Displaying a Calendar Layout

Problem

You want to create a calendar layout in your template.

Solution

Use the template tags prefixed with MTCalendar.

Discussion

Movable Type includes a collection of template tags prefixed with MTCalendar; these can be used for creating calendar layouts that serve either navigational or display purposes. MTCalendar tags are sufficiently generic to create calendars in many different formats; however, HTML tables are the most common, • MTCalendar

MTCalendar is a container tag representing a calendar month that lists a single calendar "cell" in...

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A container tag representing a calendar month that lists a single calendar "cell" in the calendar display.

Attributes: • month - An optional attribute that specifies the calendar month and year the tagset is to generate. The value must be in YYYYMM format.

The month attribute also recognizes two special values. Given a value of "last," the calendar will be generated for the previous month from the current date. Using a value of "this" will generate a calendar for the current month.

The default behavior is to generate a monthly calendar based on the archive in context. When used in the context of an...

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This plugin provides a couple of new tags to enhance Movable Type calendar publishing.

Availability

You can download this plugin from here: mtcalx-1_1.zip

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later

Installation

To install, place the 'calx.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins' directory. The 'calx.pm' file should be placed in a 'bradchoate'...

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

With the release of Movable Type version 3.2, Six Apart opted to not include the calendar feature that had been included by default in earlier versions. The reason for this is that calendars, with the days linking to blog archives, are resource intensive; they can significantly lengthen rebuild times. Six Apart has posted the code that was used in previous versions of MT. However, many users have found that simply copying and pasting the code as given doesn't yield a properly formatted calendar.

The following code will create a calendar that will be correctly formatted and...

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With v3.2 of Movable Type, Six Apart removed the calendar from the sidebar of the default templates citing rebuild times as the reason. They did post the code that was used in previous versions. However, many users found that simply pasting the code in didn't yield a properly formatted calendar. So after a little digging around, I've come up with the following code which will create a calendar that will be correctly formatted and fit in with your stylesheet. Simply copy the code and put it in your sidebar - a good location would be just above <div class="module-search module">

<div class="module-calendar module"> <h2 class="module-header"><$MTDate format="%B %Y"$><...

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After borrowing from markpasc.org and dive into mark, and some not inconsiderable fiddling, you now have the option to browse this site using a rather nice calendar.

Enjoy.

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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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The default Movable Type styles use color schemes in which certain colors are repeated in different style elements throughout the stylesheet. For example, the Independence style uses the same color red (#B22222) for the banner background color, the link hover color, the content h2, the calendar caption, and the sidebar h2 and border colors. In the comments section of the LMT tutorial Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font, developer Brad Choate remarked that you could easily use the MTSetVar tag to define a color and the top of your stylesheet, and use the MTGetVar tag throughout your stylesheet wherever you wanted that color to be used. This works because the stylesheet is a...

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01.21.2002

MT 2.0

Development on MT version 2.0 is going smoothly and we're looking at a early March release. Can you believe it's almost February?

A list of definite 2.0 features: • Multiple category support: The ability to assign multiple categories per entry • Multiple archive template per archive type • Interface modifications, application navigation and icon improvements based on findings from professional usability testing • Power edit screen: Apply title, category or author changes to multiple entries -- using one screen and all at once • More sorting options for the MTEntries tag: alphabetical by title, most recently commented-on, ascending and...

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It's a shame MT doesn't provide year-based archives because some of us have enough entries for them even if Movable Type hasn't been out that long! Here's what my 2001 blogging year looks like. Well, you can create them manually-- and since you only have to do it once a year, it isn't too bad. Click the 'more' link for details...

All you have to do to build a year archive is create an index template...

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Here are some simple changes that even a non-CSS expert like me can implement to make some fundamental changes to the default styles of MT3 weblogs.

1. Moving the sidebar from the right to the left side. The default MT3 Stylesheets have the sidebar on the right side of the page. To move the sidebar to the left hand side you don't actually have to change the stylesheet at all. The changes are made to the Main Index template and any other archive template that has a sidebar. In the Main Index template, find the sidebar code section:

<div id="right"> <div class="sidebar">

Your sidebar code

</div> </div>

If your sidebar is currently on...

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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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One of Movable Type's most powerful traits is its flexibility to adapt to practically any weblog design or use you can imagine. For the average user, most of this flexibility comes from Movable Type's template engine.

The template engine is crucial to automating the process of publishing and is what makes a publishing system go. When a rebuild is performed, templates are merged with content to create a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

These templates are what control the design and layout of your site and what keeps that design separate from the content. Templates describe where you want...

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Movable Type is set up for doing date-based archives by day, week, and month, but not by year. There are a few plugins and methods out there that will help you create a yearly calendar of your archives, for example, Brad Choate's Year Archives in MT Perl script plugin will produce a calendar archive ( example). Lummox JR's ArchiveYear plugin will produce a similar calendar ( example).

I prefer a yearly archive to show a list of entries by month, as I've set up on one of my blogs ( example). An archive page like this can be accomplished using the ArchiveYear plugin with some simple changes to the sample code given. Update August 1, 2005 The ArchiveYear plugin seems to not be in its...

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MTCalendar

A container tag representing a calendar month that lists a single calendar "cell" in the calendar display.

Attributes: • month - An optional attribute that specifies the calendar month and year the tagset is to generate. The value must be in YYYYMM format.

The month attribute also recognizes two special values. Given a value of "last," the calendar will be generated for the previous month from the current date. Using a value of "this" will generate a calendar for the current month.

The default behavior is to generate a monthly calendar based on the archive in context....

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags related to calendar dates.

Note: The MTDaylightOrStandard tag, which was part of earlier versions of this plugin, is now part of its own plugin.

Required Modules

The DateTags code relies heavily on the Date::Calc Perl module. Depending on your or your ISP's installation, this may already be present on your system. To check whether Date::Calc is installed, open a shell connection to the host on which you're running Movable Type, and type: perl -e 'use Date::Calc'

Hit Enter. If this prints nothing, the module is installed. If it prints an error message, you'll need to install Date::Calc. (The MTIfDaysOfMonth and MTBirthstone tags do not require Date::Calc, so you should be able to use those without the module installed.)...

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You should just be able to copy and paste this style sheet into the master style sheet of your blog and you'll get a nice little site refurb, on the house:

 # Waters of the Hudson # CSS distributed by # PlasticMind Design # http://plasticmind.com body { margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px; background-color: #000033; text-align: center; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif; } a { text-decoration: none; } a:link { color: #336699; } a:visited { color: #336699; } a:active { color: #336699; } a:hover { color: #ACBED5; border-bottom-width:...
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(Note: this tutorial is intended for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.) If you are new to Movable Type, and are using the default style sheets you may have encountered a surprise when viewing your weblog in various browsers. The reasons for this are many. First, different browsers (Internet Explorer, AOL, Netscape, Safari) on different platforms (Windows XP, Windows 2000, MacOSX) render CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in different ways. What looks one way on a Mac running Safari can look way different from a PC running AOL. Second, our dedicated team at Six Apart - Ben and Mena Trott - are Mac-ophiles, assuring that most of their default styles render well on a Mac, but not necessarily so...

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2.1 (2002.05.02)

• Added webMaster, language, lastBuildDate, and pubDate to both RSS templates. • Added encode_html="1" to all RSS fields that didn't have it already. • Added Norwegian dates. • Added test for mt-check.cgi to determine whether we are running under cgiwrap or suexec. • Added a new global tag attribute encode_url (thanks to Scott Andrew LePera and others for the idea). • Changed the behavior of the publish flag in blogger.newPost; previously, if set to false the new entry would be saved as a draft. This was a bad idea, for...

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Happy New Year, everyone!

We're looking forward to an exciting year of big Movable Type developments. Thanks go out to all who have supported us with donations, support and just really great feedback.

We hope our plans for Movable Type in 2002 will be as exciting for our users as they are for us.

As many of you know, we're currently developing a version of MT with multiple category support. This version, formerly referred to as 1.4, will also consist of interface improvements (including new and improved, and more importantly, more intuitive icons).

Expect this release to merit a version 2.0 label.

In the meantime, we couldn't resist planning a mini-release -- with the...

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