Favicon Plugin
Favicon is a plugin for Movable Type that adds favicons to comments and trackbacks. Favicons are small icons shown in the browsers location bar for better identification of a website. To the right is shown a screenshot of the Favicon plugin in use. Read more about favicons here.
The user needs to leave a URL for favicon to work, since the favicon is being detected via the users URL either by the URL in the comment or in the trackback.
You can see a live example of the favicons by looking at the comment on this blog posting.
A primary key in the favicon plugin is speed. Therefore the favicon plugin caches pages that dont have a favicon for a week to speed up build performance. The very first time you rebuild all of your pages the rebuild process can be slow since the favicon plugin has to retrieve and cache all favicons available. Succeeding builds are as fasts as normal builds.
Installation
Just unzip the favicon.zip into the your Movable Type installation.
You might have to change the perl path in favicon.cgi from #!/usr/local/perl/bin/perl -w to #!/usr/bin/perl -w
Usage
Favicon is used in the templates where you show your comments and/or trackback. Normally in the Individual Entry Archive template
A typical usage would be something like this within the MTComments tag:
<MTFaviconCommentIfAvailable>
<$MTFaviconComment full="1"$>
</MTFaviconCommentIfAvailable>
other comment stuff like name, text, etc.
</MTComments>
and inside the MTPings tag:
<MTFaviconTrackbackIfAvailable>
<$MTFaviconTrackback full="1"$>
</MTFaviconTrackbackIfAvailable>
other trackback stuff like url, text, etc.
</MTPings>
or if you use a plugin like SimpleComments that combines comments and trackbacks:
<$MTFavicon full="1"$>
</MTFaviconIfAvailable>
You can also drop the use of the full argument and use the favicon URL yourself like this:
<img src="<$MTFavicon$>" alt="Siteicon" title="Siteicon" height="16" width="16" />
</MTFaviconIfAvailable>
Config
From the main menu, under Plugins, in your Movable Type installation there's a link to Run Favicon for the Favicon plugin. There you can see the favicons in the plugin data cache. You can from this page also delete individual favicon entries and delete all of the favicon entries.
Pages that dont have a favicon are cached for a week to speed up performance.
You can turn on debug information that will show up in your webservers error log by changing $DEBUG = 0; into $DEBUG = 1; in the favicon.pl file.
Requirements
Favicon has been tested and works with Movable Type version 3.3x
Limitations
Favicon does not work with Movable Type dynamic PHP publishing feature.
Version history
Version 1.4- Works with Movable Type 3.3x
- Fixes return from invalid user submitted URLs
- Fixed parsing of invalid user submitted URLs
- Fixed ping/comment issue
- First version
