MT as Feedback Manager
Franccois Nonnenmacher provides us with an example of how MT can be used for more then blogging with his novel use of the tool to collect and organize feedback. Its quite ingenious and illustrates a view point I can't agree with him more on.
MT is quite powerful and ripe for many other publishing and collaborative tasks once you dig into it. It's an area I encourage developers to explore and consider and hope Six Apart will foster as it heads down the platform path.
I would not recommend the use of the XML-RPC and Forms technique Franccois employs for a number of reasons.
First the use of mySQL is required. There are other databases that MT supports and tying your system to one particular database is no good design policy. Direct database interactions is tempting, but limiting and potentially dangerous to system stability. By-passing the data object abstraction layer in MT also by-passes a significant amount of application logic that they provide the system. This means future changes to MT could result in the maintenance headaches, broken code or worse -- data corruption.
I'd also not recommend the use of XML-RPC protocol for new development either. It has a number of shortcomings that I've written extensively about in the past that indicates a very limited future. The state of remote publishing protocols is not great currently, but I expect the Atom publishing protocol to emerge as the weapon of choice for MT and many other similar tools.
The MT API is better suited for these tasks. I would have developed a script using a simple MT::App subclass and the MT::Entry and MT::Placement objects to take in the feedback and create the weblog post. Using post_save callback hook of the MT::Comment object, responses to the feedback can be captured and email to the submitter.
