Why didn't I check reviews?????
I purchased this book after browsing it at the bookstore and reading about all the nifty extra downloads available at the book's "companion site." Guess what? All the reviews are right - there IS NO SITE. It is now May of 2007 and the site STILL says it is "coming soon," with no explanation. The companion site (which sounded very cool in the book)was never developed and not only is there no explanation at the site - but not even here at Amazon where Matt Haughey and the other authors have the opportunity to write in the book blog - or leave comments to the reviews in answer to all those wondering about what happened. I just don't get it. The silence is deafening. No site? A disappointment, but no problem that can't be forgiven if someone just took the time to offer those of us who spent $30.00 an explanation. But even after 2 years of publication, that seems to be too much trouble. Shame.
No online content
I bought this book at full price and was disgusted to find out the website they direct you to has no content! At the bookstore, I was excited by all of the examples and code I could download from hackingmt.com. I accessed the website at home and there was nothing on it. There is some value to the book, but much of the advanced material is all on the missing website. Terrible!
Is this a joke?
To be honest, I'm VERY disgusted with this book - I just purchased it this afternoon, started to read it and went to the web site that was supposed to contain plugins and other materials from the book, only to find that it is essentially an EMPTY site! The site is located at:
[...]
There is no reason that this book has been out for such a long period time and yet there is still no real support site! On top of that, one of the authors even touts that this bogus site is "coming soon." That's right, Jay Allen announces on his own blog that:
"Hacking Movable Type (which has a 'coming-soon' companion website, hackingmt.com) is finally out and it's even more fantastic than I remember."
That post is located at:
[...]
He made that post on August 18, 2005 and it's now the middle of April 2006. Frankly, I'm disgusted and can not recommend this book if the authors and publisher (Wiley) are so dishonest.
Great concept, but completely missing content
A great idea for a book but it falls flat in execution. The book promises several plugins and support files are available on its website but no such site exists. The book was published in July and still nothing. You cannot use Chapters 16 or 19 whatsoever, which were the exact reasons for my purchase. The site claims the hurricane is to blame. While I do have sympathies, wasn't that after July? Wouldn't you have your support site ready to go at publishing time? I have so far gotten no response from emailed queries about the missing content. I do not recommend this book due to this situation, which is a shame as it held so much promise. If you don't mind missing that portion, then perhaps you'll like this resource.
powerful plug-ins
A sysadmin might specialise in various jobs. Hence we have a database sysadmin or a website sysadmin. But recently, there has been the rise of a blog sysadmin. It combines to some extent duties of the other two sysadmins. This book shows that if you want to run a blog site, and choose Movable Type, then you are basically running a database.
The book offers three types. All free and open source. MySQL. PostgreSQL and SQLite. The book chooses to use MySQL when demonstrating examples. But much of these seems easily portable to the other SQLs. So if MySQL is not your game, don't let that put you off the book. The book skims quickly over the theory of relational databases, and how these are implemented in MySQL.
At a higher level than the database, you access Movable Type via several APIs. Of these, the Perl API might be the most attractive, given Perl's popularity.
But of all the chapters, you might want to devote the most attention to that on plug-ins. Many third parties [you?] can and have written over 100 of these. Even if you do not intend to write one, it's worth perusing what's out there on the net, just in case one fits your situation.
