Lowdown Plugin for Movable Type
March 10th, 2006
While this blog uses Wordpress, at work I still have a few sites built using Movable Type. One of those sites is an events calendar, and I had been working on a iCAL template so that I could easily import the events into other calendars. Getting the file to work with iCalShare was pretty easy, but one of the older systems at work was a bit fussy. It didn’t like any of the special characters, like accented vowels or curly quotes that invariably crept into the event descriptions.
I spent quite a while looking for a way to remove all of these characters, but all the existing plugins and filters seemed to leave some of them behind. I spent some time thinking about using Brad Choate’s Regex plugin, but after double-checking Movable Type’s Global tag attribute filters I found what I was looking for. Sort of.
dirify also converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, meaning that something like crudité will be converted to crudite. For example, if the value of the tag without this attribute were Foo “Baz” is< br /> Bar!, the dirified version would be foo_baz_is_bar.
Yes—that’s what I wanted, but without the underscores, and usable for much longer blocks of text.
Fortunately Adam Kalsey and Crys Clouse had written code to improve the dirify feature, and using that as a starting point I made the changes to create the new global filter I needed. Something that would convert the high-ASCII characters down to low-ASCII, and strip out all the extra characters and line-breaks I didn’t need.
Lowdown.pl
Version 1.0
Lowdown removes extra information to displays plain text in Movable Type. It converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, strips HTML tags, and changes line breaks to spaces.
Installation: save Lowdown.txt as Lowdown.pl and upload it to your Movable Type ‘plugins’ directory
Usage Example: < $MTEntryBody lowdown="1"$>
This can be helpful when generating some types of feeds (eg. iCAL, RSS). If anyone is interested, I could also post the iCAL template for Movable Type that I developed that uses the Lowdown plugin.
Update
You can now get the lowdown directly from Six Apart’s Plugin Directory.
I would appreciate seeing how you have MT reading the ical feed! Thanks for this plugin.
Hi! I would like to know a example of how can I strip certain html tags using this plugin. I have a mouseover code that I would like to replace when exibiting a print version of the page.
Thank you
I wrote lowdown to create an iCal file from our MT based events calendar and use that iCal file in other applications (not MT). I think a few people, including the folks at Six Apart, were experimenting with iCal to Blog scripts back in 2002… but I haven’t been able to find any updates since then.
AcidZero—I think the best way to do what you’re considering is with a Print Style Sheet.
I would love to see your MT template for your ICS file. I’m trying to piece one together myself.
What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
Thanks.
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