Anonymous Public Posts

The Anonymous Public Posts Plugin for Movable Type and Melody provides the ability to accept unauthenticated (anonymous) entry submissions from any visitor to your published blog, regardless of whether or not they have an account or they are logged in.

DOWNLOAD

The plugin is hosted on GitHub so you can either clone the repo or you can download it in tgz or zip format on the downloads tab.

VERSION

0.1-beta (EXPERIMENTAL - not yet officially released)

REQUIREMENTS

  • Movable Type 4.2 or higher or any version of Melody
  • The Movable Type Community Pack, which is normally bundled with MT Pro and Enterprise

INSTALLATION

Download the code or the Git repo. Inside you will find a directory (under plugins) called AnonPublicPost. Simply copy the that directory from the archive into your plugins directory so that you have:

MT_DIR/plugins/AnonPublicPost

INITIAL SETUP

In order to use this plugin, you need to first set up two things:

  • An MT user account designated to be the default author for anonymous submitters
  • A modified version of the "create entry" index template that doesn't force users to sign in

Setting up the default user

  1. Create a new role that only has the permission to create entries (screenshot)
  2. Create a new user to act as the author of all anonymous entries.
  3. Assign the post-only role in #1 to the new author created in #2

Modify the Create Entry template

In this step, you need to modify the styles and javascript on the Create Entry index template so that the user has a choice whether to sign in or to post anonymously. This is an exercise left to the reader although contribution of a clear set of simple instructions would be welcome.

CONFIGURATION

The plugin has a mandatory configuration directive (set in mt-config.cgi), PublicPostDefaultUser, through which you specify the default author username created above:

PublicPostDefaultUser joeschmoe

Once this is set correctly, you should be set to go.

TODO

  • The plugin should probably prevent any logins to to the PublicPostDefaultUser account by default plus offer a config to ovverride that default.
  • Figure out a way via Perl to invalidate the session on output of the confirmation page without instead getting redirected to the long screen. Annoying!

VERSION HISTORY

  • 09/19/2009 - Initial private beta release of v0.1-beta

AUTHOR

This plugin was brought to you by Jay Allen, Principal of Endevver Consulting.

LICENSE

This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

BUG REPORTS AND FEATURE REQUESTS

If you find a bug in the plugin or would like to request a feature, you can check our bug tracker to see if it's already been filed and, if not, file a new ticket.

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