When I saw this announcement about Mark Pasc's Order Plugin for Movable Type, I decided to check it out. Looking at the examples included in both the announcement and plugin pages, I came up with an idea of how I'd like to be able to implement this into my site. Currently, the main index page is set up to show the last 10 entries. I wanted to integrate my action stream into the main index for my site by figuring out the date of the last (10th) entry on the page, and include all the action stream data from that date forward.
I figured it could be done with some sort of conditional argument. However, I didn't have a clue on how to begin to write the template code. So I posed the question to the MT ProNet list.
Mark himself responded to my query with the following code:
The code worked perfectly. What I did was create a template module that I could set up as an include on the main index page. Here is the code for my module:
Once I had set up the template module, I just replaced the <mt:entries> container tags with my new template module in the main index template. The result is here.
I'm not yet using it "live" on my site, as I'm reimagining my website in light of the release of MT 4.2 Pro. But its definitely something I'm considering.
Hi Ryan,
I saw your comment over at the EatDrinkSleepMovableType site regarding the Amazon WishList Action Streams plugin.
I, too, had the same problem. I just set it and forget about it. Then I found that the feed had in fact updated. I found this by going to my profile and clicking on the Action Streams link on the left. This is a sort of activity log for the Action Stream. All my wishlist items were there, but they were hidden. Don't know why. I set them to show, rebuilt, and it worked.
Now I need to figure out why they're being hidden by default, and how to get the Wishlist thumbnails to show. Dan doesn't seem to be responding to comments (or even approving them).
Cheers,
Gautam Patel
Gautam,
I think this is just an issue with certain types of feeds for the initial grabbing of the feed. I noticed similar behavior with the Netflix feed as well. The initial feed leaves things as hidden because it also grabs things that are older as the same time. Like it'll grab the last 5 events and have them show up as the same time, even though they happened at different times. So the behavior you describe is I think desirable, because then you can go into your stream and manually make active the stream items you want in this case. After the intitial feed grab things work as they should. As for the wishlist thumbnail...look at the code for the dashboard widget...I think that it show's the Youtube thumbnails...so that might give you an idea of the template tag to do that. I'll look around more when I get the chance and let you know if I figure it out.
-Ryan