Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

If you're interested in honesty and accountability in blogging, you may want to make it easier for your readers to see when you've altered a blog entry and how. You can indicate this manually of course, but it's easier and better if it gets done automatically. That's what the MT-Revision plugin is for.

This plugin is a bit tricky to install as it requires a number of Perl modules that may not already be installed on your web server. It's best to ask your webhost's system administrator to install the modules if possible. If not, you can install them yourself in the "extlib" directory of MT. If you're using DreamHost, all of the modules are installed except that the version of Algorithm:iff is outdated and you'll need to download the latest version from CPAN and install it yourself. I've already gone several rounds with DreamHost tech support over this and got it to this point.

If you use PHP on your individual entry archive template or just want to have a customized template to display the revision history, use this hack to tell MT-Revision to look for a template module called "revisions", then create the template module in your blog.

So the steps are: install the necessary Perl modules, install the MT-Revision files, create the revisions template, add two classes to your stylesheet for displaying the changes, then add a revision link in your templates.

I am now displaying the revision history at Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs.