AMK4 responded to the previous entry with some thoughts on how I might work around the fact that the weathernws plugin doesn’t work well with ecto and NetNewsWire (the blog isn’t completely and cleanly rebuilt after posting when the plugin is installed).
I had been using an include template to provide the weather content. AMK4 suggested instead that I create a new index template using the same code as in the include template. This accomplishes two things: since the weather code is no longer part of the primary index, the site should rebuild cleanly. Plus, the entire site isn’t rebuilt each hour; just the weather template, which is much smaller than the entire primary index.
I set things up as described, and still couldn’t post. I’m not sure of this, but it appears that simply having the plugin installed in the plugins directory caused things not to work.
My simple fix(hack): since the rebuild of the weather template is done via a script run out of cron, I modified the script to chmod 755 the weathernws plugin, run mt-rebuild as before, and then chmod 000 the plugin again. Once chmoded to 000 it’s as if the plugin isn’t there and posting works fine. There does exist the possibility of a race condition, when a new post is published when the weather cron job is running, but it’s highly unlikely.
Thanks to all who’ve provided assistance while I sorted this one out.