David Raynes

It's been a while since I wrote just a plain plugin, and this doesn't really qualify as one. But it's close. I was inspired by a thread in the MT Support Forums today, and figured it was a good excuse to play with some of the new features in MT 2.6.

This is still a very preliminary version. I am far from finished. But it works, and there's enough code there for people to play around with in their blogs, so I figured I would release what I've got so far and keep working on it.

First, the new tags: MTVoteNumber, MTVoteAverage, and MTTotalValue. MTVoteNumber gives you the number of votes submitted. MTVoteAverage gives you the average vote value. MTTotalValue gives you the total value of all the votes.

Now, to cast a vote, use mt-vote.cgi. You'll have to setup a form or a link to a URL using the following fields: __mode, entry_id, and value. Set __mode to vote to cast the vote. The entry_id field contains the entry id on which to cast the vote, at value's value. For example, to cast a vote of 7 on entry 157, use the following URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/mt-path/mt-vote.cgi
?__mode=vote
&entry_id=157
&value=7

So, to use this plugin, download either vote.tar.gz or vote.zip, unpack it, and place mt-vote.cgi in your base MT directory, Vote.pm in the lib/MT/App/ directory, and votes.pl in the plugins/ directory.

Planned for future versions:

• Threshold Actions (see thread linked above)
• Spiffy configuration interface
• Whatever else I come up with or other people suggest/request

Update (2003-03-06 16:13):

• Added a new container tag, MTVotes, that contains entries sorted by highest average vote. You can use any of the standard MTEntries tags within it, including the MTVote tags. It takes two arguments: lastn which defaults to 1 and current_blog_only which when set to 1 (it defaults to 0) will limit the entries returned to only those in the current blog.
• Added an argument to MTVoteAverage: places determines the number of decimal places to allow in the average, defaults to 0.