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 4.1 (however, due to an oversight on my part, the .gz source package requires Qt 4.2 to build; grab the source RPM if you use Qt 4.1).

This is by the same author as the Catkin application, which was a manager for Blosxom blogs. This is a fresh rewrite, using Qt 4.1 (instead of 3.3) and with the Blosxom-related parts removed. They are still in CVS, however, and may be restored in the future. The old releases are still available at Sourceforge.

Issues: Qt 4.1 text editor widgets can be slow, particularly on Mac OS X. This has improved somewhat in recent versions, but may still be noticeable when composing long articles. The same widget in version 4.2 sometimes does not update properly when adding a scroll bar when the text inside starts to exceed the size of the widget. This was a Qt bug, which was fixed in Qt 4.2.3.

Also, when quickposting multiple paragraphs from web browsers, only a single newline will appear between paragraphs, not two (i.e. a blank line). I may fix this in a patch release. Also, the "loading" taskbar entry will appear when starting QTM from the menu in KDE (but not in GNOME). I recommend disabling the use of QPlainTextEdit if compiling against Qt 4.4, because the class is buggy, by configuring with the DONT_USE_PTE option; see the INSTALL file for details (it is now disabled by default).

Markdown requires an external script; it is set up to use the normal Perl Markdown script (you can try specifying your own scripting language and parser in the Preferences). Debian and Ubuntu provide Markdown packages; RPMs from the OpenSUSE repositories bundle it, as do Windows and Mac OS X binaries (but if you want to use it on Windows, you will need to install Perl).

The Mac OS X binary was built using OS X Tiger, and uses Qt 4.5, which means it requires OS X 10.3.9 or Tiger. The Ubuntu Feisty binary was built using Qt 4.3, which is available in the feisty-backports repository; instructions on how to enable this are available on the Ubuntu website. I have not tried installing it on a system with only Qt 4.2.

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

1.1 (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)

0.7 (24th Oct 2008):

* New feature: Multiple accounts
* New feature: Assistance to user in filling out location/server details, depending on which CMS or blog service is in use
* Build system: Use of QPlainTextEdit disabled by default (because it is buggy)
* Build system: D-Bus and system tray now enabled by default where available
* "Deprecated type conversion" warnings eliminated
* Recent files: tenth entry has hotkey 0 (not 1), ampersands correctly encoded
* Number of secondary categories displayed in heading
* Preview/console menu entries change to "Exit preview/console" when activated
* Stopped adding XML-RPC faultcodes to accounts tree

0.6.3 (7th June 2008):

New feature: recent files menu in both the system tray icon and each window
New feature: two new D-Bus signals, quickpostTemplatesUpdated and quickpostTemplateTitlesUpdated
Bug fix: use double newlines when pasting text as Blockquotes
Bug fix: strips out extra newlines when pasting text as lists
Bug fix: proportions of the two sides of the quickpost template dialog set correctly
Build system: now use a CMake configure_file command to generate qtm_version.h (had not been generating properly on Mac for some reason)
Build system: now uses full paths for all generated files, to facilitate out-of-source builds
Build system: all generated files included in "make clean" list
Also, the files account_form.ui and account_form41.ui have been renamed PrefsForm.ui and PrefsForm41.ui, in preparation for separating the accounts and preferences dialogs in 0.7

0.6.2 (17th May 2008):

New feature: D-Bus interface, allowing other programs to open entries in QTM and to use its quickpost feature
Bug fix: Fixed typo which stopped the option to open a new blank window at startup from working

0.6.1 (14th May 2008):

New feature: now includes user agent string when making HTTP requests, so that QTM shows up in web server statistics
Improvement: now uses a QPlainTextEdit on Qt 4.4, rather than the heavier old QTextEdit, as console and editor widgets
Search widget: can now interact with a QPlainTextEdit as well as an old QTextEdit
Build system: building universal binaries no longer the default as it is really only necessary for distributors, not end users building from source
Build system: version number now inserted into the program dynamically, using a define in a header built by a shell script/batch file
Bug fix: stopped loading of system-try icon image on the Mac, where it is not displayed

0.6.0.1 (28th April 2008):

Compatibility: restored Qt 4.2 compatibility by removing Qt 4.3-specific layout features (so people unaffected by this, such as those using any recent Linux OS, don't need to upgrade)