Less Is More

One key principle of interface design is not to overload your users by dumping every choice available on your site right there on the front page. Users don't mind drilling for information that needs to be drilled for. Important stuff should be readily and easily accesible, and category archives falls into the category of important stuff, especially since they're one of the primary ways someone navigates your site. But for anyone who posts on a regular basis, your category section can become rather large and unweildy, very quickly falling under the category of "choice dumping". Fifty-one categories and seventy-two months listed on your sidebar...

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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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Strange adding a category called categories... but I digress.

Two Roads Diverged...

I've been working on a new blog in which I want to sort the categories in order other than alphabetical. Now, there is an quick and ugly solution, and there is a time-consuming and beautiful solution. First, we'll look at the ugly way of sorting your categories of the U.S. Presidents:

The Easy, Ugly Way

Create first category for Washington, only call it 01:Washington. Create second category for Adams... name it 02:Adams. So and so on through the U.S. Presidents. When Movable Type builds your page, it catches those initial numbers and puts them in order by number. A...

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Movable Type gives you an amazing amount of control over your content, but one of the things that it sorely lacks is the ability to make massive changes to all of your entries at once. Oh sure, you can edit the basics in power editing mode--categories, authors, dates and titles--but we want more. Being able to make massive changes to the extended, excerpt and keyword fields can become almost a necessity if, like me, you're using those fields for something other than their original purpose.

For instance--Customer A is using MT to store course listings. The extended entry field contains the dates offered, the excerpt field holds the price and the keywords...

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You've seen it before. An article gets hot and soon you have 50 to 60 comments attached to it. Getting in on the tail end of the conversation can be annoying with that many posts to wade through. So we create a handy little convention that will highlight (change the class of) the comments posted by the author of the post.

There are many, many ways this can be done (plugins, php, etc.) and even more ways to implement it (mutliple author highlighting, specific images for certain commenters, etc.), but we're going to look at two important facets: static and dynamic.

Static vs. Dynamic

This is a debate which we will leave to the professionals. I will only...

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Module Aggregation

David Raynes' MultiBlog is a must have plugin for anyone interested in content aggregation, but it's uses are far greater than just sharing text.

Take for instance storing a master stylesheet in your main blog and sharing it with other blogs (i.e. a FAQ blog) on your system to keep your look consistent. You could also share template modules across an installation, giving you the freedom to structure different parts of your site uniquely while still being able to share common elements (header, search box, category list) painlessly.

Consider this example, where I've shared the header modules from blog 2 with the blog I'm currently working...

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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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Macromedia released Flash MX in mid-March of 2002, including enhancements to the player and the authoring tool to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

Admittedly, some areas like screen reader access couldn't possibly get any worse than they were in previous versions of the player: popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes ignored Flash content completely. Other features, such as the ability to add captions (which has been available since Flash 5), benefit from improvements Macromedia made to the Flash architecture in this release.

The changes have also automatically improved access to existing Flash content when viewed in the Flash Player 6, but to...

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This is more of a typo than a bug. When refreshing your default Main Index template, it pulls in the code from the default template directory of your MT installation, and the Main Index default template adds an additional >" to the link to atom.xml feed:

resulting in:

Removing the extra characters in the main_index.tmpl of your default_templates directory should take care of it no problem and ensure bug free template refreshing.

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Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's ugly, but boy, it's never been a more welcome read.

That's right, the new Movable Type 3.2 User's Manual has just been released. You know what that means... MT 3.2 Final is just around the corner! The manual is long, but most importantly, it's USEFUL. About the only thing I ever learned from the old manual was Melody and Nelson; this finally presents you with real-life scenarios that help make installation a little less painful than it is and makes those people who make money installing MT a little uneasy.

They even have the manual open for moderated comments and a Beta Blog where you can catch all the latest news about MT...

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Well, in the immortal words of Shang Tsung, "It has begun."

The purpose of this site is not to be a definitive source on all things Movable Type. If you want that you should probably visit Movalog or Learning Movable Type.

My goal here is to chronicle my wranglings with Movable Type, and provide a place where those with not a whole lot of know-how can come to get some ideas. Ultimately, this is a pragmatic journal about getting things done with Movable Type. If something here help you out, awesome.

Enjoy.

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Six Apart is cool. So cool, in fact, that you probably don't even realize it. Look at the official orange badge on their home page. Or look at the one below. Count the spikes on it. Go ahead.

Six Apart is so cool.

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Be proud of your CMS! Here's some larger badges to accompany the standard badges that 6A is offering:

And one for my dark-sited friends (no white antialiasing around the edges) FIXED, thanks Dan:

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Somewhere in the wee small hours of the morning, the 6A team decided against a final release of 3.2 and decided to give the world one final(?) beta. Not that I'm complaining at all. A few days wait in exchange for an even rock-solid-er release is perfectly fine with me. As Mr. Franklin once said, "Haste makes waste."

I'll post a link here to beta-5 when it gets released. Not that you'll be able to download it today with the fifteen-billion beta testers in line to snatch it up the instant 6A's RSS feed say's 'go'. Of course that will pale in comparison to the d/l-frenzy when 3.2 final gets released (some time early next week?). It will be like 14.4k...

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We waited a while for it, but it's finally here. *much rejoicing*

The beta testing went on for a while, but really it was worth the wait. I'm rarely opposed to waiting for a program to get better; and I wasn't disappointed. The end product is a versatile program that adds both strength and flexibility to it's already powerful core.

And functionality! Some of my personal favorites: • Plugin Central: Plugins add a great deal of functionality to Movable Type's already powerful core. But installing plugins to previous versions would sometimes go forgotten because once the files were copied over, you'd never have any indication that they were there (like Scripturizer or...

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So Thursday AM is "The Big Day", the day when we all get to experience Movable Type 3.2, sans beta.

My entries are slow-in-coming for a few days while I launch my brand new design site. The current site is truly ghastly. I'm also currently slogging my way through 12 rounds in the ring with a couple of ornary problems:

Headache#1: .htaccess

First, I'm trying to get my server to process my .html files as .php files so I can use includes for my sidebar. I'm up to my neck in .htaccess, and I've tried adding the simple "AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html" with no luck. The site keeps returning a happy 500 error any time I try to view a .php file or...

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In " Flash Access: Unclear on the Concept," I dissected Macromedia's plans for making Flash accessible to people with disabilities. At the time, Macromedia had ignored accessibility completely. Once it had belatedly committed to solving the problem, the company did not know just what it was getting into.

People keep telling me to stop being such a bitch, so here is a much cheerier and less disempowering update. Macromedia no longer ignores accessibility and does know what it's getting into, but only the very earliest steps have been taken.

The screen reader problem

The new Flash MX authoring environment and the equally new...

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