Introduction

MT Responder is the working name of this plugin for the time being. It is my first serious plugin for Movable Type, and provides some cool features for Movable Type that allow it to function as a replacement in most cases for Google Reader. As I have time and interest, I will refactor it to use some of the better, flashier JavaScript toolkits out there, but so far it seems to work just fine as a news reader and a means to import other people's blog posts into your own post when you are responding to them. That last part is really how I got the idea to start on this project. I wanted a dialog in the entry editor that would show you someone else's entries, and then allow you to import the text as you desired, so that you could respond to one of their blog posts.

Version 1.0

Features:

• Support for RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0.
• Dialogs and pages for managing the feeds that you are tracking.
• Integration into the entry editor.
• A widget for your main admin console page to let you read your news from inside Movable Type.

Known issues:

• A hard-coded limit of 10 entries in the dialog to read your news. I put this in there because I was having issues with limiting the result set to 10 entries manually by passing a limit command to the database code.
• Timezone support is not complete.

Released 3/20/2008. Post comments and bug reports as you find cause to do so.


Goals for 1.5:

• Refactor JavaScript to use JQuery, Prototype and/or Scriptaculous where appropriate.
• Try to hammer out some of the known issues.
• Test with even more news feeds.

**UPDATE** 4/7/2008: I have started the refactoring work that uses JQuery to get rid of a lot of the stuff that I had to throw in there by hand. Please download it and give it a shot.

**UPDATE** 4/25/2008: I have refactored almost all of the JavaScript to use JQuery now.

Reader/Responder 1.5 RC What's new:

• Completed refactoring to JQuery
• Made the dashboard widget more dynamic
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

Download.