Currently many people refer to an MT community but I feel there isn't a proper place where this community can get together. Yes there are the forums and ProNet but the first isn't for real socializing (for lack of a better word) and the latter is geared up for devs or pros. I want a place where people will be comfortable expressing their newbiness, talking about Movable type, tips tricks, tutorial request etc. A preview is available here

Also I've been thinking about adding a type of directory service for people to list their Movable type sites for added publicity. This would be a place where people could list their blogs yet find new ones to read (this is a great way to fine new blogs...

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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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After the dutchpink was released, I had an idea to skin Movable Type such that a user could easily switch between stylesheets. So after a lot of work with javascript, here is the package:

SkinningMT.zip SkinningMT.tar.gz

1. Extract the contents of the distribution 2. Upload the tmpl files in ASCII to the appropriate places (MTDIR/tmpl/cms) 3. Upload mt-styleswitcher.php and the styles/ directory into your StaticWebPath (if none then your into your MT Directory, same location as mt.cgi)

The drop-down menu shows up on the main menu ( screenshot) The only requirement is that your server runs PHP. The styles directory, its contents and mt-styleswitcher.php goes into your StaticWebPath. In mt-styleswitcher.php, change movalog.com to your domain name...

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UPDATE: Multiblog 1.1 has been released which fixes bugs with the GlobalListings. I have updated the tags in this tutorial to correspond to MultiBlog only.

Have you got two or more blogs that you would like to 'merge.' By merge I mean show all entries on one page, chronologically and inline - for a greater understand take a look at my blog. The front page shows entries from the main blog plus the sideblog - the sideblog entries are formatted differently, the little bars !

The plugins you will need are: * MultiBlog * GlobalListings

Multiblog does have the GlobalListings plugin built into it, but at the time of writing this tutorial that section of the plugin didn't work. So I am using...

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As you probably already know, Movable Type 3.2 was released and boasts a stunning featureset. I personally have plenty of plugins, tools and other announcements to make which are all related to this release. The first of which you've probably guessed by the title. I present the Movable Type Style Generator. Quite simply, click on any element on the page and a box will appear allowing you to change any of the element's properties from background color to font faces and styles. After you're done, hit the Download button to get the stylesheet, 3.2 compatible! The beauty of this style generator is since it creates 3.2 compatible stylesheets, you can use them across any of Six Apart's...

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One feature I find lacking in MT is yearly archives. A yearly archive basically is just a page of twelve calendars - one for each month of the year - see mine in action here with permalinks to the days.

Now there are two ways you can do this, one easier than the other. The first - harder - way to do it is installing Brad Choate's PerlScript Plugin and then follow the steps he has laid out here. I call this the harder method because for every year you are blogging you need to create a new index template and call the template module.

The second method, all you need to do is setup the archiving and MT will do a lot for you - including tidying up you monthly archive list ! You will need...

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Learning Movable Type has an article that guides you through the steps of creating a three blog layout. The only problem is that the #container width has ben set to 904 pixels. This means that on a 800x600 layout you're going to get the nasty horizontal scroll.

The best way around this is to create a fluid three column layout ( what are fluid/fixed layouts ?).

1.Change the width of #container to 90%

2.Delete #center and corresponding div tags in all your templates

3.Duplicate your sidebar, find the following/similar code in your stylesheet #right { float: left; width:200px; overflow: hidden; }

And replace it with the following: #right { float: right; width: 20%;...

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UPDATE: No more CSS, have MT auto indent.

The "Primary Category" drop down menu just lists the categories sorted alphabetically and doesn't obey the category heirarchies you may have setup. This is especially annoying if you have several similarly named sub categories under different parent categories. So here's a hack that will change the way that field works, the categories will now obey the category heirarchy as shown in the screenshot (click for a larger view) It's probably best to note that I'm not the most perl savvy and this code may not be the most efficient/quickest/best way to do it but it works for me.

You'll need CMS.pm, open it up. Replace everything between

## Load...

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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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The development community, the independent content community, and especially webloggers, are familiar with Six Apart's Movable Type, a robust and popular publishing tool designed to faciliate the creation of blogs. Lately the community has been buzzing about a soon-to-be-released Six Apart product intended to deliver the power of personal publishing to an even wider, non-expert user base.

What has not been told until now is that TypePad has been designed to generate standards-compliant sites, and that the application itself is built with web standards. A List Apart's publisher and creative director Jeffrey Zeldman caught up with Six Apart's Anil Dash to find out more....

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After talking to Brad about the new version of MT, I felt it deserves a whole blog post about it just to talk about how amazing it is and get rid of all this excitement building up in me

First of, David's Subcats being built into the application. Well I knew it ! In #mt-plugins, David told me and a few others that he would not be entering his plugin into the contest - on further questioning he said that there was another party involved. Well once he said that it wasn't too hard to guess the right answer and we were helped by the fact that when he guessed it he either changed the topic or kept quiet ! Never-the-less I am very excited about this because Sub Categories are vital for many...

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Updated 09/05 - Search Throttle

The search form that comes with default MT templates is very limited in what it lets you do - basically it only lets you search the current blog and allows you to not specify any oother options. Here are some things you can do with searches. The code listed here can go into any template but the code must be placed within the search form ie <form>....</form>. Also each block of code is independent. You don't need to use previous code for it to work - as long as it is placed within the search form it will work no matter what other code you have or have not implemented !

Search Where ?

Replace the search form code you have with something like...

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For a few months, I had deliberated adding a WYSIWYG Editor into the Movable Type entry screen and when Typepad implemented an editor into its interface I got jealous. So, here's a way to implement the very powerful HTMLArea into Movable Type (currently only Internet Explorer, Mozilla browsers and other Gecko based browsers supported)

1. Download HTMLArea 3.0 rc-1 and upzip it 2. Upload the files to a folder called htmlarea in your StaticWebPath 3. Open up tmpl/cms/header.tmpl and add the following in <head>...</head> tags

<script type="text/javascript"> _editor_url = "<TMPL_VAR NAME=STATIC_URI>htmlarea/"; _editor_lang = "en"; </script>...

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On the forums, someone recently commented on how the listings in MT could be improved with greater sorting flexibility. I thought that it was a very good idea and so after a bit of hacking managed to get the entry listings to be sorted, it would be easy to adapt this for the comments and trackbacks listing.

This hack will add ascending and descending sorting capabilities to the title and date fields. The rest you can use the Filter option for.

First, you'll need CMS.pm, around line 2411 in the list_entries sub, find the following

my %arg = ( 'sort' => 'created_on', direction => $sort_direction, ($limit eq 'none' ? () : (limit =>...

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I have been playing around with Zoto and I'm quite impressed.

Uploading Pictures

One of the things about this service is the ease at which you can upload photos. Just download their client (called Zulu) set it up to scan folders where you put your photos and it'll do the rest for you meaning it scans the folders, makes thumbnails of the images and uploads them ! If you add photos to those folder then the client will pick them up too. I experienced a few problems with the client. It told me it had uploaded all my photos yet when I looked in my account they didn't show up, on uninstalling and reinstall the client they showed up !

Of course you could manually upload them, by selecting...

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The first question/answer from Ask Arvind...

Lea writes:

Can you provide tips on how to have cruft-free URLs (a la diveintomark.org, as well as others)? I already have this employed in my blog, but a lot of others don't.

The diveintomark tutorial in question can be found here.

First of all what is cruft ? Cruft is basically the extensions of webpages for example .php, .html etc. In the field of SEO it is meant to be very bad. Here's a - hopefully easier - method to have cruft-free urls. For this to work you will need to install the Short-Titles plugin (thanks Amit!)

•

Blank out "File Extension for Archive Files" under Weblog Config → Preferences •

Change the Archive File...

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UPDATE files are bundled in an archive.

I was very impressed with the WordPress Suggest plugin and wanted to port it over to MT. The porting was easy but the query was very slow and pulled some bad results from the database. Chad helped me last night and we had almost cleaned it up until v0.2 was released which seems to have fixed the problems I had. Try it using the search form on the sidebar.

This plugin is similar to LiveSearch (and the MT implementation) however the difference is it lets you keep the mt-search.cgi functionality which I liked. Also this plugin works slightly differently to LiveSearch, I prefer this!

Implementing it with MT is very easy, you need to have PHP and be...

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As many of you know, there are hundreds of plugins in the Movable Type plugin directory through which you can completely customize and modify the way that the application works. This has always been a great strength of the Movable Type platform and we put great effort in every release to give plugins even more ways to enhance the system.

What you may not know is that since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, dozens of plugins built specifically for v3.2 have been created. Some of the new capabilities of these plugins include plugin actions for acting on checked items in a listing screen, UI enhancements thanks to BigPAPI, feedback scoring and Junk processing.

We're happy to announce...

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UPDATE: I had pulled out the functionality to check spelling with this toolbar, well I've put back the functionality. Just download the quicktags.js file that coressponds to your version of MT again and re-upload it. A new button called "Dict." will appear that will query a highlighted word to dictionary.com !

Please go to the MT 2.x instructions to fix a problem with the Quicktags not aligning properly.

This tutorial will allow you to have the Quicktags I described in my previous entry but is not restricted to MT 3.01D.

The files you will need:

Quicktags.js

The MT 2.x Version | The MT 3.x Version

Upload the quicktags js file to your staticwebpath - ie the same folder than...

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When I set about re-creating MovaDir, I wanted to create a form that would post directly into MT. I soon discovered that I would need to use the XML-RPC API to really streamline it. This is a tutorial that will guide you through setting up a form that will allow a user to manipulate entry fields and then rebuild the entry. Use of the mySQL database is required.

You will need to create a new index template called Incutio XML-RPC Library, set the output file as IXR_Library.inc.php and copy this file for the template body.

Next create a new index template called IP Tracking with an output file iptracking.php and copy this file into the template body.

This is a very neat script written by...

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