Movable Type and exporting entries
This is a rant, early warning for everyone. To make matters worse it’s geek related too. You’ve had your fair warning, if you find this boring you have only yourself to blame!
I’ve spent a fair amount of time this and yesterday evenings dealing with Movable Type and it’s absolutely awful export format. John Wiseman has come across the same problems.
The main problem is that it’s too simple. Entries are separated by 8 dashes on a line, while sections within an entry are separated by 5 dashes. If you have an entry that has those dashes in it then all hell breaks loose. I’ve resorted to writing my own code to process the format and that is of course hamstrung by the limitations of the format.
Writing my own parser wasn’t helped by the MT documentation for the import/export format being out of date. For example the CONVERT BREAKS documentation says that Valid values are either 0 or 1
but I end up with default as well.
Now MT has taken a bit of a hammering over the last week due to Six Apart and their announcement last week and I think much of it is justified. I would like to say that MT has provided me with a great platform to manage the site, I may not agree with the way they’re going with it, but that doesn’t take away from the usefulness of the product.
Anyway, I warned you that this was a geeky post, I don’t want to hear any complaints!