Storing Your Plugin in Source Control

To make it easier for other Movable Type developers to collaborate on plugins you author, but also to make packaging and maintenance easier for yourself, the following conventions have been adopted by the community at large in regards to how you should store and manage your plugins in subversion, a popular and free source code control system.

/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/config.yaml
/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/PluginName-README.txt
/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/Makefile.PL
/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/MANIFEST.SKIP
/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/plugins/PluginName/lib/*
/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/plugins/PluginName/tmpl/*
/path/to/src/mt-plugins/trunk/PluginName/mt-static/plugins/PluginName/lib/*

The pattern, if not immediately evident, is to mirror the file structure of Movable Type itself. That way users wishing to install your plugin can follow these simple instructions and trust that all of your plugin’s files will wind up in the right place:

> cp PluginName-1.0.zip /tmp/
> cd /tmp/
> unzip PluginName-1.0.zip
> cp -a PluginName-1.0/* $MT_HOME

And sometimes the follow if you have placed your mt-static files in a directory other than $MT_HOME/mt-static/:

> cp -a PluginName-1.0/mt-static/* /path/to/mt-static/