design-nation.blog/en

Bloggin’nation 0.1: A Central application

This is the first beta of Blogin’ nation, a Central application to post to your Movable Type installation. It uses the Movable Type xmlrpc API.

The application has been developed in AS2, and the source code will be released as soon as we fix the bugs that may appear, and add a few more things.

We’ve been working on this for some time, and now that we are close to finishing it, we’d like to know your opinion, and receive your feedback about the functionalities you’d like to see, usability issues, …. You can leave your comments here, or send us an e-mail to: blog@design-nation.net

Right now, it can only be used to post, and not to edit your recent post, although that functionality is developed, but not implemented yet.

Known bugs and issues:

- I don’t know if it’s due to a problem in our code, or in the MT xmlrpc API, but the special characters ( á, é, í,…. ) are not properly displayed when the post is published. This is our main concern, in part because we are Spanish, so we can’t even use the app to post to our Spanish blog… 
- There’s no connection checking, so the app assumes that the connection exists.
- There’s no tabulation management, so you can’t pass from one text input to another using the tab key.
- There’s no ping an trackback management yet.
- There’s a general lack of visual feedback ( at least for an average user )

What are we working on?

- Multilanguage support. All the app texts well be saved on external xml files, so the user could choose the interface language.
- Edition. It’s almost finished.

Obviously, there are better choices ( like Zempt ), but this is something we started just to see how far we could go with Central, and well, here are the first results.

We'd like to thank specially Celia Carracedo for the application icon.

The xmlrpc api is located in the movable type default installation folder. It's a file named mt-xmlrpc.cgi