The Background: The templates that control the html output of movable type for the PSU blogs are controlled from one central location. The upside of this is that as new features are added, blog users don't have to worry about changing their templates. The downside of this is that bloggers no longer have total control of their blogs. This was a tricky decision, and I'll probably write more about all the factors that went into it at some point in the future. I believe that we will be able to provide users with the tools to customize their blogs to meet their needs.
The Problem: Some blog users want to use Google Analytics to track the activity on their blogs. Existing Google Analytics plugins for movable type required your google tracking number to be added to a template file, so this wouldn't work for our setup.
The Solution: I wrote a plugin that stores the tracking code separately for each blog. All we have to do now is add the output from the plugin to the templates that everyone is using. If the user doesn't enter a tracking code, then the plugin doesn't output anything.
This plugin is currently not installed on the PSU blogs server, but I hope to have it made available sometime in the next month.
You can download a copy of the plugin.
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