QTM

QTM is a blog management app which uses the Blogger, MetaWeblog and Movable Type APIs to submit and (in the future) edit and otherwise manage entries on a blog. Presently, however, it is possible to compose, format, preview and submit entries, in one or more categories, and edit newly submitted entries. Requires Qt v4.4 or later.

Issues:

(1) There are known to be problems with some versions of Qt's text editor widget; in the case of early 4.1.* versions, the problem is slowness, and on version 4.2 the problem is not displaying the bottom of the widget's text when a scrollbar is added. This problem is replicated in the QPlainTextEdit widget in Qt 4.4 at the time of this writing, and although this particular bug has disappeared in recent versions of Qt, the QPlainTextEdit widget is still sub-par compared to QTextEdit. As a result, I have used QTextEdit by default in the current version.

(2) When using QuickPost to copy multiple paragraphs of text from a web page into a new entry, you may find that there is no blank line between paragraphs, just a single carriage return. This may be fixed in a future release.

(3) When posting an entry, your categories may not be posted; specifically it may update the blog's category list rather than post those you chose for the entry to hand. If you find your post has not been categorised, use the
"Update this post's categories" entry in the File menu.

(4) Markdown support requires an external Markdown parser, which requires Perl (there are versions for other scripting languages). On the Mac, the parser is provided in the bundle; on Linux, the QTM binary may depend on another Markdown package. On Windows, the script is provided, and you will need to install Perl yourself, and configure QTM so that it knows where to find Perl.

(Markdown support is provided, and not Textile or any other formatting, because the Markdown parser works on the command line, and the others do not. It also seems to be the most popular outside the Textpattern community. I do have an internal Markdown parser in the works and am considering porting Textile to Qt, so I may provide those features in the future.)

Any enquiries and suggestions to me at indigojo at blogistan.co.uk. Please, no requests for the normal features of blog managers like ecto - most of these are on my wish list anyway.

Packages for Ubuntu (Dapper, Gutsy, Hardy and Intrepid) are also available: put this line into your /etc/apt/sources.list (replace hardy with your version, all lowercase, if necessary):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/indigojo/ubuntu hardy main

Packages for OpenSUSE 10.3 or later, Fedora 8 or later, and Mandriva 2008 can be found at the OpenSUSE build service; see this page for details on using your package management:

http://qtm.blogistan.co.uk/content/using-online-repositories

You can download them directly from:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/IndigoJo

1.3.2 (2nd May 2011):

Compatibility: always opens a new window on startup when Unity is detected (to make sure the icon always appears)
New feature: adding a title to an embedded image, and XHTML-friendly terminated image tags
New feature: Suppress "read more" inserts from newspaper websites
Improvement: less strict HTML entity detection; entity highlighting now ends with a space or a semicolon. (This is because browsers are not strict about XML validity, and will display an invalid entity as plain text, and content management systems will convert ampersands.)

1.3.1 (29th September 2010):

Bug fix: In syntax highlighting, the colour specified for colouring HTML tags was used as the background for entities at start-up due to typo

1.3 (7th Sept 2010):

* HTML Syntax highlighting, with configurable colours
* Uses Qt's network manager class, which requires Qt 4.4.0

1.2 (3rd Aug 2010):

New feature: Posting of entries using HTTPS
New feature: Ability to fetch existing tags on a Wordpress blog
Bug fix: blogid is now always a string, as per the standard metaWeblog API (SF bug 2846390)
Bug fix: was including newlines in category IDs, causing failures (SF bug 2846454)
Bug fix: Checkbox values in new accounts wouldn't take
Bug fix: Values written automatically when selecting a self-hosted blog type might not have taken
Bug fix: Port settings now honoured
Bug fix: Now only submits date and time when posting an edit when the
relevant option is enabled (this had been causing posts to de-publish as a result of wrong times being sent)

1.1 (26th June 2009):

New feature: Ability to create categories (in Wordpress blogs only)
New feature: Decodes XML entities such as & in category, blog and
account names
Improvement: Will now run Markdown from the Markdown subdirectory of the
source bundle, whether QTM is built in-source or in a 'build' directory
Bug fix: Now includes [*] placeholder whenever setting the main window title
(to stop console warnings when "setWindowModified" is called)
Bug fix: "Allow trackbacks" setting in accounts form wouldn't keep on second
account down.

1.0 (15th June 2009):

New feature: Support for Wordpress-style tags
User interface: Pressing Esc closes the search widget
User interface: Progress bar, which monitors progress of posting operations (only, at the moment)
New feature: Save all
Build system: New "confclean" target
Mac: System tray icon no longer uses the Qt STI class, as it is not actually a system tray icon on the Mac but uses the dock icon
Bug fix: About box didn't display version number when invoked from the Mac supermenu
Bug fix: In Tidy Paste, replace single newlines with single spaces rather than just removing them
Bug fix: Now fetches the first blog's categories when switching accounts
Bug fix: Now fetches account attributes (allow comments, etc) when starting up (may have fixed bug where categories were not posted)
Bug fix: Now sets allow comments/trackback boxes in side widget according to preferences
Bug fix: Changed the shortcuts in the Insert menu to make them unique
Bug fix: Fixed typo which was preventing "allow comments" working in the second account in the list

0.7.4 (28th February 2009):

New feature: Tidy paste, which tidies up multiple spaces (by reducing them to one) and single newlines in paragraphs (by removing them). Both of these are common in PDFs and probably other document formats. (HTML itself ignores both, but most content management systems don't.)

0.7.3.2 (12th February 2009):

Bug fix: Sets the default Perl location to the ActivePerl standard install path on Windows, rather than /usr/bin/perl
Bug fix: Corrected enforcement of UTF-8 encoding for Markdown, so that it doesn't come out with weird characters instead of apostrophes or UK pound signs
Bug fix: Disabled "strip paragraph tags" as this feature clashes with some multi-paragraph tags such as "blockquote"

0.7.3.1 (27th Jan 2009):

Bug fix: Correctly set the default Markdown script location when installing it to a "share" location

0.7.3 (24th Jan 2009):

New feature: Running Markdown before posting a new entry, with the option to strip paragraph tags

0.7.2 (20th January 2009):

New feature; Markdown support. This relies on an external Perl script, which can be installed along with QTM or not (some distributions provide it).

0.7.1.3 (8th January 2009):

Compatibility: Restored Qt 4.1 compatibility by fixing problems with compile-time isolators (#if blocks), and removing references to widgets which are not present when Qt 4.1 is used. (Doesn't affect later versions of Qt, so no new binaries, except for Ubuntu Dapper: see http://qtm.blogistan.co.uk/content/using-online-repositories#apt )

0.7.1.1 (3rd January 2009):

Bug fix: Fixed bug which caused the wrong blog ID to be sent out in XML-RPC requests after changing accounts in certain circumstances

0.7.1 (3rd January 2009):

New feature: Ability to set background and text colours in the editor, preview and console (requires Qt 4.2 at present)
Improvement: Auto-sets local storage directory if there isn't one
Improvement: Runs the prefs then the accounts for a first-time user if they click "Yes" in the start-up dialog (and displays "Stage [1/2] of 2" on the dialog titles)
Improvement: When the category selectors are displayed, searches for categories if there are already none
Improvement: Sets the status to "dirty" when changing the blogs or categories only if there is text in the main entry widget
Improvement: Removed redundant EditingWindow constructor
Improvement: Prepends / to the location field, as webservers require full paths (e.g. /mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi or /xmlrpc.php, NOT just xmlrpc.php)
Bug fix: Fixed crash which occurred in the accounts dialog after a new account was deleted and it was the only account
Bug fix: Corrects start-up behaviour for new users, i.e. stops prompting them for prefs even after they have specified their preferences
Bug fix: Now auto-refreshes blog list after using accounts dialog when there is only one account
Bug fix: Failed to store auto-filled server and location details (esp. on wordpress.com sites)