Recently in Perl API Category

In my spare time I've been working on http://www.trendolizer.com, a site that automatically finds and posts stories, videos, images etc. that are trending on Facebook.  I recently redesigned the site using the Bootstrap framework, and today seems to be an excellent time to point out that there is also a 'politics' section at http://politics.trendolizer.com where you can follow what is trending regarding the U.S. presidential election.  Read on if you want to know more about the technical details.

Always wanted to write or update a plugin for Movable Type 5.x but didn't know how?  Never fear, thanks to the efforts of Shmuel from Six Apart now you don't have to learn Japanese anymore to understand the relevant documentation.  Just have a look at the English Movable Type Developer Guide here. Nice!

Thanks to Google translate (and the community feed) I found out about this nice little trick (original Japanese version) by Akira Sawada today.  When doing any kind of Perl development, you can run a one-line command just by calling

perl -e 'some command'

and it will be executed.  But did you know you can also (in your MT folder) do this

perl -MT -e 'some command'

and have it executed with all of Movable Type's settings and modules etc. loaded?

Even if you have dabbled in Perl scripting a bit before, writing plugins for Movable Type can seem a bit daunting at first.  Even though there is a step by step guide explaining how to create a Movable Type plugin, you still need to know quite a bit about Perl to make sense of it.  However, what many people don't know is that you can script quite a lot of actions in a Movable Type system without needing to write a full-blown plugin at all.

Did you know that 'search_by_meta' is a little known method of the MT::Object class?  Until today, I didn't, but I came accros this  hidden gem today while writing a custom Perl script for one of my Movable Type installations.  Basically I needed to pull one specific page from the database based on a value that was stored in a custom field.  It seemed easy enough, and at first I tried the standard 'load' method...