Content Management
Process Tags plugin
5 Aug 2002
One of the questions often seen on the Movable Type support forums is related to the usage of MT tags inside your entry text. Typically someone tried to use an MT tag inside their entry body and found that it didn’t process the tag. And someone recently asked me why they couldn’t use the MTAmazon plugin inside an entry.
The reason why this doesn’t work is that Movable Type just doesn’t look inside your entry text when it creates your pages. But now it can.
Process Tags is a new plugin from Kalsey Consulting Group that creates a new global tag attribute called process_tags. A global tag attribute is a MT tag attribute that can be used on any tag. You’ve probably seen and used the built-in global attributes like encode_html and dirify.
By using the process_tags attribute, you tell Movable Type to process all the MT tags that are contained in whatever tag you use it on. So for example, if you have included MT template tags in your entry body, you can use <MTEntryBody process_tags="1"> to make sure that those tags get used when the entry is built.
Download
Installation
Copy processtags.pl into a directory called plugins inside your Movable Type directory. If you don’t already have a plugins directory, create it first. Copy postproc.pm into a directory called bradchoate inside your extlib directory. If you don’t already have a bradchoate directory, create it first.
Your installation should now look like this:
mtdirectory/plugins/processtags.pl
mtdirectory/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm
Usage
Once you’ve installed Process Plugins, you’ll have a new global tag attribute that can be used on any non-container tag. Keep in mind, though, that just because you can use the attribute on any tag, using it on things like date tags doesn’t make much sense.
- process_tags
When set to 1, processes the results of any MT tag for more MT tags. For example, if you use this on your MTEntryMore tag, any MT tags inside your extended entries would be processed.
Example
<MTCategoryDescription process_tags="1">
Acknowledgements
This plugin relies upon Brad Choate’s post processing plugin, postproc.pm. Brad even updated his plugin to better support this plugin.
License
Like our other freeware, this plugin is released under the open-source MIT License. In plain English, that means you can do whatever you want with the software, including modifying it, selling it, or eating it, but we’re not responsible for anything that goes wrong.
Revision History
1.0 - August 5, 2002
Initial release.