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 themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them however Six Apart have created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on any of these three platforms and designers can...

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Movable Type provides a powerful API that allows developers to extend its functionality. Plugins can add tags to MT's templating system, or create full-fledged applications that interact with the MT database.

One missing piece of the API, however, has been the ability for plugins to modify MT's own interface—the screens you see when using Movable Type to manage your content.

BigPAPI is intended to fill this gap. It provides hooks so that other plugins can access and alter any page of the MT interface before it's displayed to the user. In effect, it enlarges the Plugin API—hence the name BigPAPI.

Unless you're a developer, that's probably all you need to know. The best way to...

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

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 themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them, however Six Apart created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on...

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A good friend is often one's harshest critic. This came to mind while reading this post Jason Kottke writes about the "New Internet" and, more specifically, Six Apart's role in creating "a black hole for creative people". I can feel comfortable in debating his opinion because I respect Jason as a friend and a peer and, in the past, have questioned him privately on his opinion of what makes a respectable company. Because of this relationship and my respect of his opinion, I've decided to break the perceived Six Apart oath of silence (you should see the initiation ritual!) and respond to his post.

Jason writes:

A person who -- when she was unemployed 3 years ago -- could spend a couple...

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Ajaxify is a set of plugins that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type interface. It currently consists of EnhancedEntryEditing - that adds a WYSIWYG editor and resizable textarea controls to the entry screen - and Search Suggestions - that add a "Google Suggest" like feature to the quicksearch box.

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Boeing's Vice President of Marketing, Randy Baseler, has just announced the relaunch of the "Randy's Journal" blog. Acknowledging some of the feedback, including harsh criticism, that the blog has received in the past, the new site addresses the critiques and notes improvements to the site without being dogmatic about what constitutes a "real" blog.

In relaunching with Movable Type, the site acknowledges requests for features such as permalinks and XML feeds while reaching, as the BBS blog describes it, balance between giving the blogosphere the proper respect and your business goals. It's a good demonstration that a corporate blog should reflect the culture of the...

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PoeticForm is a small and amusing plugin that lets your format your text as a poem, automatically adding markup to your text so that your poetry gets an appropriately elegant presentation. Go give it a look.

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One of the biggest announcements at last week's Gnomedex conference was Microsoft's support for XML feeds in Longhorn, the next release of the Windows platform.

Offering robust support for RSS and Atom, as well as some new extensions for lists and a system-level library for building syndication-aware applications, the services being made available should allow for a new class of XML-aware programs.

In addition to the overview on the Microsoft Developer Network, the Internet Explorer team's blog offers some more insights into the development of these new features for Windows.

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For the second year in a row, popular weblog advertising system Blogads is offering a reader demographics survey. Though the survey sample isn't necessarily wide enough to be a true representation of who's reading weblogs, it's still a useful tool for advertisers and site owners who want to know a little bit more about their audiences.

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The team at Technorati just announced the launch of their new beta site, which collects much of the features and functionality that have been available on the popular blog-tracking service and wraps them in a friendly and fun interface.

In addition to the new look, Technorati's site now has a company blog talking about service news, as well as a developer blog with details for people who want to build on top of the service. Both Movable Type-powered blogs are useful additions to the roster of services available from Technorati, and should help make it easier for a new audience to discover more of the blogosphere.

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eWeek's just published RSS Updates Moving Beyond Pings, a look at the FeedMesh community. FeedMesh is an emerging format for sharing update notifications between the various tools and services that generate site updates and the clients, services, and applications that consume the updates and make use of them.

The format is still evolving, but current implementations exist, including PubSub's implementation, which Bob Wyman has discussed for some time on his blog.

Though there are some with misgivings, it seems clear that the value of collaborating on updates, the progress that's already been made, and the positive focus of the community that's already formed will help FeedMesh mature...

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François Nonnenmacher has written up a cool description of how to use Movable Type to gather feedback online, complete with screenshots of his work in action.

There are a number of applications for this sort of tool, but it seems like a particularly strong fit for organizations that have deployed Movable Type on an intranet who want to collect all of their feedback in one place.

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• Newsgator Toolkit • Updates to the Style Generator • Hurricane Katrina Donation • Movable Type Style Generator • Plugins Forums • Feeds Burned • The IndiBlog Awards • Planet Movable Type • MovaDir, v2 • Preview Release • Vulnerability in Servers Using PHP • Securing your weblog - CGIWrap and SuEXEC • Syndicate This Site • Upgrading • Consulting • Movalog Sideblog • Ask Arvind •

Code Snippets

• Random Banners • Quicktags for Comments • Reset Templates • Iconize • SubCats and Contents • Tweaking Searches • Password Protection • Alphabetizing archives • Relative Dates • Automatic Acronyms •

Dynamic

• Dynamic Publishing - Pros and Cons • Troubleshooting Smarty Errors • PHP Dirification • The DB and Dynamic Publishing • Custom Error Messages • Dynamic Pages & The .htaccess • Breaking Plugins • Smarty. MT. Dynamic...

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Over on LiveJournal news, Brad's announced two cool new features. The first is in-page comment management, which savvy geeks will see is powered by some nifty AJAX wizardry.

The second announcement is of interest to a lot of Professional Network members as well. LiveJournal now supports Nokia's LifeBlog application, which means the Atom API extensions needed for LifeBlog have been added, as documented in the previous ProNet posts on LifeBlog, and the core Atom API support in LiveJournal has been revamped as well.

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If you're involved in promoting or advocating for a cause, you'll want to check out John Emerson's excellent Introduction to Activism on the Internet. Covering not just blogs, but email, general techniques, and numerous examples of efforts that have succeeded in the past, it's a valuable resource for promoting a cause, and can even serve as a useful checkpoint for people doing traditional marketing on the web.

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

With the release of Movable Type version 3.2, Six Apart opted to not include the calendar feature that had been included by default in earlier versions. The reason for this is that calendars, with the days linking to blog archives, are resource intensive; they can significantly lengthen rebuild times. Six Apart has posted the code that was used in previous versions of MT. However, many users have found that simply copying and pasting the code as given doesn't yield a properly formatted calendar.

The following code will create a calendar that will be correctly formatted and...

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Joe D'Andrea just posted a useful writeup of the process of creating a new standards-based design for AT&T. There's an extensive list of the techniques and tools used as well, complete with links if you'd like to implement similar tricks yourself.

(Thanks to The Web Standards Project blog for the link.)

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Richard MacManus, who's been on a roll lately with his excellent blog, Read/Write Web, presents a look at a Collaborative Feedburner Stats Project. Richard's talked to the team behind the popular XML processing service and convinced them to make individual feed statistics available through a simple REST API.

Once you've got stats for your burned feed, you can parse the XHTML or XML and start to use the data in your applications or plugins. Richard is leading an effort to publish individual web stats in order to determine trends and collaboratively analyze the results.

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Award-winning Movable Type plugin developer Tim Appnel's just launched a new code section on his Appnel Internet Solutions site, where he's launched a number of powerful new plugins and updated a bunch of his existing plugins.

Among the new releases is Feeds.App, a complete rewrite of the popular mt-rssfeed plugin, with a host of new features and an updated user interface that integrates directly into Movable Type.

In addition to the new plugins, which are available in a variety of licenses ranging from free, to free for personal use with a donation suggested, to a paid license for commerical uses which includes support, Tim's linked to his contributions to CPAN, where he's been...

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Brad's been active with a cool little LiveJournal hack, inspired by the buzz around tags at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, where he displays LiveJournal's interests in a new variable-sized tag-style display, instead of the years-old sorted list. Pretty.

Another cool little work-in-progress is the AJAX whiteboard Brad's put together. As Brad mentions, it only works in Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox, and it tends to die after a little while. But if you want to see why it's so cool, have someone else edit the drawing at the same time as you, and you can watch their updates in realtime.

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