Now that Flickr exists, many would-have-been-blog-articles become a post on Flickr instead.

It’s contrived, not to mention excruciatingly limited since it only searches for the text “rss” right now … but it’s a first step.

Check your contact form e-mail.

That was my biggest fear in switching TXP versions and moving to Dreamhost, that my urls would be broken, but so far so good. I agree with you too, Mark, that comparable CMS’s like WP are more appealing than MT because they use only PHP and not Perl + PHP, etc.

@Michael: I’ve not yet tried it, but Doug Bowman just released his photo album system for MT under a CC license…

stopdesign.com/log/2005/08/24/photo-templates.html

Joe: Awesome! With regards to the solution over at orangehairedboy’s site, yeah, that’s what I’m using right now. Not a big fan. Looks like what you’re cooking up might fit the bill nicely though.

Mel: Yep, MT isn’t perfect out of the box, but it’s nice.

[1] If you want to have a good database search, you will have to use the MySQL fulltext search. Searching with simple LIKE-phrases is no real improvement.

[2] If you want to use fulltext search, you have to deal with the problem of database engines. You have to setup some sort of replication or otherwise solve that problem.

[3] Searching is one thing. Giving good result lists is another thing. You have to solve several issues, if you want to offer a good “sort by rank”.

[4] Most of the time, an entry in Movable Type only contains readable text. However, if you want to do this right, you also have to deal with Movable Type tags being inside entries. Searching through the database rows will not be enough. You will have to search through the text that results from the rebuild process. Tags have to be evaluated, the complete text of an article has to be assembled.

[5] As the MySQL parts of this component are not trivial, a good setup and administration interface has to be created. Just giving some SQL to the users is not enough. For example, giving a replication process into the hands of many users, most of them knowing nothing about SQL, is an interesting job.

I have been doing some work on this subject. Initially I integrated the MySQL fulltext search into my own Movable Type Weblog. Then I extended the search, so several websites could be searched, leading to the creation of the MTLookup website.

If you are interested, you can find some information in the Movable Type Weblog, MTLookup category.

Later, I will release the code for fulltext search in Movable Type. It just needs some time for doing it right.

Michael G. Schneider

I like to save my files out with .php extensions for easier identification and editing, but on the web, I want to refer to them as extensionless.

I only just upgraded to 3.2 yesterday so I’m still learning the newer features, but would the Archive File Path Specifiers, in particular the %F specifier do what you are after for the extensions?

1. When I have comments enabled, why doesn’t the link to comments at least lead one to a form?

2. Why is there no longer a template for including a comment? They certainly don’t expect me to make one from scratch before I can get commenters, do they?

3. how come the id’s in links don’t start with letters? EX: blah.xml#00027, isn’t ok by the XHTML spec because ID’s must not start with a number. Why do I have to hack through the templates just to get something SO SIMPLE to work that SHOULD work out of the box?

…those are my pet peeves, in addition to the extensionless thing Mike mentioned.