As reported a few times before, I have been prying time here and there to work on a prototype web site, that replaces a current, hand edited Low Threshold Applications web site with a dynamic one authored in MovableType. I am just polishing off a new add-on hack that uses PHP and mySQL to dome nifty magic.

We are making progress on moving the old content over, but one of the last features to tackle (I think) was a dynamic generated equivalent of the LTA Contributors List where it lists the authors names, emails, organizations, and a list and links to the content they had authored.

After exploring the available tags in MovableType, plugins, I was still not finding a simple way to do this. Yes, MT can sift through entries sorted by authors, but you have to know all the author username in advance, so every new author would mean a rewrite of the template. Not dynamic enough for me.

I found a solution very close to what I was after from Scriptygoddess (a heavenly MT resource), MT hacks: Master Author Archive, MySQL version and with not too much leverage, was able to customize my own. Basically, I use PHP to pull info on all the authors on this particular blog, then for each author, echo their contact details. Under each, he trudge the database again, and for each author, pull just the entry titles they have posted to build a list and links.

However doing this the way we wanted meant needing extra information on the author, as MT’s author table just lists their login name and email, and I needed their full name, and their organization/affiliation. So my approach here was to create my own local author table in the MT database, and tie it to the MT one via the MT generated author_id (I am likely losing all of the non programmers here, bye ;-).