tips and tricks for movable type

That's brilliant! I've had to edit a few comments recently, and this would have made it so much quicker than getting to the entry and finding out which of the three comments by the same person was the problematice one! I already have the permalink to the comment on the individual archive page around the comment date, so I (again) wrapped the link code around the P in Posted. Now I have both toys! Thanks heaps. :)

Thanks for this great tip!

On some (most) Bulletin board systems a visitor can also edit his own comments. That would also be a nice feature but probably only possible in combination with a visitors-login. (like PMachine?) But maybe with cookies this could also be done? If so it's a feature request for Ben I think.

Lawrence

Nice trick…I may end up adopting it on my site.

Just a quick brainstorm, too. If you want to add a teense bit more CSS code to hide the link even more than it already is, add cursor: text; to your 'edit' class. Currently, while there's no text decoration to visually clue the link's existance, mousing over it changes the cursor to a hand. By setting the cursor to the 'text' cursor (the 'I-bar'), it will look exactly the same as when you're mousing over any other text.

Caveat: At least, it'll work on Windows boxes. I'm at work, not at home, so can't verify that cursor display behavior is the same on the Mac, and my brain's not kicking in enough for me to be sure. In any case, it's another idea….

Just following up on my earlier post — the cursor: text; declaration does display correctly on Macs (at least under IE 5.2.1 and Netscape 7.0) just as it does under Windows. With some slight modifications to your code, I've now got virtually invisible 'edit' links for my posts and comments — details can be found here, if you want.

Here's a little hack I came up with last night to allow inline editing of MT entries. It's messy, but it works!

<script>
c = document.cookie;
s1 = c.split('=');
s2 = unescape(s1[1]);
s3 = s2.split('::');
if (s3[0] == "<$MTEntryAuthor$>") {
document.write('<a href="<$MTCGIPath$>mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=<$MTEntryID$>&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>">[edit]</a>');
}
</script>

Just insert that anywhere within your <MTEntries> block and you should be good! It'd probably be safer to hide it within a .js file on your webserver and call the script using script src, but you get the idea.

Oh. I forgot to mention that if you blog resides somewhere other than <$MTCGIPath> (which mine does), you must manually edit the App.pm module to have MT set your login cookie to '/' as described here.