infinite sushi

After two months of testing, I'm satisfied enough to upgrade ecto3's status from alpha to beta. Thanks to the massive amount of feedback I received via the support forum and by email I was able to smoothen wrinkles, fix bugs, and add some more features. The beta stage will be mostly about adding to the feature set, documentation and opening up the plugin interface.

The first beta version of ecto adds initial AppleScript support and a new set of plugins for notifications.

The first notification plugin I wrote is to publish a tweet on twitter.com after a post was successfully published. You can download it as Twitter.zip. Unarchive and double-click to let the Finder invoke ecto3 to install the plugin. To set it up, go to Settings under the ecto menu and choose the Tools… menu item. Choose the settings pane for Twitter and enter your login credentials and a twitter template (you can leave it blank to use the default template).

The initial AppleScript library is closely modeled to the architecture of ecto3. If you do not use AppleScript, you can ignore the text that follows.

Here's a sample script to publish an entry:

tell application "ecto"
  set account_list to accounts whose name is "MT4"
  set a to first item of account_list
  set blogs_list to blogs of a
  set b to first item of blogs_list
  tell b
    set e to make new entry
    publish e
  end tell
end tell

If you prefer to have a document popup for the user to edit the entry, use "edit e" instead. If you make changes to the entry via AppleScript while an editor is open, invoke "edit" again.

To upload an image, you can use, for example:

tell application "ecto"
  set b to selected blog
  set att to make new image with properties {filepath:"/Users/foo/Desktop/foo.png", scales:false, filename:"foo.png", thumbnail:false}
  properties of att
  upload att to blog b
  delay 30
  set upurl to url of att
end tell

Since ecto uploads files asynchronously, you will need to use a delay or your script will proceed to the next statement while the upload is still in progress. You should also check if the web address of the uploaded attachment is valid. If it is not, the upload has not been completed or has failed.

More to come!