Expressions

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8 Jan 2003

Expressions is a Movable Type (MT) plugin designed to be used by plugin developers. The plugin provides a method that allows plugins to support the use of Movable Type tag expressions in their tag attributes. When a plugin is using Expressions, MT tags like the following are allowed:

<MTFoo bar="[MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"]">

Download

Expressions.zip

Installation

Copy Expressions.pm into a directory called MTPlugins inside your Movable Type extlib directory. If you don’t already have a MTPlugins directory, create it first.

Your installation should look like this:
mtdirectory/extlib/MTPlugins/Expressions.pm

Usage

Unless you are developing plugins, you won’t find this plugin very useful. It doesn’t add any new tags. It doesn’t make your copy of MT do anything interesting. All it does is gives plugin authors an easy way to support tag expressions in their plugins.

If you are a plugin developer, well, that’s a different story. By using this plugin, you’ll find you sleep better at night, no longer get hangovers, and have the sudden urge to send me money by PayPal.

Okay, maybe not.

But you will be able to support tag expressions in your plugins.

To use, all you need to do is hand the plugin your MT object reference (commonly stored in $ctx) and your tag attributes (commonly stored in $args). The plugin will check all your attributes for tag expressions, run them through MT for processing, and hand them back to you, ready for use.

The plugin nesses with your token stash and your stashed builder object, so it’s very important to retreive these before you call this plugin. You can do that like so:

my $tokens = $ctx->stash('tokens');
my $builder = $ctx->stash('builder');
$args = MTPlugins::Expressions::process($ctx, $args);

Example

<MTMyPlugin input="[MTEntryTitle]">

Acknowledgements

This plugin was insired by an idea from Brad Choate. Brad also contributed a patch to MTAmazon that is now part of this plugin as well.

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. Read the license file included with the downloaded package for the complete license.

Revision History

1.0 - January 8, 2003
Initial release.

Nino
November 21, 2005 9:52 AM

Small adjustment needed…

MT versions up till 3.2 weren’t bothered by:

package MT::Plugin::Arithmetic;

MT3.2 is, as it should be

package MT::Plugins::Arithmetic;

Al
January 24, 2008 9:12 AM

In MT 3.3, there is no “MTPlugins” folder, but rather a “plugins” folder. Do I need to create an “MTPlugins” folder or can I get away with altering line 17 to:

“package MT::plugins::Expressions;”

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