Movabletype Modifications

[Aaron]

I've been tweaking my MT installation the last couple of days and I have a couple of things I think others might be interested in. This is the first time I've made anything I've done public so I hope it goes smoothly.

I know some people hate MT because of its resource intensity. I believe some of that is due to users doing rebuilds and simply accepting the "rebuild all files" default selection. I changed the rebuild_confirm.tmpl file so that "rebuild indexes only" is the default selection. I also swapped the "rebuild" and "cancel" buttons, saving as much as 3cm of mouse movement. The thing I'm not sure how to do is make my modified file available to others. I guess I could zip it and attach it here. I'll do that and if someone has a more reliable or better way then I'd be happy to consider doing it another way.

The other modification I did was to add a spellchecker to MT. I'll post that in a separate thread.
Well I was going to do that but in the middle of a semi-long description and explanation, the silly bulletin board decided I hadn't logged in and once I got it sorted out, all my typing had disappeared. Now I just don't have the energy to type it again. Maybe later if anyone is truly interested.

Forgot to tell you where to put the file. Unzip the rebuild_confirmation.tmpl file and upload it to your *MT*/tmpl/cms/ directory, where *MT* is your movabletype directory, probably in the cgi-bin.

[pete3005]

Hi Aaron

I'd be interested in knowing how you add the spell checker. Are you using a web service for this or are you communicating to the MS Word spell checker using a com object?

Let me know as this would be cool to do in PHP :)

BTW, anything you can do to ease the burden of MT must be a good thing!

Pete

[Aaron]

Actually the spell checker is a hack of a hack. I originally found the spell checker here: Thornet (http://www.thornet.com/archives/cat_movabletype_help.html) which uses a script found here: WBOSS (http://www.dontpokebadgers.com/spellchecker/). Steven was kind enough to get the aspell module installed for me and it worked fine. When MT ugraded to 2.6x they changed the edit_entry.tmpl file and it took a little doing for me to get it to work again, but I did it. Attached is the edit_entry.tmpl file that you can upload to your (movabletype)/tmpl/cms directory and the spell.pl file that needs to go into the same directory as mt.cgi. As long as aspell is installed on your server, it should work. You can edit the style sheet that is part of the spell.pl file if you want to change the look of it. There are instructions for a custom dictionary at the WBOSS link above.

The spellchecker only works if you have the buttons in your edit entry screen at the bottom. But I must say I integrated the button quite nicely! Let me know if you use it and what you think.

[g808]

that'd be a cool and useful feature in MT, but i just use ie spell (http://www.iespell.com/). no hacking required, just IE. :)

[Aaron]

I know about iespell. I don't use IE, I use Opera. Also, when I looked into using iespell, it was having issues with WinNT 4, which is what I'm forced to use here at work.

[Karenn275]

Hey, just wanted to say thanks. Both of these work great! Especially that spellcheck!

[Aaron]

I'm glad you like it! I'm really pretty proud of the spell check. I'm not a programmer at all and I think I did a pretty fine job of making it look like an integral part of MT. Thanks again for your kind words.