I finished Hacking Movable Type by Jay Allen, Brad Choate, Ben Hammersley, and Matthew Haughey. I actually finished it a few days ago, this is really the first chance I’ve had to sit down and write a review (I kept trying to write it at work, so I could just copy and paste it into the Blog..but nooooo.. apparently, I’m expected to actually work at work) So… Here’s the review!

Incredible suspense, amazing plot, intelligent characters, hot steamy sex scenes.. these are all things that are NOT in this book.. if you’re looking for those.. try a trashy romance Novel.. or maybe check out something over on Satan’s bookclub. If, however, you’re looking for a book that will teach your inner (or outer) geek the secrets of Movable Type.. this is it.

The book does assume a level of knowledge about Movable Type in general. So it does not cover the installation, go over all the MT tags that are available, talk about initial setup, or that kind of stuff… which is fine, that’s all covered in the documentation for Movable Type, and in the Movable Type Bible. The authors do state upfront that none of this stuff is covered..And while it is a technical book, so by nature it is dry material, the authors do their best to keep it an entertaining read.

Now, I’ll admit, that there is some information in the book that caused me to develop that ‘deer in the headlights’ look. In particular, the chapters that cover writing your own MT plugins.. waaaay outta my league. I read them, it looks like they contain lots of good and useful information, just not something I’d be comfortable trying right now.

In my opinion, the chapters covering the MT database itself, dynamic publishing, and some of the examples of what MT is capable of (Did you know, you can set it up to act like a dayplanner? complete with calendar!) were the most useful.

I’ll be incorporating some of the changes they talk about making to your templates in the next revision (things like a ‘most recent comments’ section, Template Modules – which have their own little tab in MT 3.2 – those kinds of things.) to the site.

I also learned how to backup my MT database (always a good thing) including the commands to add to Cron on my server to automate it (Now..if I could just figure out why the command errors out when cron runs it, but works fine when I run it…..) This is particularly useful, because now I don’t have to worry so much about hosing the site completely as I screw around with things. Granted, had I taken the time to learn more about SQL and mySQL, I could have found this information other places, its very helpful and nice to have it all in one spot, with the explanations of how MT interfaces with the database, as well as examples of ways to manipulate the information without going through the MT interface.

There is a full list of EVERY (yes every) database field used by a default installation of MT, as well as an explanation of what that field is used for.

All in all, a very informative, useful book. Its one I’m sure I’ll keep referring back to as I play more with MT… the book points users to a Hacking MT website (which as of this writing, didn’t have any content on it yet…but with MT 3.2 going to Beta at the same time this book got released, thats understandable). I’d imagine that there will be more examples and tips posted there, as well as any updates that are necessary to the tips in the book with the change to MT 3.2. Its a book I strongly recommend, especially to anyone interested in writing plugins for MT. I’ll give it 4 out of 5 stars