This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying the first letter of a section of text as a "drop cap." A drop cap is a large initial letter of a paragraph that spans more than one line of text. The CSS2 standard lets you create drop caps using the first-letter pseudo-element. However, this will not display properly in older browsers, and it also doesn't allow you to use images for your drop caps. This plugin is designed to let you do drop caps the old-fashioned way, by using an HTML table or image with align="left", which will cause the paragraph to wrap around the drop cap.

The DropCap plugin currently only formats the first letter of the entire piece of text you...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for defining a section of text and/or HTML code as "glue" that will appear between items (entries, categories, comments, etc.) in a listing, and will not appear after the last item in the listing. The functionality is similar to that of the glue attribute of Movable Type's MTEntryCategories tag, although the way the plugin is used within a template is somewhat different.

Installation

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

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Arvind Satyanarayan shows why his site Movalog is one of the most popular references on Movable Type with his post about Movalog: Variables and Conditional Display. Explaining the obscure, but extremely powerful, Movable Type template tags MTSetVar and MTGetVar, Arvind shows how they can be used in combination with some simple PHP scripting to allow for conditional display of content on your Movable Type-powered pages.

Trackbacks:

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Question

I understood that each entry is placed on the main index page. Some of my entries are "something special". They should never be placed on the start page. How can I achieve this?

Answer

Depending on how you define "some of my entries", there may be a specific solution. For example, there is a plugin for excluding certain categories. If you want a general purpose solution, you should look at Comparison needed for conditional Generation. In this entry, I describe how certain parts of a page can be conditionally generated.

mgs

Feedback is welcome!

What do you think about this entry? Was it interesting or boring? I would like to...

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Version 2.51 of Movable Type is now released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the changelog if you have been experiencing a problem with 2.5 and to determine if it was fixed in 2.51.

This release also adds two new features: • A Windows right-click menu item called "MT It!" allows you to use the bookmarklet from your right-click menu. If you're running Windows, you can add this menu item through the "Set Up Bookmarklets" screen in Movable Type. Thanks to Anil Dash. • An <MTElse> tag that can be used globally to provide an "else" condition for any conditional tag. ( more information) Thanks to Brad Choate.

If you're upgrading from any previous Movable Type release,...

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Usually a weblog is not the best place to give a good introduction into a certain subject. The author writes about whatever he wants. He doesn't care whether the current entry fits to the last entry or not. With this sitemap I want to give a complete listing of all entries and bring some structure into the chaos.

You can also use a simple list or a category-grouped list of all entries.

Why do I start a weblog?

There are probably many reasons for starting a weblog. Maybe you are interesting in mine. • In the Beginning nothing but Problems • Wake up! • Trying to be a Global Player

Basics

When I first read a weblog I thought its structure was rather difficult to understand....

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10.18.2002

MT & TrackBack in Technology Review

November's issue of MIT's Technology Review contains an article about backlinking -- as well as a mention of TrackBack and some quotes by us. The article is currently premium content, but the author, David F. Gallagher has informed me that it will most probably be available for free some time in the next week.

Posted by Mena at 06:21 PM | Permalink

10.08.2002

Version 2.5 and a birthday

Read what we've got to say on the one-year birthday of Movable Type. Then, please fill out a short survey and download version 2.5.

What's new in version 2.5?

Posted by Mena at 10:28 AM |...

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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...

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The following topics have not bee sufficiently covered in the user manual but will be included at a future date. • Save & Rebuild button on New/Edit Entry Screen. • Creative Commons Licensing. • IP Banning. • Throttling. • Author Listing Screen. • Deleting a Weblog. • Plugins Listing Screen. • Atom ID in author profile. • General discussion of Listing Screens in Getting Started Introduction. • Expiration of sessions if Remember Me option not used. Include configuration directive and purpose of feature. • Background Tasks. Testing, purpose/explanation and configuration. • Defining Default Templates for All Weblogs. • Main Menu Welcome Message....

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Andy Budd, a name some of you will recognize as a proponent of CSS-based design, has decided to take a long, hard objective look at the arguments made in favor of CSS.

I'm sure we've all found ourselves writing fairly complicated CSS to do something that would be trivial using tables. Take form styling for example. It's possible to lay out even very tricky forms using tables in just a few minutes. You can achieve similar results by floating elements with CSS, but it's a lot more involved

The rest of Andy's points are lucid, level-headed, and enforce something that you may or may not personally believe: CSS-based design under all circumstances, while a...

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Content Omissions

The following topics have not bee sufficiently covered in the user manual but will be included at a future date. • Save & Rebuild button on New/Edit Entry Screen. • Creative Commons Licensing. • IP Banning. • Throttling. • Author Listing Screen. • Deleting a Weblog. • Plugins Listing Screen. • Atom ID in author profile. • General discussion of Listing Screens in Getting Started Introduction. • Expiration of sessions if Remember Me option not used. Include configuration directive and purpose of feature. • Background Tasks. Testing, purpose/explanation and configuration. • Defining Default Templates for All Weblogs....

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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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One of the nice things about old-school table layout methods is that they enable you to create liquid page designs very easily. If you want to center content vertically or stick a footer to the bottom of the browser window, all you have to do is include one main table with a height of 100% and position elements inside of it.

With web standards, you can't do this anymore. The table height property is deprecated in XHTML, and web standards recommend that you avoid using tables for page layout. To divide structural markup from presentation, CSS is the way to go - but if you want to use CSS for vertical positioning, you face a lack of support from some mainstream browsers....

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Apparently there remains some confusion after my Thursday-afternoon rumination on the potential use of tables, as opposed to pure CSS-based layouts. I'm going to share some of my experience to help clear this up.

Some of the comments on this site were discouraging, it sounds like the original piece was interpreted to advocate laziness. Some of the replies on other sites perpetuated this interpretation, so once more, tables should be considered only with the proper education to use them responsibly. This means attention to accessibility, as well as offloading all other presentational attributes to the CSS, leaving the simplest of layout-structural tables.

The point I was clear to make...

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Professional Network member Kevin Shay wrote the following tutorial to introduce the community to his exciting new plugin and its development potential.

The BigPAPI plugin for Movable Type allows you to create plugins that can easily add features to Movable Type's interface. This article explains the background behind the develpment of BigPAPI, and walks through the creation of a simple working plugin.

Why BigPAPI?

With each new version, Movable Type has become friendlier to plugin development. The earliest plugins could do little more than add tags to the platform's templating system. Now (as of version 3.2), the Plugin API allows plugins to define not only template tags...

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There has been a growing debate lately that pits accessibility against usability, but there's no reason we can't have both. If you can make a page more usable without making it less accessible, by all means do so; do not let your inability to translate certain usability enhancements into accessible functions or features restrict your use of those enhancements. As long as the enhancements do not restrict accessibility, go for it.

As many of you know, with JavaScript and the DOM, we have the ability to control every element on a well-structured web page. It is my feeling that, using the DOM, we can improve the usability of a page without restricting its accessibility....

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Movable Type provides a powerful API that allows developers to extend its functionality. Plugins can add tags to MT's templating system, or create full-fledged applications that interact with the MT database.

One missing piece of the API, however, has been the ability for plugins to modify MT's own interface—the screens you see when using Movable Type to manage your content.

BigPAPI is intended to fill this gap. It provides hooks so that other plugins can access and alter any page of the MT interface before it's displayed to the user. In effect, it enlarges the Plugin API—hence the name BigPAPI.

Unless you're a developer, that's probably all you need to know. The best way to...

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This tutorial is co-authored by LMT guest author Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting and Elise Bauer of elise.com.

Movable Type allows you to create categories and sub-categories for organizing your entries. The default MT3.2 Main Index template includes code to list these categories in the sidebar section. This tutorial will attempt to explain the tags used in this code and how they work together.

Categories, Sub-categories, Parent, Child, and Levels

The only difference between a category and a sub-category is that the latter will always have a "parent" category. The sub-category is still a category, and everything else remains the same as any other category. But by having...

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Oops. Something went wrong. You're not sure what - was it you? Was it the website? What do you do now?

Welcome to the world of the Error 404 page. You've requested a page - either by typing a URL directly into the address bar or clicking on an out-of-date link and you've found yourself in the middle of cyberspace nowhere. A user-friendly website will give you a helping hand while many others will simply do nothing, relying on the browser's built-in ability to explain what the problem is. We can do better than that, can't we?

I won't go into details about how you set your server up to deliver a custom 404 page - ...

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Web designers are not programmers, and that can often be a problem when you need to create an active element in your web site using server side scripting. Programming is no light task, it seems, and most designers whimper and cower away when faced with even a small snippet of Perl or C.

Fear not, however, because Active Server Pages and VBScript make it easy to deliver effective server side scripting. This article assumes you know a little bit about how computer programming works, but you don't really need to know anything about VBScript or Visual Basic at all to get started. I'll walk you through two very useful ASP applications, and when you're done with this tutorial,...

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