I got to thinking today about how I would really like ecto to offer comment management. It would be really nice to view, modify, add or delete comments from inside ecto. I was thinking about how this could be done and the inevitable answer fell from the sky. Columns.
So the idea is to replace the current list view with a columnar selector.
In the first pane, we have the name of the blog along with it’s favicon for kicks. In the second we have individual entries with an entry icon and then in the final we have a comments list. To the side of this you can have a preview drawer that includes meta data currently in the list view such as id, date and time posted, status, author and even text from the entry or comment. Double click on an entry or comment and it will come up in the main window which will have context sensitive tabs depending on whether it’s editing a comment or a post.
Update: Adriaan has informed me that this is currently not possible as the Movable type API does not allow 3rd party clients access to the comments table. I sent an e-mail to the sixapart people to see what I can dig up on that end. Maybe we’ll see this in MT 3.0?