mike, I am new with Movable Type, I'm using the custom field and having several types of content here, which has different mandatory fields between content types, what do you think will be the best way to achieve this?
I'm with Tekimaki on this one. Having done a lot of CCKs in Drupal, I agree that a similar plugin for MT would be very cool. With CCK in Drupal, you just give your new content type a name and start defining fields for it via the standard Drupal admin interface, and you get an entry form for free--no need to subclass an existing type and write code to modify the entry form, no need to create your own object and write handlers for it. Someone who knows nothing at all about coding can create their own content type with all the fields they need in a matter of minutes.
I'm working on an implementation even now where such simplified functionality would be very cool indeed. It's an enterprise site where they want to be able to launch videos in a shadowbox from a link in an entry excerpt on the front page of a portal site, one panel of which consists of content from an MT blog. In order to do this, I need
1. A link in the entry itself pointing to
2. An HTML file that embeds the video player in a shadowbox and references
3. An XML file that specifies the video source file and some other information.
Since this is a site with multiple authors, who may or may not know a lot about HTML and/or XML, and since the HTML and XML are pretty much boilerplate with just two or three user-provided values, it would be extremely useful and foolproof for my authors to just have simple forms where they could provide the variables each file needs and upload a video file, and the HTML and XML files would be constructed using that information. With a CCK-type plugin in MT, I'd be done already, instead of having to write, test and debug two new objects.
Bill
I'm stuck here, anyone have plugins (free or paid) to achieve this functionality?