phil ringnalda

I’ll be breaking my TrackBack pretty thoroughly for a bit, and then possibly breaking it for some people for a while, trying to persuade MT to rebuild my individual archive page for an entry when it gets pinged.

Update: unless I’m missing something, that didn’t take long.

The problem: when you receive a TrackBack ping, Movable Type needs to do everything it does with the ping before it sends a reply to the person who pinged you, so that it can tell them whether or not the ping worked. That sets a time limit on how much it can do, before their program decides that the ping has taken too long and gives up. So MT adds the ping to your database, rebuilds the RSS file for that entry’s pings, rebuilds all your index templates in case they have TrackBack counts in them, mails you a notification, and calls that good enough. It doesn’t try to rebuild archives, in case it takes too long to get that done, which is a problem for those of us who don’t like popups, and display our TrackBack pings on the individual archive page with the comments.

So far, the three solutions I’ve see are: my solution, which involves using PHP to include the output from the CGI program the popup calls, with the template stripped down to just the stuff I want included in the page; the direct solution of having PHP get the TrackBack data from your MySQL database without going through MT at all; one I haven’t seen done, using PHP to parse the RSS file of pings and include that in the page; or the manual solution of rebuilding yourself when you get an email TrackBack notification. The first three solutions are tolerable, but not very slick; the fourth is too much trouble to suit me, and is likely to get you pinged multiple times, if you aren’t there to rebuild when someone thinks their ping didn’t go through since they don’t see it on the page.

If you have a fair amount of faith in the speed of your rebuilds (or in your TrackBackers’ willingness to keep trying, or to let you know that there’s a problem), you can hack in support for rebuilding archives, or just rebuilding the individual entry page for the entry that was pinged. Fairly obviously, this isn’t a hack for the faint of heart.

First, you might want to save a backup copy of {your MT directory}/lib/MT/App/Trackback.pm, to save yourself the trouble of redownloading it when things go south. Then, look for the lines (starting at 199 in my copy):

    $app->rebuild_indexes( Blog => $blog )
        or return $app->_response(Error =>
            $app->translate("Rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));

and directly below that add:

    if ($tb->entry_id) {
      $app->rebuild_entry( Entry => $entry, BuildDependencies => 0 )
          or return $app->_response(Error =>
            $app->translate("Archive rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));
    }

That will rebuild all the archive files for the entry that was pinged, individual, date-based, and category, so if you have TrackBack counts in all of your archive types that’s probably what you want, but that’s the sort of rebuild that Ben expected would take long enough that pings would time out. If all you want is to rebuild the individual archive page for the entry, use:

    if ($tb->entry_id) {
      $app->_rebuild_entry_archive_type( Entry => $entry, ArchiveType => "Individual")
          or return $app->_response(Error =>
            $app->translate("Archive rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));
    }

and then post a message along the lines of:

I’m experimenting with rebuilding individual archives when an entry gets a TrackBack ping. If you have trouble pinging me, please let me know about it. Also, you might try setting a longer value for PingTimeout in your mt.cfg file.

and let me know how it works for you, and feel free to ping this entry mercilessly to see how it works for me.