I've been trying to finish up the self-installer for the mt-screen gewgaw (and I suppose "mt-screen" is as good a name as any). Some good things from this system:
- It provides a new structure for nonerror status feedback. For example, you can be warned you forgot to enter the required name or email address when you preview instead of when you try to post. You'll see on preview that (or if) your comment will be screened.
- It's implemented using inheritance-based OO; there is only one change to the real Comments.pm and none to CMS.pm, because the new code is in new CGIs that inherit from/call to the real MT::App classes. (The CMS component sounds very like mt-blacklist's, I hear from Phil Ringnalda, but I didn't look or copy or anything. Honest.)
- It could become an infrastructure component for comment gadgets, through plugins. I was going to do that at first, as I said before, but coding my part then factoring it into an infrastructure is the simplest thing.
Unfortunately building the autoinstaller keeps uncovering parts I forgot and insufficiently designed. The boring parts on which I'm blocked this second are:
- Recoding the PostingStatusMessage bits. Writing the actual template code revealed problems with my error classifications.
- I wanted to move the email MT sends when a comment is posted out to a .tmpl file, to edit more easily (ignoring that I still have to change the real Comments.pm to do that, heh). I forgot until this morning.
- Automated install is scary. Maybe I should have it let you select which parts to automatically do, and only say how to do the others... but then, only people who know what's what care about this, as long as it works.
This is all preparatory to the PGP junk; I installed GnuPG and GPGshell recently to see how easy it'll be. Answer: not very. Mostly that's because the concepts around PGP are hard; key management is a tall block over which to stumble. There could be a niche for a minimalist "sign this text" application, if PGP were to soak into general net infrastructure.
I also didn't mention before that social network integration (read: FOAF) could allow "whitelist fallout" so friends of your friends could post too without you explicitly whitelisting them... but that's quite a ways off yet with all this other stuff before it.
