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01: Installation and Upgrade

• Introduction • Choosing the Right Weblog Platform • Finding Perl on your Server...

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<MTPerlScript> is tag for Movable Type templates. If you know how to write Perl code, this custom tag gives you remarkable flexibility in producing pages from Movable Type. You can literally do any kind of manipulation you can think of using your Movable Type data.

This tag was written with a 'trust-the-programmer' mentality (or in this case, the template writer). There aren't any restrictions...

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The default Movable Type MT3 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code? MT3.1 and...

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Update: A 2.01 release of MT-IfEmpty is now available, which mainly adds support for dynamic publishing in MT 3.1x.

You can download this plugin here: mtifempty-2_01.zip.

Usage: <MTIfEmpty var="EntryTitle">(untitled)</MTIfEmpty> <$MTEntryTitle$>

Embedded expression support works like this: <MTIfNotEmpty expr="[MTEntries days='1']1[/MTEntries]"> We...

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Learning Movable Type has a tutorial on how to apply MT 3 styles to a 2.x blog but what about the other way around ?

I scanned two similar stylesheets to see what changed, basically the only thing you need to change is the definitions names mostly, the actually style definitions can stay the same. I am assuming you are using the default MT 3 templates Here is what has changed with the CSS from MT 2.x to MT 3 styles - it may not be perfect but it'll be darn close. I have listed the MT 2.x definitions and then the MT 3 definition it needs to be changed to: • .description becomes #banner h2 • #content and .blogbody becomes .content • #links becomes #right • .title becomes .content h3 • .date becomes...

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1.4 (2002.01.07)

• New default templates no longer use &lt;label&gt; tag in the Remember info? checkbox for the ``remember me'' JS, because it was breaking XHTML validation. • Fixed Linked File Templates so that, when linking a template to a new file that doesn't yet exist, the permissions will be set correctly (based on umask settings in mt.cfg). • Added new default templates and made them customizable by stylesheets. • Added the Comment Error Template to specify the layout of the page a user receives when there is an error with his/her...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

Updated Nov 16

The default styles that come with MT are known as 'fixed' styles. This means that size and position of layout elements, such as columns, are fixed and are defined in pixels (px). This also means that no matter what a person's screen resolution, everything will be the same width and in approximately the same position. The alternative to a fixed design is a fluid design. A fluid design uses percentages when defining size and positions, so the sizes of elements on the page are relative to the user's screen resolution. A fluid design also removes the horizontal scroll bar. With a fluid...

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This plugin allows you to define search and replace parameters for elements you produce from Movable Type templates. Keep reading for the details.

More details forthcoming-- for now I'm just providing the download link. The readme.txt in the zip file has all the relevant information.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtregex-1_61.zip

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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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Morbus Iff has been doing some really interesting things with Apple's iCal and Movable Type. Here's the O'Reilly entry that describes how to publish your weblog into iCal-compatible format.

>From his own weblog, Movable Type blog-to-iCal implementation.

Another thought: since iCal is scriptable, one Ben could write an AppleScript (see below) to gather the latest events in your calendar and publish them to a blogging system via XML-RPC.

Update: Here is an AppleScript called iCal2blog to publish events in your iCal calendar(s) to your weblog via XML-RPC. The README contains usage instructions. Note that you'll need to modify Movable Type slightly to allow setting the Authored...

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09.12.2002

Blogging over iCal

Morbus Iff has been doing some really interesting things with Apple's iCal and Movable Type. Here's the O'Reilly entry that describes how to publish your weblog into iCal-compatible format.

>From his own weblog, Movable Type blog-to-iCal implementation.

Another thought: since iCal is scriptable, one Ben could write an AppleScript (see below) to gather the latest events in your calendar and publish them to a blogging system via XML-RPC.

Update: Here is an AppleScript called iCal2blog to publish events in your iCal calendar(s) to your weblog via XML-RPC. The README contains usage instructions. Note that you'll need to modify...

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For you Movable Typers who also use PHP, here's a little function that will let you link to content from previous years. Read on to see it.

This routine lets you link dynamically (or statically if you prefer) to blogs from prior years. Small caveat-- this requires that you archive entries on a daily basis. Here's the code-- just make necessary changes to the "archive_path" and "href_path" variables...

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As broadband Internet connections become more ubiquitous, and more corporate sites begin to incorporate Flash and use it as their primary tool, there will be more of a need to incorporate e-commerce functionality into the Flash-based websites that you design. For the moment, this is uncommon, and I can propose two reasons why: • Most e-commerce developers have experience creating HTML-based sites, and the current crop of development tools (i.e. ASP, PHP, JSP, Cold Fusion) are specifically designed to spit out HTML pages. • Many people still use dial-up modems. So, to provide easy, quick access to the largest number of customers possible, simple HTML sites are almost always the way to go....

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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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The web services concept being championed by computing giants like Sun, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, and IBM doesn't contain many new ideas, but it is a great step towards simple access to software over the network. By promoting standards–based communication, web services might change the way we build websites.

What is a web service?

Web services make software functionality available over the Internet so that programs like PHP, ASP, JSP, JavaBeans, the COM object, and all our other favorite widgets can make a request to a program running on another server (a web service) and use that program's response in a website, WAP service, or other application.

So when I need to get some...

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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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• Initial beta release

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer)...

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2.5 (2002.10.08)

• Localization: the MT interface can be available in multiple languages, on a per-author setting. • Integrated Jay Allen's mt-search (Thanks, Jay!). We've made the following changes from version 1.31b: • Rewrote ``new comments search'' to make it more scalable (using recently_commented_on functionality) • Added a search log through the Activity Log. • Added search request throttling, to help against denial of service attacks. • Merged mt-search.cfg directives into mt.cfg....

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05.31.2005

Movable Type Cheat Sheet

One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a template tag for displaying text based on whether an entry's date falls within Daylight Saving Time.

Required Modules

The MTDaylightOrStandard tag uses the Time::Local module, part of the standard Perl distribution.

Installation

To install the DaylightOrStandard plugin, upload the file DaylightOrStandard.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.

Contact

Please address questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, interesting usage examples, etc., to mtplugins [AT]&...

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