Open source releases from Six Apart Services

Steve Cook - 18 April 2009 - Post a Comment

Six Apart Services has a bag of tricks that would make Felix proud. Over the last few weeks, we've released several pieces of code as open source that we think other developers might want to add to their own magic bags.

Bob the Rebuilder

A utility class using run-periodic-tasks to continuously rebuild blogs on a scheduled basis. (Note that rpt must be enabled for Bob to do anything.)

Reblog

Reblog pulls feed entries from RSS or Atom feeds and turns them into Movable Type entries. Imports can be run either manually or in the background using run-periodic-tasks.

UnrecognizedTags

UnrecognizedTags implements a system-level Tools menu item that will compile every template in the installation and report on all instances of unrecognized tags, collated by tag and listed by blog and template.

We've used Bob on a number of projects to keep index pages fresh when they're being populated by items such as ActionStreams that don't trigger a rebuild; Reblog is a utility knife that enables some highly complex content aggregation; UnrecognizedTags is incredibly helpful to keep templates from breaking when upgrading legacy systems or replacing plugins.

Additionally, we've pushed out the Services versions of two existing developer tools.

MT::Test

The Services update to the MT::Test framework, enabling more sophisticated tests of plugins (MT::App output, behavior under memcached, sessioning code, etc.)

MT::Booter

The Services update to the MT::Booter plugin for generating test data (users, entries, comments, and more).

These aren't official releases, so they're not supported by Six Apart, but they're tools that we use almost every day, and we're delighted to share them with the larger community of Movable Type users and developers.