Categories provide an alternate means to the weblog's traditional chronological form of organizing entries. Movable Type allows you to enter a list of categories using a variety of methods and assign one or more to each of your entries. You can use MT's categorization facilities to group related entries despite chronology or simply as a means of filtering entry listings in the CMS more easily.

Each entry can be assigned one primary category and any number of secondary categories. The primary category is used when you wish to display information about just one of the categories to which an entry is...

continue reading ...

06.20.2005

UTF-8 Dirify bug and patch

Today we are releasing a patch to fix an issue for customers running Movable Type versions 3.16 or 3.17 and using UTF-8 character encoding on their weblogs. Specifically, a bug introduced in Movable Type 3.16 causes the dirify routine to preserve dashes in transformed text where, historically, it has suppressed them. This could be problematic because the dirify routine is used to create all URLs in Movable Type.

While default Movable Type installations are not adversely affected by this bug, there are certain common or legacy customizations (which will be detailed below) that could cause problems. For that reason,...

continue reading ...

Updated. Originally posted in early 2004.

The template edit windows and the New Entry edit windows in Movable Type can easily be made larger with a simple adjustment.

MT3.2

In the folder that contains your static MT files on your server, open the file style.css in a text editor.

To change the edit-entry window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; height: 400px; }

To change the template edit window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-template textarea.wide { width: 618px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-template textarea.wide...

continue reading ...

Question

How do I add a new weblog in Movable Type?

Answer

Assuming you have the necessary permissions to create weblogs in the system: • Determine the location for your new weblog and create the folder for it on your server, using FTP or a File Manager provided by your host. If your server is not running under cgiwrap or suexec, remember to set the permissions on the new folder to the UNIX equivalent of 777.

Tip: It may not always be necessary for you to create the weblog folder yourself: in version 3.21, Movable Type will try to create the folder...

continue reading ...

Page: 1 1 Page.

The New Themes - Making Sense of it all

Tutorial cross posted on Learning Movable Type and Movalog. With Movable Type 3.2, Six Apart launched a new markup and stylesheet structure that has also unified their three platforms. These new templates and stylesheets (from now on referred to as...

Continue reading "The New Themes - Making Sense of it all"

Posted on 09/04/2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Extending the Sidebar

Matthew writes I am trying to make the side bar in Movable type to extend to the bottom of the page. I have gotten it to work in IE but not firefox. You can take a look at my site...

Continue reading "Extending the Sidebar"...

continue reading ...

Perhaps one of the most underappreciated bits of functionality in past versions of Movable Type is the Activity Log. For years, all common actions that take place in a Movable Type installation have been logged, providing administrators with a view of lots of key information: • Successful logins and incorrect login attempts • Creation, updating or deletion of weblogs and entries, and deletion of comments and TrackBacks • Detailed errors generated from plugins • Search terms entered into Movable Type's integrated search engine (great for knowing your audience is having trouble finding)

But we've left all that alone in version 3.2 of Movable Type and made no improvements. Just kidding!...

continue reading ...

I don't have a complete knowledge on IRI. So below contents might have some misunderstandings. If you find one, please feedback to me.

* At first, this post was written in part of Cool IRI for a permalink. So in this post, you'll often see the words, "this plugin". "This plugin" means that a plugin for a Movable Type bloggin tool, which enables you to create a Cool IRI for blog archives.

You may be stunned by comparatively long page. I swear this content is not deeply technical and is just common knowledge. If you have no time to read it, just see some pictures. Perhaps it will do a little for you.

What means a "Cool" ?

If you've never heard of Cool URI, I...

continue reading ...

Question

When I save an entry or rebuild my site, I receive an error that says "Writing to filename.new failed".

Answer

End of the error message says No such file or directory

• Make sure that you have created the folder where you want Movable Type to publish your blog files.

• Make sure you have properly set your path(s) in Settings > Publishing1. In almost all cases, you should be using a full server path for Site Root ( and Archive Root, if enabled)2. (See How can I find my full server path? for more information.)

End of the error message says...

continue reading ...

Current version: 1.05 (Updated 2005/10/4)

Simply, Better File Uploader is a Movable Type plugin that allows you to create default settings for file uploads. Create default settings to: • Specify a folder to upload to • Append year/month/ to the upload path • Create a new entry or show HTML • Select a thumbnail size • Build photo galleries quicker

Better File Uploader is also the successor to A Better File Upload Template.

Installation

Better File Uploader requires the BigPAPI plugin. BigPAPI is included in the below distribution. Better File Uploader requires Movable Type version 3.2 or higher. • Download BetterFileUploader.zip and unzip. • Upload to your plugins/ folder, preserving directory structure. The result should one file in the...

continue reading ...

Those of you who have been blogging for at least a few years will remember a time all permalinks to individual weblog entries looked something like "http://www.example.com/002911.html" where 2911 was the entry ID of the entry in question. This scheme was not only unfriendly to users but also to search engines. Fast forward a few years and now we see the proliferation of search engine- and human-friendly URLs like the one for this entry thanks, in part, to Movable Type's basename field.

The entry basename, introduced in Movable Type 3.0D, consists of the first fifteen characters of an entry title with punctuation and spaces converted to URL-compatible characters. The basename is used by...

continue reading ...

Many people have asked me how to display the status of comments and trackbacks on the power edit entries screen. This hack will guide you through the process of adding two fields, as shown by the screenshot. One is a drop down menu for the comment status while the other is a checkbox for Trackback status.

First of all, open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 2584 find my $row = $obj->column_values;

and add underneath it $row->{"allow_comments_" . $obj->allow_comments} = 1;

Next, around line 2688 find $entry->title(scalar $q->param('title_' . $id));

and add underneath it $entry->allow_comments($q->param('allow_comments_' . $id)); my $allow_pings = $q->param('allow_pings_' . $id) || '0'; $entry->allow_pings($allow_pings);...

continue reading ...

John Gruber found (as I did recently) that the Movable Type RSS 0.91 template doesn't validate using the new RSS validator (kudos to Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby for developing the tool. Mine validates now.). John offers a way to fix it using a new custom plugin, <$MTrfc822BlogTimeZone$>. For those that already have my Regex plugin installed, you can do this instead: <lastBuildDate><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S"$> <$MTBlogTimezone regex="s/://"$></MTEntries></lastBuildDate> <pubDate><$MTDate format="%a, %d %b %Y...

continue reading ...

Question

Someone commented on or sent a trackback to my blog, and I never received the notification email.

Answer

Note: There was a bug introduced in version 3.14 which prevented notifications for moderated comments from being sent out. Please upgrade to version 3.16 or higher to eliminate this bug as a possible cause for this issue.

Check Settings

• Make sure you have specified a valid email address in your Author Profile.

• Make sure you have checked the appropriate options on the Settings > Feedback screen for Email notification, for both Comments...

continue reading ...

Question

I rebuilt my site, but no entries appear on my main page.

Answer

Check The Post Status For The Entry

Make sure that your entries are set to a status of Published and not Unpublished1. If you change the setting, you must remember to save the entry to update your site.

Check Your Default Weblog Display Settings

By default, Movable Type will use the Entries to Display setting in Settings > General : Default Weblog Display Settings2 to determine how many entries to display on the page (as well as on your other index templates).

If you've chosen...

continue reading ...

Another day, another plugin. This one lets you manipulate images. You can gather size, height, weight information from them and you can even resize them for whatever purpose you'd like. Nifty, eh?

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtembedimage-1_21.zip

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later • ImageMagick and the Image::Magick perl...

continue reading ...

A little while ago I converted my site to use the Smarty for dynamic templating. I'm still using Movable Type for the content management though. Click the 'more' link for an overview of how it all works together...

Smart Templates

The Smarty template engine for PHP is pretty sweet. There's a lot of power in dynamic template rendering. The most important for me is that I can change the shape of my...

continue reading ...

Professional Network member Kevin Shay wrote the following tutorial to introduce the community to his exciting new plugin and its development potential.

The BigPAPI plugin for Movable Type allows you to create plugins that can easily add features to Movable Type's interface. This article explains the background behind the develpment of BigPAPI, and walks through the creation of a simple working plugin.

Why BigPAPI?

With each new version, Movable Type has become friendlier to plugin development. The earliest plugins could do little more than add tags to the platform's templating system. Now (as of version 3.2), the Plugin API allows plugins to define not only template tags...

continue reading ...

Yes, I realize Movable Type is not a general-purpose content management system, but if you're in a pinch it can do wonders. Especially with this plugin, which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates. (Click the more link for more information.)

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtkeyvalues-1_53.zip

Installation

To install, place the...

continue reading ...

Here's a little plugin that provides some new Category tags for Movable Type.

Availability

You can download this plugin from here: mtcatx-1_5.zip

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later • MT-Regex (if using the 'pattern' attribute of the IfCategory or IfPrimaryCategory tag).

Installation

To install, place the 'catx.pl' file in your Movable Type...

continue reading ...

Question

I published a new entry, but no one on my notification list received the email telling them about it.

Answer

Note: There was a bug introduced in version 3.15 which affected the send notification feature. Please upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type to eliminate this bug as a possible cause for this issue.

Have You Sent the Notification?

The notifications for new entries are not sent out automatically, so make sure you have sent the notification after publishing your entry:

Navigate to the Edit Entry screen of the entry for...

continue reading ...