Rad Geek’s Projects: PHP SimpleComments

I realized this morning that there are a couple of provisos I need to put up about the initial release, both of them related to limitations in the current status of the PHP plugin API in MovableType 3.1x.

1. When you use <MTSimpleComments> outside of an entry context, it returns all comments and pings (or as many as you specify in the lastn attribute) on the entire blog. Unfortunately, there’s no way to retrieve them all using the normal calls in the PHP plugin API. In the entry context, we use the standard API method fetch_comments(), but when outside of an entry context, we have to directly access the database with an SQL query. This would cause problems for non-SQL backends, except that MovableType 3.1x doesn’t seem to ship with support for any non-SQL backends in the dynamic publishing engine anyway. In any case, though, this is an evil kludge. I’m told that the MovableType developers are going to fix the PHP plugin API to solve this problem Real Soon Now; as soon as they put out a release that fixes it, I’ll update PHP SimpleComments to use the new, non-evil method on versions of MovableType that support it (but maintaining backward compatibility with versions that require the evil method). Status: awaiting deliverance from MT developers.

2. There’s also a known issue which has less to do with aesthetics and more to do with functionality. The moderate attribute does not work in the initial release. You can use moderate="0" but you will still only get visible comments in the listings. Again, this is a problem with the PHP plugin API–fetch_comments() offers no way to retrieve invisible comments from the database. I’ll fix this and put out an incremental release momentarily; unfortunately, though, it will require more evil database accessing. So it goes in this vale of tears. Status: fix in progress.