Some lessons for using ecto with Drupal.
- Don’t use the extended entry area. Ever. Manually enter <!—break—> when you want to break.
- Use the MovableType API so you can set your filter and categories. Remember to turn it on in Drupal’s settings.
- Setup your time zone on the server correctly. In ecto, remember to set your server’s timezone in Weblog → Edit Settings… so that posts appear as the right time when edited.
- Allow TrackBack is meaningless. Don’t even bother.
- Allow comments works. None is none, Closed is Read Only, and Open is Read/Write.
- ecto apparently will not give you Textile or Markdown previews, even if the filter is named properly. No idea why. (Yes, latest version; the annoying dialogs made sure of that. Yes, I can turn them off, but then I wouldn’t update.)
Have you sent this information to the author of ecto? If I do decide to ditch MT, the lack of previews in ecto is a serious negative for Drupal.
I’m almost moving back to ecto from marsedit, for the simple reason that ecto will look at the site, and find all the blogs on it, and you can make Druapl present an xmlrpc interface that will let you edit any page on the site – I have an ecto blog for my real blog and an ecto blog for the normal nodes. Very cool. I can’t figure out how to make marsedit do this, though – it’s something to do with the blog id, but there’s been no time for me to dig..
I alerted James Walker to your entry and I’ll gladly provide some workarounds in ecto for point 6. It basically drills down to the keys drupal uses for the available formatting list. In MT, the keys are names (markdown, textile, etc). In Drupal, those are numbers and they may vary per install. I’ll sort out a way so ecto also looks at the formatting name (even though that is not fixed either…).
let me try to address:
1 - I tried to address that here: http://www.codepoetry.net/archives/2005/02/08/hacking_blogapimodule.php
2, 3 and 5 - good tips. This is exactly what's intended.
4 - True enough - was a limit of drupal's old trackback module (which was a pretty limited implementation). I'm told that per-node trackback settings have been implemented in CVS - I will take a look.
6 - Adriaan and I have discussed this - I will prepare a patch that sends the filter name as the key - and we'll have to document how to name filters correctly ... Sadly it's the best we can do with the given APIs.
Hope that helps - and please, when you find bugs report them at drupal.org so we can get things fixed .
Thanks
I added a workaround in ecto 2.2.3 so you can use ecto to preview your Drupal entries. If you have a Markdown or Textile filter, make sure the filters are named as such in the “input formats” section of your Drupal admin config area. HTH!
Can anyone help? When I post to my Drupal site using Ecto the post goes in fine. But if refresh the post in Ecto it comes up with crap replacing the quotes marks and non-standard characters. I have the “encode HTML entries” box checked. Post your ideas here or email me on mike at mbites dot com. Thanks!
Oh, and I use a Mac