Clients for MovableType

Just spent some time reviewing a clutch of third-party apps and clients with interfaces for posting to a MovableType blog. Went through nine and kept five. Surprise, surprise: one of those that didn’t make it was BlogJet. That was a tough call.

My favourites, in order of preference:

1. Zempt and w.bloggar. Very little to choose between these two top-flight apps. Arguably, w.bloggar might have a slight edge. Both provide access to the full MovableType interface — entry, extended entry, excerpt, title, keywords, pings, comments, trackbacks, formatting, post status. Both allow uploading of files and multiple accounts, though w.bloggar seems more accomplished. However Zempt has a much better account-management interface for multiple accounts. You can alter the settings without having to log in to each account being managed or changed. It also allows a per-account setting of advanced options (post status and text filters, for example). This is important — in some blogs I use the convert-line-breaks options, in others I use Markdown with Smarty, and in a third I use Textile.
2. MTClient 1.60 is truly excellent. It has everything you need right on the main editing screen/window, even the text filters (formatting options) and the post status. Allows file uploads.
3. MovablePoster also replicates the MovableType interface pretty accurately, but doesn’t seem to have an option to upload files.
4. SharpMT is the fourth choice, and only for two reasons: it doesn’t allow multiple accounts to be registered in its interface (you have to go in and change the account details each time; and it requires the Microsoft .NET framework Version 2, which everybody may not have or even want.

The ones that didn’t make it

1. Ecto did not allow me to specify formatting — at least not in any easy way I could find, and it was much too complex. I don’t fight software. Also, it’s shareware.
2. Post2Blog didn’t post to the selected category, and, worse, it added silly para tags in HTML that I really don’t want. I don’t want to jump through hoops to strip the software’s formatting when my blog is set to do that. Again, shareware.
3. Qumana is, IMHO, the weakest of the lot. It does not seem to have provisions for uploads, formatting, extended entries, excerpts … really, I see no reason to use this when the competition is so much better. And if it’s there, it’s extremely well hidden.
4. BlogJet truly saddened me when I saw the others. It doesn’t allow easy file uploads or thumbnailing. It doesn’t allow me to specify the text filter. It bangs in HTML para tags. It has an awkward dotted line separator for the extended entry. If you’re using Markdown with Smarty, this can be a problem: the Markdown syntax will produce a horizontal rule whenever it encounters “three or more hyphens, asterisks, or underscores on a line by themselves”. Not good. Plus, it’s shareware too.

Hot tips for MovableType 3.2

Tip # 1 : Login passwords

Some clients will return an error when you try to use the web control panel password (the one used at yoursite.com/mt/mt.cgi). This is because in version 3.2, MovableType now has a separate password for the xmlrpc interface. You can (and should) change this — preferrably to something other than your regular password. To do this, login to your MovableType Control Panel from the web, click on your name to edit your profile, go down to the bottom of the page and there you’ll find a second password field (with “Reveal”) next to it. If you click reveal, you’ll see some random password; change this, and use this in your client. All will be well.

Tip # 2 : Posting to draft

Guess what? None of the clients will correctly post to draft because of a change in the MovableType architecture from version 2.1, and one that’s very poorly documented. What you need to do is modify the config file (used to be mt.cfg, is now mt-config.cgi). Add the following line to the bottom of that file:

NoPublishMeansDraft 1

Upload the config file to your MovableType installation directory (make sure the permissions are correct, chmod to 755).

This is “documented” — if you can call it that — in Lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm thus:

Code:

In 2.1 we changed the behavior of the $publish flag. Previously, it was used to determine the post status. That was a bad idea. So now entries added through XML-RPC are always set to publish, unless the user has set “NoPublishMeansDraft 1” in mt.cfg, which enables the old behavior.

Yeah, well, thanks a bunch for telling us up front, guys.