CREATING MT OBJECT

    $mt = new MovableType('http://mt.handalak.com/cgi-bin/mt-xmlrpc.cgi');
    # or
    $mt = new MovableType('http://author.handalak.com/rsd.xml');
    # or even..
    $mt = new MovableType('/home/sherzodr/public_html/author/rsd.xml');

Notice, you need to pass at least one argument while creating MT object, that is the location of your either mt-xmlrpc.cgi file, or your web site's rsd.xml file. Default templates of MT already generate rsd.xml file for you. If they don't, you should get one from http://www.movabletype.org/

If your rsd.xml file is available locally, you should provide a full path to the file instead of providing it as a URL. Reading the file locally is more efficient than fetching it over the Web.

Giving it a location of your rsd.xml file is preferred, since it will ensure that your "blogId()" will be set properly. Otherwise, you will have to do it manually calling "blogId()" (see later).

It is very important that you get this one right. Otherwise, Net::MovableType will know neither about where your web site is nor how to access them.

MovableType requires you to provide valid username/password pair to do most of the things. So you need to tell MovableType object about your username and passwords, so it can use them to access the resources.

LOGGING IN

    # creating MT object with valid username/password:
    $mt = new MovableType($proxy, 'author', 'password');

    # or
    $mt = new MovableType($proxy);
    $mt->username('author');
    $mt->password('password');

"username()" and "password()" methods are used for both setting username and password, as well as for retrieving username and password for the current user. Just don't pass it any arguments should you wish to use for the latter purpose.

DEFINING A BLOG ID

As we will see in subsequent sections, most of the MovableType's methods operate on specific web log. For defining a default web log to operate on, after setting above username and password, you can also set your default blog id using "blogId()" method:

    $mt->blogId(1);

To be able to do this, you first need to know your blog id. There are no documented ways of retrieving your blog id, except for investigating the URL of your MovableType account panel. Just login to your MovableType control panel (through mt.cgi script). In the first screen, you should see a list of your web logs. Click on the web log in question, and look at the URL of the current window. In my case, it is:

    http://mt.handalak.com/cgi-bin/mt?__mode=menu&blog_id=1

Notice blog_id parameter? That's the one!

Wish you didn't have to go through all those steps to find out your blog id? Net::MovableType provides "resolveBlogId()" method, which accepts a name of the web log, and returns correct blogId:

    $blog_id = $mt->resolveBlogId('lost+found');
    $mt->blogId($blog_id);

Another way of retrieving information about your web logs is to get all the lists of your web logs by calling "getUsersBlogs()" method:

    $blogs = $mt->getUsersBlogs();

"getUsersBlogs()" returns list of blogs, where each blog is represented with a hashref. Each hashref holds such information as blogid, blogName and url. Following example lists all the blogs belonging to the current user:

    $blogs = $mt->getUsersBlogs();
    for $b ( @$blogs ) {
        printf("[%02d] %s\n\t%s\n", $b->{blogid}, $b->{blogName}, $b->{url})
    }

POSTING NEW ENTRY

"newPost()" expects at least a single argument, which should be a reference to a hash containing all the details of your new entry. First, let's define a new entry to be posted on our web log:

    $entry = {
        title       => "Hello World from Net::MovableType",
        description => "Look ma, no hands!"
    };

Now, we can pass above $entry to our "newPost()" method:

    $mt->newPost($entry);

In the above example, description field corresponds to Entry Body field of MovableType. This is accessible from within your templates through MTEntryBody tag. MovableType allows you to define more entry properties than we did above. Following is the list of all the attributes we could've defined in our above $entry:

dateCreated

Authored Date attribute of the entry. Format of the date should be in ISO.8601 format

mt_allow_comments

Should comments be allowed for this entry

mt_allow_pings

should pings be allowed for this entry

mt_convert_breaks

Should it use "Convert Breaks" text formatter?

mt_text_more

Extended entry

mt_excerpt

Excerpt of the entry

mt_keywords

Keywords for the entry

mt_tb_ping_urls

List of track back ping urls

Above entry is posted to your MT database. But you still don't see it in your weblog, do you? It's because, the entry is still not published. There are several ways of publishing an entry. If you pass a true value to "newPost()" as the second argument, it will publish your entry automatically:

    $mt->newPost($entry, 1);

You can also publish your post by calling "publishPost()" method. "publishPost()", however, needs to know id of the entry to publish. Our above "newPost()", luckily, already returns this information, which we've been ignoring until now:

    my $new_id = $mt->newPost($entry);
    $mt->publishPost($new_id);

You can also publish your post later, manually, by simply rebuilding your web log from within your MT control panel.

ENTRY CATEGORIES

Unfortunately, structure of our $entry doesn't have any slots for defining its categories. This task is performed by a separate procedure, "setPostCategories()".

"setPostCategories()" expects two arguments. First should be postid of the post to assign categories to, and second argument should either be a name of the primary category, or a list of categories in the form of an arrayref. In the latter case, the first category mentioned becomes entry's primary category.

For example, let's re-post our above $entry, but this time assign it to "Tutorials" category:

    $new_id = $mt->newPost($entry, 0);  # <-- not publishing it yet
    $mt->setPostCategories($new_id, "Tutorials");
    $mt->publishPost($new_id);

We could also assign a single entry to multiple categories. Say, to both "Tutorials" and "Daily Endeavors". But say, we want "Daily Endeavors" to be the primary category for this entry:

    $new_id = $mt->newPost($entry, 0);  # <-- not publishing it yet
    $mt->setPostCategories($newPid, ["Daily Endeavors", "Tutorials"]);
    $mt->publishPost($new_id);

Notice, in above examples we made sure that "newPost()" method didn't publish the entry by passing it false value as the second argument. If we published it, we again would end up having to re-publish the entry after calling "setPostCategories()", thus wasting unnecessary resources.

BROWSING ENTRIES

"getRecentPostTitles()" accepts a single argument, denoting the number of recent entries to retrieve. If you don't pass any arguments, it defaults to 1:

    $recentTitles = $mt->getRecentPostTitles(10);
    for my $post ( @$resentTitles ) {
        printf("[%03d] %s\n", $post->{postid}, $post->{title})
    }

Remember, even if you don't pass any arguments to "getRecentPostTitles()", it still returns an array of hashrefs, but this array will hold only one element:

    $recentTitle = $mt->getRecentPostTitles();
    printf("[%03d] %s\n", $recentTitles->[0]->{postid}, $recentTitles->[0]->{title});

Another way of browsing a list of entries, is through "getRecentPosts()" method. Use of this method is identical to above-discussed "getRecentPostTitles()", but this one returns a lot more information about each post. It can accept a single argument, denoting number of recent entries to retrieve.

Elements of the returned hash are compatible with the $entry we constructed in earlier sections.

RETREIVING A SINGLE ENTRY

    my $post = $mt->getPost(134);
    printf("Title: %s (%d)\n", $post->{title}, $post->{postid});
    printf("Excerpt: %s\n\n", $post->{mt_excerpt} );
    printf("BODY: \n%s\n", $post->{description});
    if ( $post->{mt_text_more} ) {
        printf("\nEXTENDED ENTRY:\n", $post->{mt_text_more} );
    }

EDITING ENTRY

    $mt->editPost($postid, $entry)

DELETING ENTRY

    $mt->deletePost(122);   # <-- deleting post 122

By default entries are deleted form the database, not from your web log. They usually fade away once your web log is rebuilt. However, it may be more desirable to remove the entry both from the database and from the web site at the same time.

This can be done by passing a true value as the second argument to "deletePost()". This ensures that your pages pertaining to the deleted entry are rebuilt:

    $mt->deletePost(122, 1); # <-- delet post 122, and rebuilt the web site

UPLOADING

Net::MovableType provides "upload()" method, which given a file contents, uploads it to your web site's archives folder. On success, returns the URL of the newly uploaded file.

"upload()" method accepts either a full path to your file, or a reference to its contents. Second argument to upload() should be the file's name. If you already provided file's full path as the first argument, Net::MovableType resolves the name of the file automatically, if it's missing.

If you passed the contents of the file as the first argument, you are required to provide the name of the file explicitly.

Consider the following code, which uploads a logo.gif file to your web site:

    $url = $mt->upload('D:\images\logo.gif');

Following example uploads the same file, but saves it as "my-log.gif", instead of "logo.gif":

    $url = $mt->upload('D:\images\logo.gif', 'my-logo.gif');

Following example downloads a file from some remote location, using LWP::Simple, and uploads it to your web site with name "image.jpeg":

    use LWP::Simple;

    $content = get('http://some.dot.com/image.jpeg');
    $url = $mt->upload( \$content, 'image.jpeg' )