Quick and Dirty: Clone Custom Field, Template Linked Files on Movable Type
This entry was originally published at my site's personal web log. Additional information or comments may be available on the original posting.
Movable Type is a pretty frustrating platform to work with because every so often (or, “way too often,” depending on who you ask) a function of the system simply doesn’t do what you’d expect it to do. Such is the case with the “Clone Blog” functionality. Although it dutifully copies most of a website from one “blog” object to another, a few things are missing.
Most notably, custom fields and templates’ linked files are not copied. This is a deal-breaker for any large installation that uses the built-in MT “Clone” feature.
To get around this limitation, I wrote a stupid, quick ‘n’ dirty PHP script to finish the cloning process, called finishclone.php. It takes only 1 argument: the “new ID” you are cloning to. If all goes well, you’ll see output like this:
[root@dev www]$ php finishclone.php 28 Cloning process complete. [root@dev www]$
In this example, 28 is the newly created blog’s ID. The blog you want to clone from is set as a constant within the script. I’ll leave modifying the script to support more flexible command line arguments as an exercise for the reader.
php /** * Ease the final steps in cloning a Movable Type blog. * * Description: This script should be run after Movable Type's "Clone Blog" * function has completed and before the cloned blog is used. * * Author: "Meitar Moscovitz" */ // Set constants. define('MT_ORIG_BLOG', 0); // the ID of the blog you are cloning from define('MYSQL_HOST', 'localhost'); define('MYSQL_USER', 'movabletype'); define('MYSQL_PASS', 'PASSWORD_HERE'); define('MYSQL_DB', 'movabletype'); // Get command line arguments. if (2 > $_SERVER['argc']) { die('Tell me the ID of the blog to clone into.'); } $blog_id = (int) $argv[1]; // Connect to db if ( !mysql_pconnect( MYSQL_HOST, MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_PASS ) ) { die( 'Connection to the database has failed: ' . mysql_error( ) ); } mysql_select_db( MYSQL_DB ); // Clone custom fields. $result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM mt_field WHERE field_blog_id='.MT_ORIG_BLOG.';'); while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($result)) { mysql_query( sprintf("INSERT INTO mt_field (" ."field_basename," ."field_blog_id," ."field_default," ."field_description," ."field_name," ."field_obj_type," ."field_options," ."field_required," ."field_tag," ."field_type) " ."VALUES('%s','%s','%s','%s','%s','%s','%s','%s','%s','%s');", mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_basename), mysql_real_escape_string($blog_id), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_default), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_description), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_name), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_obj_type), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_options), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_required), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_tag), mysql_real_escape_string($row->field_type) ) ) OR print mysql_error() . "\n"; } // Link template files to filesystem for git repositories. $arr = array(); $result = mysql_query('SELECT template_name,template_linked_file FROM mt_template WHERE template_blog_id='.MT_ORIG_BLOG.';'); while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($result)) { $arr[$row->template_name] = $row->template_linked_file; } foreach ($arr as $k => $v) { mysql_query("UPDATE mt_template SET template_linked_file='$v' WHERE template_blog_id=$blog_id AND template_name='$k';"); } print "Cloning process complete.\n";