Opposable Thumbs

So last week I was sitting around, lurking on #joiito when someone asked if anyone else on the channel was a MoveableType Perl wizard. Having programmed in Perl on and off for the past 6 years or so, I wouldn't call myself a guru or anything, but I have poked around in the MoveableType innards (though I hadn't actually implemented anything). So I responded. What he was asking for was a plugin that would allow people to vote on blog entries. He showed me an example of what he wanted, but, sadly, I didn't save it. However, based on that input and the basic direction to make it rather configurable, I started diving in. My first concern was where to store the data. As it turns out, starting with MT 2.6, there's a mechanism that allows a plugin to store arbitrary data using Perl's Storable module. The real issue, it occured to me, was how to get readers responses back into the system. Granted, I could just write a plain old CGI script to handle this, but it needed to be MT aware. Again, it turns out that, though this is reaching into the seemingly arcane aspects of MT plugin development, someone (Ben Trott I suspect) had the foresight to build MT in such a way as to make this rather straightforward. And they documented it well, too!! So here I present to you, the latest