phil ringnalda

The way I have Movable Type set up, and the way I use it, when I save an entry I need to have a title (which makes the URL), an entry body (which is why I’m posting), an excerpt (which goes in the RSS <description> to keep from having an awful auto-excerpt), and a category (because my category navigation on the individual entry archive page is a bit buggy when there’s no category, linking to a category page at /blog/category/.php). Someone else, who doesn’t use entry titles, but uses the keywords field to build a URL, might require only entry body and keywords.

Because I’m exactly the sort of person who caused the Mozilla menus to be the sea of submenus and preferences that drove me away from it, I think this is a perfect place for a pref. There’s already a prefs popup to determine what things to show on the entry editing page, and in what order. One more checkbox, for “require non-empty”, and a bit of Javascript to validate it, and I could cut one more step off my “whew, that’s done, saved, and published; now all I have to do is check for long <pre> lines breaking my layout, validate the page, check the activity log to be sure I didn’t break my RSS feed*, check this, and that, and the other thing…” list.

Or I could just hack it in myself, and add one more thing to the list of things I’ll have to re-hack if the mythical MT 3.0 ever comes out.

* Which I do automatically by running it through a locally-installed copy of the validator – does anyone actually want to do that badly enough for me to write up a howto?