Movable Type 2.2 is now available for download.

Amongst the small fixes and improvements documented in the changelog, there are two very large new features with this release. • TrackBack is a framework for peer-to-peer communication between weblogs; it can track cross-weblog discussions, it can provide remote content repositories, it can emulate guest authoring, etc. A more detailed introduction to TrackBack is available here. Please read through the documentation to learn how to set up TrackBack on your blog. • The system can now use a MySQL database for backend data storage, as an alternative to the Berkeley DB storage. If you are installing Movable Type for the first...

continue reading ...

04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

continue reading ...

I've updated the edit_entry.tmpl file in the Alternate Template Collection with a new feature: a "Now" button. Clicking the Now button will update the Authored On field to the current date and time!

Download the edit_entry.tmpl alternate template or learn more about this and other alternate templates I've created.

If you found this article useful, please consider supporting this site through a donation.

continue reading ...

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....

continue reading ...

If you are looking for help making the transition to CSS layout (that's Cascading Style Sheets), you've come to the right place. I am cataloging here as many useful cross-browser CSS layout techniques as I can find, and some that I made up when I was bored last Thursday. All the examples on this site have been reduced to only their essential code, and you will find the source displayed on each page to hopefully make it quick and easy to understand the inner workings of the CSS. Feel free to steal all the code you find on this site, and consider linking back here on your site or in your source comments.

You will also find below links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran....

continue reading ...

This version of Workflow finally fixes the transfer bug. I found the problem with my test and squished the bug for good.

Hop on over to the Workflow page and get yourself upgraded.

continue reading ...

You may have noticed that we just announced the release of Movable Type 3.17 over on the MT News blog. This release is a small bug fix release in terms of changes, but an important one for those who are affected by the bugs.

If you're running MT 3.16 and would like to upgrade to this release with the minimum of hassle, you can simply upload the following changed files: • docs/ (a number of files) • README.txt • lib/MT.pm • lib/MT/App.pm • lib/MT/App/CMS.pm • lib/MT/Plugin.pm • lib/MT/Template/Context.pm • mt-db2sql.cgi • php/mt.php • plugins/nofollow/README.txt • plugins/nofollow/nofollow.pl • plugins/nofollow/tmpl/nofollow.tmpl • tmpl/cms/edit_comment.tmpl

For those of you on international versions, you...

continue reading ...

Question

I was deleting a comment from an entry, and when I saved the entry, its text was replaced with the comment I just deleted.

Answer

This is a documented bug with Safari.

If that's the browser you're using, here's what you need to do in order to delete a comment (until Safari fixes this bug):

When you delete a comment, you will be returned to the Edit Entry page for the entry the comment was posted on.

Do NOT save the entry at this point.

Instead, note which entry you're on, then leave the page by clicking on List & Edit Entries. Then find that entry in the list, click on its title, and you will be returned to the...

continue reading ...

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard includes seven font-size keywords intended to give designers a simple means of setting font sizes without creating accessibility problems. Sizes range from xx-small to xx-large and are relative to users' preferred "medium" settings. Putting these seven sizes to work should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately there are plenty of obstacles ahead. Fortunately there is a workaround. Let's start by surveying the damage, then move on to a working solution.

Netscape 4

The first obstacle is Netscape 4, whose implementation of the keywords actually follows the CSS-1 spec's suggested 1.5 scaling factor between indices. (In...

continue reading ...

This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for collecting information from specified HTML tags in your entries, and collating and displaying that information. This lets you enhance your MT-based pages in a variety of ways. For example, you could: • Display footnotes for the links or images that appear within each entry. The StripTags plugin could also do this; since this plugin can do everything StripTags can do and much more, StripTags is superseded by Collect and will no longer be updated. See the Usage Examples section, below, for some examples of how to duplicate the functionality of StripTags with Collect. • Generate a "Recent Links" listing to display in your sidebar. • Create "by citation" or "by quotation" archives, similar to the ones Mark Pilgrim has on...

continue reading ...

Although the campaign hasn't been completed, I was excited about this release due to its featureset and didn't want to busy myself with its release during the peak of my exams.

So here it is, Download MT-Protect_1.0.zip and follow the installation instructions . If you are upgrading from the beta, you will need to run the upgrade script that will create a new table.

This new release includes several new features: •

Typekey groups, this is where you create groups of Typekey users from example Friends etc. To assist you in creation of these groups, a new list_commenters.tmpl has been included in the distribution so you can select Typekey commenters to add to a new group. •

Protection of entire blogs --...

continue reading ...

A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects. CSS2's current state requires a separate HTML element for each background image. In many cases, typical markup for common interface components has already provided several elements for our use.

One of those cases is tabbed navigation. It's time to take back control over the tabs which are continually growing in popularity as a primary means of site navigation. Now that CSS is widely supported, we can crank up the quality and appearance of the tabs on our sites. You're most likely aware that CSS can be used to tame a plain unordered list. Maybe you've even seen lists styled as tabs, looking something like this:...

continue reading ...

UPDATE: Version 1.21 has been released that fixes the password protection bug under static publishing. Please download the new version and re-enable protection on all your blogs.

MT Protect is a plugin that allows you to easily protect entries so only authorized users can read the entry, comments and trackbacks. This new version has been built for Movable Type 3.2 and is feature packed: • Cross-database compatibility - MT Protect is now compatible with PostGreSQL and SQLite. The only problem with using either of these two databases is that if you haven't got the necessary modules installed, you cannot use Password Protection (this is further explained in the docs) • OpenID Support - MT Protect now allows you to protect entries/weblogs using OpenID. Protecting an entry using OpenID works exactly like protecting an entry using Typekey and best of all is that you can create OpenID groups. You may also be interested to know that Movable Type 3.2 comes with OpenID support, look in the extras/ folder!M...

continue reading ...

We have released a new version of Movable Type, version 1.2. Existing users of either version 1.0 or version 1.1 should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the new upgrade instructions.

In addition to bug fixes and improvements to general stability, this release adds the following features: • Ability to export entries from Movable Type for backup purposes, or for importing into another blog ( more information) • When uploading images meant for popup windows, Movable Type will now create an HTML file to surround the image in the popup window, which fixes browser offset problems ( more information) • Ability to link templates to external...

continue reading ...

Randy's updated SharpMT and Pocket SharpMT, two great posting clients, with extended support for TypePad and Movable Type 3.0. They're still beta releases, but you'll want to check in if you use SharpMT to post.

Trackbacks:

Zempt News - Zempt 0.4 - December 3, 2004 08:29 PMWe've released Zempt 0.4, the result of Toby's hard work. This version fixes a number of small bugs that I'm sure were irritating in the day-to-day use of Zempt, as well as making some major changes and fixes. Download it......

Previous Entry: MTKeywords Plugin

Next Entry: Give a TypePad Blog

continue reading ...

Note: This plugin used to be called LastModified, and had an MTLastModified tag. Since version 2.65, Movable Type has had a built-in MTEntryModifiedDate tag, making the plugin tag obsolete, but MTIfModified is still useful.

This Movable Type plugin implements a template tag for displaying a section of template code conditionally based on whether or not an entry was modified since it was created.

Installation

To install the IfModified plugin, upload the file IfModified.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you do not already have a plugins directory, create one before uploading the file. For more information about Movable Type plugins, see the documentation.

Contac...

continue reading ...

3.1 (2004.08.31)

• Scheduled (``Future'') posting. • Dynamic pages powered by PHP. • Subcategories for hierarchical categorization of posts. • New application-level callbacks enable new ways to extend the Movable Type platform: new hook points allow fine control over site rebuilds as well as filtering and throttling for comments and TrackBack pings. • Plugins now have more ways to add to the Movable Type user interface, with more ``plugin actions'' and an ability to add items to the rebuild menu. • TransparentProxyIPs configuration setting...

continue reading ...

07.13.2005

Announcing Movable Type 3.2 Beta

Over the past two weeks, we've been telling the world a lot about Movable Type 3.2 and now it's time to show it.

Today, we are releasing the first beta version of Movable Type 3.2 and we encourage everyone to download it and see for themselves.

You can find the details over on the Beta Blog. We hope to see you over there!

Posted by Jay Allen at 06:19 PM | Permalink

07.05.2005

Intermittent "500 Server Errors" in MT (RESOLVED)

If you are experiencing intermittent "500 Server Errors" while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause...

continue reading ...

12.22.2004

MT-Blacklist v2.03-beta

As part of the ongoing efforts against comment spam, Jay Allen has released Blacklist v2.03-beta. This release is designed to take advantage of the improvements in Movable Type 3.14, and the combination of the two is an excellent way to manage comment spam while not imposing too much of a burden on your web server.

If you're using an older version of MT-Blacklist, it's strongly recommended that you update to this new version. And just to review, MT-Blacklist, despite the name, MT-Blacklist offers a wide variety of techniques to manage or moderate comments or block spam, in addition to its namesake Blacklisting feature.

Posted by Anil in Plugins at...

continue reading ...

UPDATE: I've just pushed out a silent update that fixes a problem with custom entry field descriptions not showing. Thanks Nilesh!

A new version of CustomFields is available that fixes four bugs that people found; • CustomFields weren't editable in Internet Explorer • Textareas would break the layout of the entry screen in Internet Explorer • CustomFields data would get erased during Power Editing mode. • If a field description was empty the brackets would still showThis new version also implements a new resizing control for textareas. Many users complained the previous method either didn't work or looked ugly. As a result, the new control takes up much less space, doesn't cause the layout to break...

continue reading ...