Limiting the HTML in Comments

Problem

HTML was used in the comments, but you want to limit which tags get displayed.

Solution

Use the "Limit HTML Tags" settings of the weblog.

Discussion

When data is submitted by visitors to your site, that data should not necessarily be trusted. For example, if you are allowing HTML in your comments, visitors to your site could submit malicious HTML, or scripts in Javascript or PHP, to run code on your site. This code could do anything including reading cookies or reading private files on your server.

To protect your site, Movable Type can...

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CookiePath

Specifies the exact path for which MT cookies are set.

Permalink

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CookieDomain

Specifies the exact domain for which MT cookies are set.

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It's been lamented that most of the people using CSS for design are the people who shouldn't be designing in the first place. I have a theory about why the real designers aren't jumping in.

Building a site with tables, while tedious, is generally straightforward. You make sure your body margins are set to 0, you check that you have enough spacer GIFs, you chop accordingly, and you're good to go. It's refined to the point where there isn't a lot of thinking involved anymore.

CSS is still quirky. You have to remember to add your padding to your width instead of subtracting it, although in some browsers it works the opposite way. (I have to admit, IE5...

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Question

A list of all known issues in the latest version of Movable Type. Please be sure to review this list before using the product or opening a support ticket.

Answer

As of Version 3.16, released April 18, 2005 • Configuration • A new application method ("app_path") prevents the login cookie from being set when Movable Type is installed in the root folder, rather than a subfolder. See Keep getting login screen for the solution. • Archives • It is impossible to produce files with no file extension by using the File extension for archive...

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Question

When saving an entry or rebuilding, I get an error that says Build error in template '[Some Template Name]': Error in <MTInclude> tag: Can't find included template module '[Some Module Name]'.

Answer

This error means you've used the <MTInclude> tag in the specified template to call a Template Module, but Movable Type cannot find that module.

Look on the Templates : Modules tab1 and confirm that you've created a module by the name referenced in the error message.

If you do not see the module listed, you will need to either...

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Today a new version of MTLookup, the search engine for Movable Type related information, has been released. Several new features have been implemented.

In a couple of days, I will describe all improvements in detail. Here is a summary of the most important changes.

More Websites

With the initial release of MTLookup just the three websites Movable Type Weblog, Learning Movable Type, and Movalog were included.

Today, 20 websites are spidered. There are Movable Type resouce websites, Six Apart websites, and CSS related websites. These are...

Tutorials

• Movable Type Weblog • Learning Movable Type • Movalog • Dan&Sherree • geekmum {movable cafe} • MT-Hacks • PubHacks • Staggernation...

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Question

When running any of the Movable Type CGI scripts, I receive an error that says Can't locate Some/File.pm in @INC (where Some/File.pm is the name of a particular file).

Answer

• Run mt-check.cgi to ensure that all of the Perl modules required for Movable Type usage are installed on your webserver. If they are not, follow the instructions in the Installation Documentation. • Check to make sure that in the directory containing your CGI files (for example, mt.cgi), there is a directory called lib; inside that the file in the error message (for...

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To reset templates within a blog browse to the following url http://www.mydomain.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=reset_blog_templates&blog_id=BLOGID

Replace the bits in red with your domain, path to MT and blogid (this can be found by logging into MT and going to the blog's menu and you'll see it in the address bar as &blog_id=X where X is the blogid)

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It was bound to happen. Microsoft's Internet Explorer finally just broke. Nothing fancy, no bells, whistles or fireworks. It just died. For some unknown reason, cookies are no longer working. There are a handful that are set, and more are accepted because they keep piling up. But the ones I want to work ( Observer login, Bloglines login) don't.

So I'm done. I had installed Mozilla's Firefox 0.8, and with a simple "set as default" click, Internet Explorer is no more. Sure, it's there and all. But it's not the default, and if I can help it, I'm not even going to fire it up. So far, I'm pleased. The browsing speed is much faster than IE as far as I can tell, and I'm supporting an...

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07.24.2002

TrackBack at OSCON

If you're at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, then you might be interested in checking out TrackBack at OSCON. The purpose of this page is to supplement ORA's existing weblog coverage and provide a listing of weblog entries regarding OSCON-related topics.

Posted by Mena at 10:59 AM | Permalink

07.16.2002

Support Forums Moved

The support forum is now running on a new server. If you use the forums regularly, you will probably notice that it's faster.

We've tried to make the transition seamless, but in anything like this there are bound to be problems. And the main problem here is...

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1.1 (2001.10.22)

• Made <$MTDate$> work as a ``system date'', or the current date/time at which the page is being rebuilt. • Added Pragma: no-cache header to keep Opera from caching pages. (Jay) • Changed default templates to use iso-8859-1 (Latin 1) encoding instead of utf-8. • Added Blog Configuration option for the number of words in an auto-generated excerpt. • Added comment previewing, using the new Comment Preview template. Default templates now ship with comment previewing enabled, and the comments links on the main index...

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Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make a post to their weblog for everything...

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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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Everyone talks about testing, but there's precious little information about what specifically to do. There's Julia Hayden's ALA article, (May 1999), Matthew Haughey's ALA article (September 1999), and this evolt.org item from November 1999, but I haven't seen any nuts–and–bolts descriptions of how to set up a cross-browser, cross-platform testing station.

In this article, I describe how to set up a G3 (or faster) Macintosh to enable you to: • test your web pages in multiple Windows95 browsers from your Macintosh • test your web pages in multiple Macintosh browsers without confounding your personal browser's preferences with those...

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We believe in total empowerment of the user to decide what content they want to look at. – Microsoft Product Manager Shawn Sanford, as quoted by NewsBytes

Microsoft thinks they can improve my writing. This makes me want to get a gun and go to war. – Dave Winer, Scripting.com

Smart Tags can be developed by anybody, are completely under the user's control, and can do some very useful things. – Executive Editor David Coursey, writing for ZDNet AnchorDesk

This is exactly like what Microsoft did in the past...leveraging what they have on the desktop into another market... – Gartner analyst Michael Silver, as quoted by News.com

The dustup surrounding...

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