My father has been writing a column for over 10 years. To date he has been distributing it via e-mail to a rather sizeable list. We have been talking about setting him up in a blog format and my question is this:

Is it possible to put all of this data in a database and then have MT draw upon the thousands of entries (2, 3, 4 or sometimes as many as 7 columns a week for 10 years is a lot) on a go-forward basis and do so automatically?

He's reached a point where he's really just recycling old messages and has a new project he'd like to work on - but his commitment to the regular distribution of his articles is such that he'd like it to continue. And I know his readers would like that as well.

I know I can get the content into a format that is usable by MT - it's the automatic daily display that i'm most interested in.

Thanks,

Rob

If you can get the data into MT's sql database, maybe using the import tool, then I reckon you should be able to set the status to Scheduled, fix the dates on the imported entries as appropriate and fire up a cron job.

So in a sensible sequence:
1. Decide which articles to publish on which dates in the future
2. Apply those dates to the articles
3. Import the articles into MT, setting the status to Scheduled on the way through
4. Set a cron job running

I've done different combinations of these ativities to a range of different records so I don't see why you shouldn't be able to put them all together.

I'm currently running version 2.6 I believe - I'm betting I have to upgrade to get that scheduled functionality?

Regardless - I need to do that anyway based on some of the plugins I want to use. Thanks for the response - it seemed reasonable that I could do so - glad to hear you've done something similar.`

Upgrading would be a wise choice! There was a ton of work done "under the covers" which makes 3.2 a better product.