Co-authored by Elise Bauer and Arvind Satyanarayan. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

The installation instructions in the Movable Type Install Guide contain a section in the Configuration area called Enable Security Features. These instructions tell you to uncomment the Umask lines in your mt.cfg if your server is running cgiwrap or suexec. If you don't know what CGIwrap or suEXEC are, you may be tempted to skip this step. Don't. This step gives your MT installation extra security, which we will explain. (Note that this tutorial is only appropriate for MT installations on Linux/Apache web servers.)

What is CGIWrap or suEXEC?

CGIWrap and suEXEC are features...

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A great way to easily customize the look of your Movable Type weblog is to replace the default title banner with a banner image. There are two basic methods for adding a banner image - adjusting the CSS or adjusting the index and archive templates.

Before making template adjustments, you first need to prepare your banner image. You might choose to use an image that will take up the entire banner space, or you might want more of a logo-like image that would only take up a part of the banner space, with a solid color making up the difference. Photographic images that extend to the edges of your weblog's container work best for banners in "fixed width" styles, such as in the default...

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(Note that this tutorial is appropriate for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.)

Say you want to send an email to your weblog readers when you update your blog, so they know to go to your site. There are various ways to do this. Movable Type has a built-in email notification feature. Unfortunately it is probably the least robust of the many wonderful MT features as I will explain shortly. With some serious hacking of the code the feature becomes more functional. Another option (which I prefer) is Bloglet, a third party service that can seamlessly provide email notifications for your site.

1. Movable Type's built-in Email Notification feature. Using MT's email notification feature, you...

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One area where plugins have greatly enhanced MT functionality is in categories. Here's a list of some of the things you can do:

How to exclude entries of certain categories from lists of entries. Say you want to list out your 20 most recent entries in your sidebar, except for the entries in the Special Announcements category. This is easy enough to do with the Exclude Categories plugin. The code would look like this:

<MTEntriesExCat category="Special Announcements" lastn="20"> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br /> </MTEntriesExCat>

How to list entries only from certain categories. This trick doesn't require a plugin at all. Just add the category attribute after the MTEntries tag like so:...

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The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with one sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page. With a little template manipulation you can have an additional sidebar on the left - a 3-column layout.

The MT3.2 stylesheets and templates are designed to have the columns laid out in order, starting with the column named "alpha". The columns, in order are alpha, beta, gamma (for a 3-column layout), and delta (a hypothetical fourth column that one could create). In the default MT3.2 Main Index template, the sidebar is on the right and is in a column named "beta.

To add a third column, you will make a copy of the default "beta" column code and put it before the "alpha"...

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Movable Type comes with a default search capability that your site visitors can use to search for keywords in your weblog entries. You can add functionality to the search form that people see on your site, and make adjustments to the templates that govern how the results are displayed.

Keyword Search Templates

Suppose you want to change the way the search results look when someone uses the default MT search function to do a search on your website.

Movable Type's templates that govern the MT keyword search results pages operate differently than the other weblog templates. (You may have noticed this if you have changed the name of your default weblog stylesheet away from...

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Using includes, you can modularize your template code making it easier to edit and rebuild your Movable Type templates. For example, instead of having all of your side bar and center content on the same Index template, you can set up a separate file to hold your side bar content and use an include to "include" it on your index template. This is especially handy if you use the same sidebar content on multiple index and archive templates.

There are two basic ways to use includes in Movable Type - the MTInclude tag and PHP includes. MTInclude is easy and anyone using MT can use it. The downside (slight) is that if you make a change to an include file, your sidebar for example, you have...

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Google recently released some useful tips on how to optimize the use of Google Adsense on one's web pages. No surprise - the hottest "hot spot" for the best click-through returns lies right in the middle of your content.

How does one place a Google Adsense ad (or any other ad, bit of text, or image for that matter) between entries on the main index page of your MT weblog? By using a simple trick of the "lastn" and "offset" attributes outlined in the MT manual here.

Normally on your Main Index template, you would have your MTEntries section laid out like so:

for MT 3.2:

<MTEntries> <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> <MTDateHeader><h2 class="date-header"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2></MTDateHeader>...

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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...

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When you are first setting up a new weblog, Movable Type prompts you to choose a file extension in the weblog config preferences section. The default setting is HTML.

If your server allows PHP scripts, and you would like to add customization features that aren't part of the default Movable Type system, it is highly recommended that you choose PHP as your default file extension preference in place of HTML. Doing so allows you to take advantage of many freely available PHP scripts to help customize your weblog. PHP is an open source scripting language that is powerful, stable, and extremely popular for adding dynamic elements to websites. In your Movable Type weblog, PHP scripts can...

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Movable Type uses a template system to generate the pages of your weblog. To change which content elements and how they are displayed on the pages of your blog, you need to make changes to the appropriate templates.

Selecting "Manage Templates" from the sidebar navigation in your weblog edit screen will show you the list of templates, but what do they all do? And, if you are trying to conserve storage space on your server, are there any you can delete?

Index Templates

Index templates have individual output files, specific to the template. Let's go down the list.

Click on image to enlarge

• Atom Index - The Atom Index produces an Atom syndication feed, atom.xml for those...

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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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Updated

The default templates in Movable Type list archives by month, not by category. See the following steps for configuring your weblog for category archiving, creating and assigning categories, adding a category list in your sidebar, and adding a "Posted to" line at the end of each entry.

1. Edit your weblog configuration for category archiving. In your weblog config window, tab over to "archiving". Put a check in the checkbox next to "category". Save and rebuild your weblog.

2. Create and assign categories. When you create a new entry, right next to the Title window is a scroll bar for selecting a category. Scroll down to "Add new category". This will open a window for...

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One measure to guard against spam is to close comments on old blog entries. This is easy enough to do.

At the bottom of your Edit Entry window is the pull-down for none, open, or closed comments. If you don't see this as pictured, click on "Customize the display of this page" link, select "Custom" and select the fields you wish displayed, including "Allow Comments".

You can also set comments to be open, closed or non-existent by default through the weblog config window, Preferences section. Under "Comment Configuration" see "Allow Comments" Default. Note that you can override this default via your selection on the individual entry.

Plugins

There are several plugins that can be...

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To save space on your sidebar listing of categories or monthly archives, you might want to use a pull-down menu like so: Select Category Beginner Tips Categories Definitions General HTML and Javascript Install Marketing Reference RSS Security Servers Style Weblog Goodies

To do this for your category list, make sure that you have category archiving selected as an archiving option in your weblog config, and add the following code to your sidebar:

<form action="" name="pulldown1"> <select name="mypulldown1" onchange="document.location=pulldown1.mypulldown1.options[selectedIndex].value"> <option value="">Select...

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A number of international MT users have expressed their desire to donate through methods other than Paypal.

For those who wish to donate but can not use Paypal, we will be very happy to accept gift certificates via Amazon. If you're interested in donating, please send the certificate to donation@movabletype.org.

Donations via Amazon gift certificates will be treated just like Paypal donations, so for every $20, you'll receive a recently updated key. And, for donations of $45 and up, you'll be entitled to extra and personal support.

Previous Entry: Spotlight Sites

Next Entry: MT Blog Ring...

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12.12.2001

Version 1.3 Released

We have released a new version of Movable Type, version 1.3. Existing users of versions 1.0-1.2 should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the upgrade instructions.

In addition to bug fixes and improvements to general stability, this release adds the following features: • XML-RPC server implementation of the Blogger API, so you can use existing XML-RPC clients to post to Movable Type ( more information) • Search and replace functionality ( more information) • Ability to specify the directory in which upload files are placed, rather than just dumping files into the archive...

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There are several ways to get statistics about your Movable Type weblog. Most web hosts give you access to some statistics regarding your site as a matter of course - referral logs (list of sites that link to you in which someone has clicked on the link to get to your site), number of hits, number of page views, etc. If you want more information, i.e. the search terms used to find your site, the most recent entry pages to your site, the mix of browsers and OS platforms of those viewing your site, the length of time people spend on average on your site, you can use a site statistics service, also known as a hit counter. These services work by having you put a small piece of code on the...

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Sometimes it's nice to get a lot for a little. Macros let you do that. Instead of typing laborious HTML as you write your entries, a macro can do all the work for you so you can concentrate on writing. Perhaps you want to use a set of icons within your posts but don't care to write <img> tags all day long. Or maybe you'd like to link up to Google queries without having to type out the full URL. This plugin allows you to do that and much more.

...

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Some of the more interesting customizations you can do with your Movable Type weblog require using PHP scripts, either on their own or in conjunction with the MySQL database. Some scripts are easy enough to install and require very little configuration. Others, however, require that you know something about how the script works, or how your MT database is set-up, or both.

Larry Ullman's PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites is a well organized, fairly comprehensive, easy-to-follow introduction to PHP and MySQL. Ullman expects you to know basic HTML and have had some exposure to programming. I took a basic Pascal programming class 25 years ago, but that's about it and I still...

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