Lots of little MT admin issues

I’ve been trying to refine my Movable Type setup lately and I have run into a number of little problems for which I can’t find easy solutions online. For example, there appears to be a bug in MT 3.2 that permits junked trackbacks and/or comments to show up on a blog. The workaround seems to be to delete them, but I don’t see this listed as a known problem.
Another issue that’s been plaguing me for some time is that when I post an entry generally on the first build, the category for the item does not appear. It will appear on subsequent rebuilds, but again I don’t see this listed anywhere as a known problem and I don’t have a workaround for it short of rebuilding each time I post a new entry, immediately after posting (which is a pain).
Another thing is I added Brad Choate’s MT Authors plugin recently so I could list the contributors to a blog more easily in the sidebar (the blog in question is Uncle John’s Blog). For some reason, though, the tag lists authors from my installation who have never contributed to that blog. They’re not associated with it in the database, so I don’t really know how to track the error.
Finally, I recently decided to repurpose my Above the Fold test blog as an announcement site for people blogging on my system. I set up a “newsbox” index modeled after the output that appears in the MT interface (here’s the raw output), and I changed my configuration to specify that URL as the newsbox content, but MT refuses to grab my cotent and insists on showing the MT newsbox instead. Curiously, if I set the configuration option to disable, that does work, so the system is responding to the setting, but something is preventing it from superseding MT news with Mediajunkie/Above the Fold news. I’m stumped.


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7 responses to “Lots of little MT admin issues”

  1. Chi Avatar

    Christian,
    Lawrenceville class of ’84 here. Friends with you brother Art but long time no see. I hope all is well with you. I saw you on CNN and tracked you down.
    keep it moving!
    -chi

  2. Mark Paschal Avatar

    Comments: are you using a plugin like SimpleComments? I know it had issues with moderation. Maybe there’s something similar with the junk flag.
    Newsbox: it gets saved in the mt_session table so it doesn’t have to fetch it each time. You might need to clear that record. (It’s the one with “NW” for its id, so “delete from mt_session where id=’NW’” SQL would get it.) MT checks if the URL is “disable,” but can’t tell if it’s just a new URL so it would still use the cached version if it hasn’t expired.

  3. Mark Paschal Avatar

    From looking at Brad’s MTAuthors code, looks like you’ll get a list of all MT authors (as you see), unless you use the “permissions” attribute. For example, you can list all the authors who can post to that blog with:
    <MTAuthors permissions=”post”>…
    His post about it says <MTAuthors> should list “all available authors for the current blog,” though. I asked Brad about it and he said that <MTAuthors> listing every author was how he understood it to work, so it’s not clear (at least to me) if it’s a code bug or a documentation bug. :)

  4. xian Avatar

    Thanks, Mark, for all your help! I’ve tried responding via email but markpasc.org appears to be down, at least from my corner of the interweb.

  5. Brad Choate Avatar

    If you specify a “permissions” attribute, it will limit the authors listed to those that have that permission on that weblog. Otherwise, it will list all authors on your MT installation. I can see the need for listing all authors (regardless of permission) for a particular weblog too. I’ll have to add that option. But for now, specify the permission attribute with a value of “post” to select the authors that have permission to post to the weblog.

  6. Ringfahndung Blog Avatar

    hosteurope: Ringfahndung disabled

    Nachtrag, 18:22 — ein netter Support bei HostEurope hat mich freundlicherweise bei der Einkreisung des Problems unterstützt. Es schaut so aus, als habe der Traffic von Freenet in Verbindung mit dem statwatch-Plug-in für MT 3.2 massenweise Perlprozes…

  7. Andrew Jessup Avatar
    Andrew Jessup

    The problem with using the ‘post’ permissions flag is that it will list site administrators (who may have nothing to do with the blog itself). As a workaround, you can use the MTIfNonZero tag. eg. for the following code that will generate a module with a list of users…

  8. .html”>
    …this will only list users who have actually posted specifically to your blog.