I finally got my copy of Hacking Movable Type and finished reading it last night. Written by the biggest names in the Movable Type community, the 300 pages of Movable Type goodness guide you through getting the most out of Movable Type and really pushing what it can do with detailed tutorials to setup photo and moblogs and event calendars.

It walks you through using all the APIs available in MT including XMLRPC, Atom, Perl and PHP and provides detailed examples that are very easy to understand. One of the best parts of the book, I feel, is the plugin walkthrough which is a far better guide than the current plugin docs. It literally holds your hand showing you what is possible and if I...

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UPDATE: Donors check the email address through which you donated, you have a surprise waiting!

a Dropcash campaign

MT Blogroll 2.0

$102 of $100 raised so far

donate now »

I've almost finished up work on MT Blogroll 2.0 and have fixed most (if not all) issues raised with the beta. I've created a dropcash campaign for MT Blogroll 2.0's release. Once the campaign's target has been reached I will release the plugin to public. If you've found version 1.0 or version 2.0b useful consider donating to the campaign. Those that donate to the campaign get priority for support.

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After a lot of requests, its finally here. This hack will give you a more powerful listing whilst assigning multiple categories to an entry that includes the category hierarchies. As usual open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 2772 find

$cats{ $cat->id } = $cat->label;

(make sure it is in the edit_placements subroutine) and replace it with

my @cats = $cat->parent_categories; @cats = ($cat, @cats); my $glue = " > "; my @res; while (my $c = pop @cats) { my $label = $c->label; push @res, $label; } $cats{ $cat->id } = join $glue, @res;

Finally open up tmpl/edit_placements.tmpl and replace the two occurances of style="width: 175px;" with style="min-width: 175px;"...

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In recent days, spammers seem to becoming smarter and smarter. Adam Kalsey points out a new technique whereby spammers post comment spam that links to other blog entries. But on inspecting those entries one sees that it has been flooded with spam. The problem is, many weblog authors don't really care about spam and won't remove them.

In fact blog spam has reached such heights that The Register has written an article on the subject and mention MT-Blacklist. If you are a weblog author that is bothered by comment spam, you must install MT-Blacklist

Another new technique comment spammers have discovered is using HTML entities in their urls. For example rather than something.com they enter in...

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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

Quite a few people ask me this question (you can see the problem in the screenshot -- click for larger view), and this problem was fixed in the default templates. It can be combatted in two ways.

CSS

Add the following to your stylesheet

#container:after, .content:after { content: "."; display: block; height: 0; clear: both; overflow: hidden; }

HTML

Alternatively, on every template that you have a sidebar, add the following code just before the end tag of the #container div

<div style="clear:...

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MT Blogroll has been updated to be compatible with Movable Type 3.2 and includes some new features too: • Improved UI - The UI has been drastically improved to fit in better with 3.2, you can see the new UI elements on the screenshots page. Along with the UI there are a few javascript tricks I've borrowed from Movable Type that should make your life somewhat easier • Greater Control - With MT Blogroll 2.1, you have far more control over your links, you can customize the link adding page in a fashion that is similar to MT and display the links with ease on both static and dynamic pages. • Priority Sorting - I have added a priority field and this has become the default sorting column. As a...

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UPDATE: Fixed a bug where the image would only appear when you were logged into MT. Its a one line fix in SCode.pm

Although CAPTCHAs have several problems, there is no denying that catch most (if not all) of the spam. The most popular CAPTCHA generating plugin for Movable Type, SCode, had not been updated in a long time as the author had migrated to Drupal. It still involved hacking and did not integrate with 3.2's new junk/feedback framework. As a result, I took the plugin and did some major re-writing to make it work with 3.2. A run down of the new features: • No Hacking Required - Simply drop the plugin in and enable it to use • More Friendly UI - Previously, you would have to set...

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UPDATE: There seems to be a bug with the Sub Categories code which prevents this tutorial from working properly in static index templates. In dynamic index templates it works as it is meant to. Differences can be seen between static and dynamic

Following on from Elise's Expandable List Menus tutorial, this is a way to incorporate Sub Category relationships in your Table of Contents or other similar pages.

Add the following code to an index template wherever you want the Category/Entry list

<div class="subcats"> <MTSubCategories> <MTSubCatIsFirst><ul></MTSubCatIsFirst> <li> <h3><a...

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Acronyms are used in weblogging practically everyday with things like Mt, 6A, IIRC etc. It has been suggested for accessibility purposes that every acronym be giving a definition. Now if you use a lot of acronyms in one post it can be very tiresome to keep typing out the code everytime, so why not make MT do it automatically ?

UPDATE: The best way to do this is to install the Acronym plugin that will do all this for you, automatically! Alternatively you could do it manually as described below

To do this you will need Brad Choate's MTMacro plugin.

Create a new template module and populate with code:

<MTMacroDefine no_html="1" name="mt"...

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UPDATE: An updated entry can be found here This is now out dated !

I loved the quicktags available in WordPress. They were just so much more powerful that then four offered within MT. So Carthik pointed my to quicktags the javascript used my WordPress.

So I hacked MT to remove the pathetic little buttons and put these more powerful ones on there - see the screenshot.

You will need two files: •

The Quicktags Javascript - put this file in your StaticWebPath •

edit_entry.tmpl - this file should go in MT_DIR/tmpl/cms/

I've not yet get it to work properly with the Extended Entry, currently it only work with Entry Body. If anyone is able to help me with this I'd appreciate it !

UPDATE: I uploaded another...

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Feedback during Power Edit was a popular hack that unfortunately didn't work with with v3.2. As a result, I rolled the hack into a plugin which I've appropriately dubbed "PowerEditFeedback." This plugin works exactly like the hack except its been updated for v3.2 - the plugin adds two checkboxes, one for the comment status and the other for the trackback/ping status to the power editing page. Installation is very simple, just download the plugin and unzip it in your MT folder preserving the directory structure. As a result, you will get a folder called PowerEditFeedback under your plugins folder, and that's about it, the plugin does the rest!

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I'm quite pleased to announce Ask Arvind Hopefully this will generate content that is relevant and useful for you readers. Basically do email me all questions you have within consideration. Please don't ask me questions to do with install, upgrade problems. Those questions are best answered on the MT Support Forums

Sometimes I will feed the need to publish the question/answer - if you really don't want this please say so in the question ! If I don't feel that I need to publish the question/answer rest assured I will answer your question personally either telling you how to do it or point you in the right direction !

[ Ask Arvind]

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I'm not sure why I've chosen the new version number to be 2.0 but none-the-less, the new version of Tabs is here. This new version boasts a new feature that will make multi-tasking easier. The "open links in sidebar" checkbox will open the MT manual (or WP Wiki) in the sidebar hence allowing you to edit your template in the main window whilst browse through the tags in the sidebar. Also this new version features a slick new CSS (with updates from Kasey) and javascript 'magic' thanks to Akmal. With 2.0, support for the Opera browser has also been added.

Any suggestions, feature requests, complaints etc. are always welcome. Please post those in the comments. • MT Tabs • WP Tabs

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A recent thread on the Professional Network had people talking about how they could trust non-Typekey commenters and someone requested an ability to "Trust" commenters based on their IP. Turns out, I had written a plugin that did exactly this a long time ago but had forgotten to release it. Quite simply, this plugin allows you to define an email whitelist. If a commenter enters an email that matches one on the whitelist, two things will happen: • The comment is credited with a junk score of +10 (the highest positive score) and depending on your junk threshold will cause the comment to be instantly approved. • The comment status is set to visible so that it will be publishedThis plugin is a great way to have some "trust" functionality for those of you that don't feel comfortable using Typekey....

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UPDATE: I have also updated the template tag reference for Blogroll!

This is an update to fix the DateTime error faced by people from the 3.16 upgrade. I'm still using DateTime (which is included in the full distribution) because I haven't had time to explore MT::DateTime (6A's new replacement module). I have also briefly tested this plugin on Windows machine (albeit on Apache) and so far its been working, those of you on Windows try it out!

I have also fixed the two others bugs raised in the comments, the sorting problem due to upper/lower case links and the "Reset Filter" button. If you have any other bug reports please post them in the comments section or email them to me.

If you haven't upgraded to...

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In my recent re-design on Movalog, I had three banners and unfortunately I liked them all and couldn't figure out which one I liked best. As a result, I decided to use them all.

First I moved all the images to a subfolder called banner and renamed the images to 1.jpg, 2.jpg and 3.jpg. Finally I used PHP's mt_rand function to randomly print a number from 1 to 3 (mt_rand works better than the plain rand function function), like so

<?php echo mt_rand(1,3); ?>

Hence my banner image code looks like this

<img src="http://www.movalog.com/images/banner/<?php echo mt_rand(1,3); ?>.jpg" alt="Movalog - All Things Movable Type" />

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The past few days, I've been working hard on a new version of MT Blogroll that will be feature packed. Some of the features I have either written or plan to write include: • Integration with del.icio.us - MT Blogroll is now capable of completely synching with del.icio.us. This means that links you add to MT Blogroll will get added to del.icio.us and vice-versa. • Tagging - to complement the above, I've implemented the ability to tag links just like del.icio.us. The template tags are also powerful enough for you to generate your own tag cloud. • Export to OPML - one of the biggest feature requests I've received was to have an export mechanism and I've finally gotten around to implementing that. • Direct import from Bloglines - Simply enter your Bloglines username and your folders and links are imported. I'm investigating similar integration with Blogrolling and Newsgator....

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Gautam Patel asks

I want to upload images but there is some html I want generated in each image invariably (not just the standard stuff) -- for example border="0" or align="left" or whatever. How do I hack the MT tmpl files/scripts to do this?

Open the file lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 1902, find the following

my $link = $thumb ? qq(<img src="$thumb" width="$thumb_width" height="$thumb_height" border="0" />) : "View image";

As you can see, for the most part it is simple HTML. To align left, just add the attribute like this

my $link = $thumb ? qq(<img src="$thumb" width="$thumb_width" height="$thumb_height" border="0" align="left" />) : "View image";

There are two other lines you...

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This is a quick plugin I wrote during the beta tests because I frequently changed the values of my config file to test bugs and hated scrolling page comments or having to manually enter in directives. ConfigUI is a plugin that quite simply adds a graphic user interface to the config file. It has been built for MT 3.2 and uses almost every new API available. It works by re-writing your config file so you need to make sure: • mt-config.cgi (or mt.cfg) is writeable by the web server • your check your settings before saving

Have a look at the screenshot to see what it looks like. It basically lists all non-critical directives (this means it doesn't list the CGIPath or Database...

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When I first wrote my password protection hack, I noticed two major flaws with it:

1) You had to keep re-applying the hack every time you upgraded MT (this is the case with all hacks but I found this to be a major pain)

2) The actual protection method was rather basic. The password would need to be distributed and could be leaked.

As a result, I've written a new plugin called MT Protect, a plugin that allows you to protect entries either with the use of passwords or by verifying the reader's identity through Typekey. I've currently labelled it as beta as the featureset isn't complete and I haven't thoroughly tested it. None-the-less, it should be good enough to install and use. If you...

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