Introducing Publish Queue Manager for Movable Type
An essential component of any large scale Movable Type installation is "Publish Queue." Publish Queue is a system by which files published by Movable Type are published in the background at the next available moment, as opposed to slowing down the commenting system and application as MT publishes lower priority files.
For the longest time, Publish Queue was a black box. Users had absolutely no idea what it was doing and how many files were in it awaiting publication. This made diagnostics very difficult, if not virtually impossible.
Well, not any longer. Publish Queue Manager provides the administrative console you need to better manage your queue.
Publish Queue Manager is 100% open source, and it needs your help. I have put in place a basic UI framework for viewing and managing the queue, but there is so much more a power user would want to do than to simply view and delete jobs. You may for example want to change the priority of a job, or even filter the jobs as they appear on the screen. You may want to have some way to check if Publish Queue is running properly. You may want a publish queue dashboard widget. Who knows, I leave that up to you. By the way, if you have an idea or feature request for Publish Queue Manager, leave a comment here to let other developers know what you need.
If you are a developer and want to help, then please let me know. Feel free to check out a copy of the plugin from subversion and get to hacking. If you don't know how to hack Movable Type plugins, consider checking out our recently updated Movable Type Developer Guides. They can help.
Enjoy.
Filed in Movable Type, Open Source, Personal Projects and tagged movable type, open source, personal project, publish queue, publish queue manager, the schwartz
8 Comments
Note to self - would like a way to see Publish Queue entries that have resulted in an error. And what that error was.
Byrne at 2008-10-20T15:51:40-08:00
Note to Byrne - this rocks.
David Jacobs at 2008-10-20T16:40:09-08:00
Thanks to Jay Allen for his bug fixes. And FYI - I just released 0.92 - which allows you to change the priority of jobs on the queue at will. Muaaah-hah-hah-haaaa!
Byrne at 2008-10-20T20:53:51-08:00
You are like a GOD!
Dan Wolfgang at 2008-10-21T07:07:08-08:00
Testing this on MT4.21-en. Even though I have set a template to publish on Queu, saved and republished the template, I still get the following error message when I try to see the Manage Publish Queue list:
It appears that your have never used publish queue before. To enable publish queue, set any template to publish "Via Publish Queue" and then save and publish that template. Then return to this screen to see everything humming along.
Elise at 2008-10-21T17:04:29-08:00
This plugin piqued my interest in the previously unused publishing queue and I wanted to test if it helps anywhere.
However, every time I go into the queue manager it says "The selected jobs were deleted".
I don't know if it is deleting jobs or not, but there's never been anything in my queue!
Richard at 2008-10-22T05:07:17-08:00
That is something I have seen as well. Its weird and I am not sure at a glance why that message is always appearing! But I will fix it. Thank you!
Byrne at 2008-10-22T07:44:08-08:00
@Richard - FYI, the issue reported has been fixed in 0.94 of PQ Manager. Thanks for the report!
Byrne at 2008-10-23T17:52:41-08:00