Updated

Occassionally databases get corrupted, servers fail or web hosts go out of business. So it's a good idea to back up your Movable Type blogs. There are many methods for doing so, a few of which I will cover here. The back-up process is much easier if you are using MySQL as your database, which, by the way, is one good reason to use MySQL over the default Berkeley DB.

TypeMover

TypeMover is a new plugin for the purpose of backing up, restoring, and/or migrating your Movable Type weblog. It is compatible with MT3 and later versions of Movable Type. From the TypeMover website:

TypeMover is a MovableType plugin. It adds backup, restore and migration features that let you get...

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The Movable Type team has been hard at work and we have some very exciting things coming in the 2005 release schedule. To kick things off we are proud to introduce Movable Type 3.16.

Movable Type 3.16 sports significant improvements to application security and over one hundred other fixes which really make it a highly recommended upgrade for all users.

Movable Type 3.16 is a simple drop-in replacement for any user who is running version 3.1 or higher. As long as you are running one of these more recent versions, there is no need to run an upgrade script or do anything other than upload the files in the upgrade distribution. Of course, if you're running a version older...

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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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Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings - short, attention-grabbing blocks of text - it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We've become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

Most sites that replace text with images do so using hand-made images, which isn't so terrible...

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Many Movable Type users have wished for the ability to define additional custom fields for entries. A future version of MT may include such functionality. This plugin is a stopgap measure until we have a version of Movable Type that allows custom fields. It lets you define custom fields on a per-weblog basis, by creating one or more SQL tables to store the additional data (this plugin has been designed to work only when using MySQL as your MT backend; see below for more on this).

Some users have managed to add custom fields to their copies of Movable Type by modifying the field definitions within MT. See this page and this thread and this thread. However, this approach has several...

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Movable Type is being used to store a list of classes, and we need to make those class titles available in a form field (class registration) as a dynamically linked list box. The user will be presented with two list boxes, the first with a list of categories, the second (which is disabled until a category is chosen) with a dynamically generated list of the titles in the selected category.

Ingredients

We're going to need two important things here. First, a handy DHTML script from Xin Yang called Chained Selects that's going to power our linked list boxes. The script that you'll be dropping into your directory is called chainedselects.js.

Second, a javascript file...

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Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

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2.0b1 (2002.02.18)

• Lots of changes to the UI: leftnav, topnav, edit-entry screen, new-entry screen, etc. • Blog Editing Menu has now changed greatly to provide space for a welcome message (editable in blog config), blog stats, and links to 5 most recent posts and comments. • Added the ability to do NFS-safe database locking using .lock files and link(). This is not something most people should worry about; if it affects you, it's likely that you will know it. :) Thanks to Kelsey Cummings for ideas and code. • Hold and Release are now Draft and Publish...

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I really need to learn Perl. I can look at some code and stumble through it to figure out what's happening, and I can hack it with minor changes - but I really don't know what I'm doing. And once I learn Perl I can learn to write some MT plugins.

I've had ideas for a few plugins floating around in my head: • A plugin to change the file upload behavior. I've hacked the file upload template and CMS.pm to add a Photo Gallery option that formats the URI as I need it and insert it into a new entry; I think this could be made into a plugin with BigPAPI. Done: Better File Uploader. • A file management plugin. It doesn't need to be terribly...

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Looking for a way to incorporate a Photo Gallery into your MT blog? Check out Photo Gallery Templates from StopDesign.com.

There are many ways to create a web-based photo album or photoblog in Movable Type. This tutorial addresses just one method for creating a photo album, and is based on the steps I took to create my MT-based photo album. This tutorial is for experienced MT users and assumes familiarity with plugins, CSS, creating a new weblog, category archiving, and uploading images. Although long, the tutorial is easier than it looks, especially if you want a photo album that works just like mine. It's always the customizations that take time. In this tutorial I will give...

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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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We all have our daemons. They lurk behind the scenes, driving us, seducing us. Their powers can be quite magical.

In the Unix operating system, for instance, the many background tasks that occur behind the scenes are controlled by processes called daemons. Following the Unix tradition of keeping the names of things short, a "d" is appended to the end of the name of the task that the daemon controls. Thus the daemon that controls the hypertext transport protocol (http) on Unix based web servers is called httpd. Similarly, ftpd controls TCP/IP file transfer.

As designers, I often think that we have a design daemon (designd) controlling our creative impulses. When my...

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With the most difficult part of running Movable Type -- the installation -- behind you, it is time to get started using MT.

It all begins with The Movable Type Content Management System (CMS). This script is the heart and soul of what makes powerful weblog publishing possible.

The CMS contains the majority of the intelligence and work flow that makes Movable Type what it is. Whether it involves posting an entry, adding a colleague as an author, or publishing your content with a whole new style, it is the CMS that is doing the heavy lifting.

By default the CMS script is named mt.cgi, although this...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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You now know why there hasn't been any updates in nearly 20 days! I'm very proud to announce MT Blogroll 1.0. Basically MT Blogroll is a blogroll manager, similar to blogrolling.com. You are able to store various details about a link including its URI, Name, Description and Relationship and assign them to various categories. If you have been using another blogroll manager like blogrolling.com or blo.gs, you can use the Import OPML tool to import those links into MT Blogroll.

I would suggest reading the README first which describes the installation process and includes some example code. Other documentation includes the Tag Reference which describes the template tags that MT Blogroll...

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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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by Category | by Date

Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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01.31.2005

BlogBinders: Publish your blog in print

If you're looking for a way to hold your blog in your hands, BlogBinders.com offers a simple and clever service to turn your blog into an attractive, customized book. BlogBinders supports LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad.

Posted by Anil in Web Services at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

01.31.2005

Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

Gawker Media's just added two new Movable Type-powered weblogs to its media empire, as announced by Nick Denton. Lifehacker is a friendly geek site and Gridskipper is a travel site aiming for selectivity.

Posted by Anil in New Sites at 10:45 AM | Permalink |...

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UPDATE: EnhancedEntryEditing has been bumped up to v1.01 to fix a bug where popup windows wouldn't disappear after you were done with them. Grab the update, you only need to upload EnhancedEntryEditing.pl

Ajaxify is a series of BigPAPI plugins that adds various javascript and AJAX widgets into Movable Type's interface. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. The first of which is EnhancedEntryEditing. This plugin adds two widgets into the entry screen: • Resizable Textareas - I personally find the textareas on the entry screen too small and find it annoying to hack the stylesheet everytime I upgrade Movable Type. This plugin now adds "Increase Size" and...

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