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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 31 KB, 2050 words
Updated September 23, 2004 There are two basic ways to create an about page in Movable Type. The first is to just create it as any ordinary entry. Then use the permalink URL to link to it from your main page. Unless you want comments and trackbacks on your About page, disable them for that entry. The other method is to create a new index template just for your About information. The steps for this method are outlined as follows: 1. From the templates menu, select Create new index template. Name the template something recognizable as referring to an about page. Pick a name for the output file and enter it in the output file field. Use either the .html or .php extension for the...
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Movalog, Tutorials, 29 KB, 1076 words
MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup â just type out the content and voila, you're done.
This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.
There are 3 main...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 26 KB, 1326 words
The default Movable Type layouts don't give you a lot of choice in terms of navigation. Clicking on the top bar with the title of the weblog will take you back to the main page of the weblog. Every other nav element is in the sidebar. You can however, pretty easily add a horizontal nav bar, with links to important-to-first-timers, or frequently used areas of your site, such as archives, about, or contact links.
Adding horizontal nav bar requires adding a few lines of code right underneath the banner section in your index and archive templates and adding a few new elements to your style sheet. Once you've created your navigation code, the most efficient way to add the code to the...
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Brad Choate, Tutorials, 58 KB, 1826 words
The Touch of Hope web site is powered by Movable Type. It's more than your average blog site though. Don't let it's blogging slant fool you-- MT is a budding CMS!
The architecture is like this: • 1 blog for the site's basic content: welcome page, about page, Art for Hope page, request a site page, make a donation page, contact us page and the news and updates content. All of this is in...
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A List Apart, Tutorials, 19 KB, 2353 words
Apologies to Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra for the paraphrase of the caption of his famous letter.
Current browsers are very forgiving; they quietly correct or gloss over many common HTML errors. This makes it easy for people to experience the joy of creating their own web pages with a minimum of frustration – if a page displays correctly, then it's "right."
Unfortunately, by hiding the need for structure that the web will require as it moves towards XHTML and XML, these forgiving browsers have helped create a world of structural HTML illiterates. As long as browsers continue to parse and display HTML that isn't well-formed or valid, we...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 34 KB, 2158 words
Providing contact information on your weblog can be useful to your site visitors who may want to email you directly rather than submit a comment to one of your entries. You can choose to write out your email address, provide a mailto link (see MailTo Syntax for how to write out a mailto hyperlink), or you can provide a contact form. Contact forms are often preferred because they can easily hide your email address information from the spammers who regularly scour the web looking for email addresses to harvest.
I have researched and tested two free PHP-based contact form scripts - TheSiteWizard Feedback form and DodosMail - either of which you can easily implement to add a contact form...
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Six Apart News, News, 19 KB, 1071 words
10.22.2001
Version 1.1 Released
We have released version 1.1 of Movable Type. Existing users should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the new upgrade instructions.
New users should download the full distribution after agreeing to the license agreement.
The new release provides some bug fixes as well as some new features; read through the changelog for a full list, or take a look at an abbreviated list of features here.
Posted by Benjamin Trott at 03:38 PM | Permalink
10.19.2001
New Release Scheduled
We are planning a new release of Movable Type for next Monday, October...
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Learning Movable Type, Tutorials, 18 KB, 850 words
Sometimes you might want to link to a popup window from your Movable Type weblog. For example you can make your About page a popup instead of a separate page. Although using the target="blank" attribute in a hyperlink can generate a new page, using javascript commands for popups will give you more control over the appearance and location of the popup.
Movable Type already uses popups. You can create a link to an image file that will create a popup of the image when clicked (see Uploading Images and Photos). There is javascript code in the default headers of your index and archive templates for OpenComments and OpenTrackback that can be used to invoke comment and trackback popup...
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Brad Choate, Tutorials, 156 KB, 6962 words
Matt Haughey has a great article on how he uses Movable Type to do it all (apparently, Kottke does too… can't wait to see his article).
Anyhow, I wanted to share a tidbit in that vein. I've just set this up recently, and I'm in the process of moving the rest of my static content to use it. What I did: • Created a new Movable Type blog and named it "bradchoate.com: Static Content". • Deleted all the Index templates. • Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template. • Made sure individual archives were enabled. • Made the archive path the root...
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Six Apart ProNet Weblog, News, 53 KB, 4849 words
04.28.2005
Blogs as a complement to newspapers
Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.
The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:
"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...
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Learning Movable Type, News, 24 KB, 1110 words
A year ago this week, trying to keep track of everything I was learning regarding using Movable Type, I wrote my first MT tutorial and launched Learning Movable Type. Stung by comments in the forums to RTFM (read the f%$#ng manual), exasperated that the manual - while thorough - seemed to be written in some foreign geek language understandable only to those who could probably write code in their sleep, and determined that other newbies and non-techies would not suffer the tens and hundreds of hours of lost productivity pulling their collective hairs out over trying to get some dang thing on their MT blog to work, I got to writing.
It must be clear to most technically savvy people who...
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Movalog, Tutorials, 27 KB, 836 words
Here are some tips on how to optimize your weblog and make the page load times drop: • Sidebars: Sidebars are everything when you're talkin about page load. I have found that sidebars on the right decrease page load times dramatically. Having the sidebar on the right also allows the content to load first. The content is what your readers have come for and hence they can start reading even before the page has fully loaded. The default MT templates have the sidebars positioned to the right, to change your sidebar location you'll need to change the float element in the css: float:right;
or you may have to move around some of your markup (the template code) • Content: Although content is...
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Six Apart ProNet Weblog, News, 16 KB, 474 words
Most of you who are doing heavy web development work have told us that you're using Firefox as your browser of choice, and if so, there's a few absolutely indispensable extensions that we'd recommend adding to your toolkit. (If you're not familiar with installing or using extensions, the Mozilla foundation has documentation available.)
First, for anyone who uses the web interface of their blogging tool or edits text online for any application, the resizeable textarea extension will let you size text entry boxes to whatever dimensions you prefer.
Once you're set up for resizing text areas, there's a suite of astoundingly powerful tools available for web developers, particularly those...
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Six Apart ProNet Weblog, News, 20 KB, 675 words
Noted usability maven Jakob Nielsen, long a subject of conversation and critique by bloggers, finally returns the favor with a top ten list of design suggestions for bloggers. Titled " Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes", the latest Alertbox offers a number of simple and useful specific items to review.
For most Professional Network members, a lot of this is a review of practices we're already familiar with, but it's worth taking a closer look at some of the suggestions. • No author biography and no author photo: When we launched TypePad two years ago, one of the first items we added was support for an "About" page and an author photo. If you're making a...
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Six Apart News, News, 13 KB, 330 words
First, let me clarify that we've never made any claims of superiority over any other weblogging software.
We've never claimed to be the best.
We've never presented MOVABLE TYPE as the program that will revolutionize weblogging.
We're just developing a system with a lot of the features that we've heard users are looking for.
Luckily, we've received a lot of good word of mouth. People are hoping that MT will be THE program and THE solution.
With expectations like that, I'm sure users are bound to be let down. And of course, whenever something receives too much good press, the inevitable criticism just gets louder and uglier.
MT is a work in progress. Please remember...
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geekmum {movable cafe}, Tutorials, 19 KB, 549 words
One very exciting new feature in MT3.2 is the new handling of the default templating system. Instead of one consolidated file tucked away in the source code, the default templates have been created individually and are stored in the default_templates folder in the MT directory. Customizations are much simpler now - no more hacks - just edit a default template right from the folder. Thanks to the new TemplateRefresh feature (a plugin included in the MT installation), there is great ease in applying default templates for use across your entire installation, both for existing AND newly created blogs. All it takes now is one simple action to selectively (or corporately) apply MT3.2's...
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