Like I previously mentioned, I have so far refused to leave MovableType (MT) behind for another CMS. MT was the first blogging software I used, and once I became familiar with it, I jumped into customizing many of the templates for my very simplistic needs. I could very easily move over to the one that won the war, WordPress (WP), but I don’t see that happening any time soon. If I were to switch, it would probably be to something other than WP. I like throwing support to the underdogs, especially when they are actually superior to number one.

Since my decision to stick with MT had already been made, I needed to figure out a way to connect IFTTT to my sites, but IFTTT only offered a channel for WP. That’s when my search led me to Richard Benson’s Posting to MovableType from ifttt, and his use of a modified xmlrpc.php (the piece that enables API use for third party apps and blogging software). IFTTT uses WP’s variation of the xmlrpc, and Richard wrote this to take in IFTTT’s data to be used with MT’s xmlrpc API. In his words:

So today I made a bridge that will allow anything that insists on WP implementation of xmlrpc to talk to MovableType. It’s a fairly simple solution, merely inserting the blogid and passing everything else on as is. It works for posting to MovableType, I have yet to test reading posts, but it should be easy enough to tweak if needed. Code after the jump….

Bear in mind that this will need to be in the root of your domain and called “xmlrpc.php” as ifttt will only look there, if you can, use a subdomain or a rewrite if putting it at the domain root is not desirable. It doesn’t need to be on the same site as your MT install, however.

Using this, combined with 3 IFTTT accounts and the three locations for my blogs, I was able to automate photo, video, and word posts through Flickr, Vimeo, and email. Ideally I would like to be able to use a single IFTTT account and a single xmlrpc.php file, but that is just not possible just yet.

I know I will need to move on from MT at some point, but until something becomes so broken that a solution like this can’t be found, MT will remain my CMS of choice.