A look inside Media Manager
Building Media Manager has been an incredible experience for me. Not only has it kept me hacking, but it has also taught me so much about how Movable Type is built, and how extensible of a platform it really is. On the surface Movable Type appears to provide only a limited set of hooks for a developer to take advantage of. But what I have found is that Movable Type is more than just a platform for plugin developers, but a platform for application developers as well.
I wanted Media Manager to be more than just a set of template tags, I wanted to add functionality across all aspects of the Movable Type application, and I wanted it to have a complex user interface of its own. And over the course of the past 4-5 months that I have spent working on Media Manager, I have been shown and I have discovered some incredible techniques that have allowed me to make Media Manager a completely integrated Movable Type application.
This series of articles will be posted to Six Apart's ProNet weblog. In this first installment I discuss how certain aspects of the Media Manager plugin were built. I will share code samples, discuss the underpinnings of Movable Type’s architecture, and show how you can make the most of Movable Type as a software platform.
