Scheduled posting for Movable Type!

Trickle is a perlscript by blogneighbor Jim Flanagan of Everything Burns that enables publish-on-date style posting to the future under MT, my personal biggest missing feature. The script was developed in response to requests from another blogneighbor, Dan Sanderson of BrainLog.

Now I just have to go back and figure out why vanilla cron misbehaves on my OS X box. It’s surely aslo an excuse to finally install Cronnix.

Jim’s solution is elegant and simple, but like all users, my inelegant and complex needs stub a toe. In this case, it’s the use of a category as the publication key. Jim asks users to assign a new category, “Deferred,” to the draft entres you’re queueing up. However, even if I assign a dual category to my post-to-the future, I’ll still wind up with a new category and category achive page, “Deferred,” unless I rummage around to ensure that that specific category is treated in a special way.

It should be noted that Jim’s made the category assignable and configurable as an independent variable at the top of the script.

Perhaps that’s my key: can I assign the variable to ALL categories, such that any post in Draft mode with a future date will render under Trickle the next time after that date? I bet so. Can I do it via “*”? One way to find out.

Alternatively, I could just comment the category test, maybe.

UPDATE: rowsabowsa ragga fragga, I’ve burnt my twenty minutes with no love. I shall return. I believe I’m bumping against some of the same issues that frustrated me previously regarding cron and OS X, and not issues in Jim’s code.

On proofreading this piece, maybe I’ve brought a typo to the table. Fumblefingers!

UPDATE II: Point one: Jim actually notes in the code proppah that the script will strip the Deferred category from the entry.

Point two: the script needs to be in the same directory as your mt.cgi stuff (although I’m sure that’s hackable).

Point three: for the record, “*” is not a valid value for the Deferred category. It’s not necessary to worry about entries piling up in your Deferred archive, though, as MT won’t render empty categories. This does mean one should assign dual categories to your entries.

Point four: The execution problems I was having were a combination of pathing and permission problems. The successful use of the script I’m describing above was manually triggered from the command line. When I get it to run using Cronnix I’ll add an update here.

UPDATE III: manually via Cronnix, yes; scheduled via Cronnix, not yet.

UPDATE IV: scheduled via Cronnix, if Cronnix is currently loaded as an active application, yes; scheduled via Cronnix for cron to run solo, not yet.

UPDATE V: Success! Cronnix skedded-jobs ran independently via cron, just as one would want them to. I deleted several (but not all) test posts.

UPDATE VI: reset creation time to force to lead story slot.