<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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In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement, my first article for Digital Web Magazine has been published. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Particularily good comments in the past 24 hours:

#6 - "Most browsers are configured not to print background images, so your headers may come out blank in the print (this is also true of people who surf the web with images disabled in their browser). The first can be solved with a print stylesheet (does IE5/Windows support these?) but the second is a bit nasty." - Simon Willison

#12 (on a new FIR variant) - "The best part is that this technique works in JAWS (tested, and approved), and there is no...

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I've read several HTML references, online and off, and all seem to make some mention of the dichotomy of style and content, presentation and structure, appearance and substance. The good designer is admonished to keep them separate in order to ward off various woes: unmanageability, unusability, professional shame.

I think this is a myth. I think it has persisted for four different reasons. I don't think web designers need be concerned about it at all.

Vital to good web design is architecting data so the site is usable and maintainable. This begins only after a thorough grasp of mission and means. A textbook web site may fit together nicely with one simple separation,...

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The dawn of the web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type.

The printing press gave us type that was clearer and easier to read than that produced from a typewriter, because the typesetter had additional tools at his disposal - and knew how to use them. The web has cost us some of those tools.

Lack of tools and knowledge

There are two problems here. The first is that until HTML 4 came along, the web was missing almost all of these tools (it's still missing many important ones).

But the larger problem is,...

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As I mentioned yesterday, I recently managed to hack the Movable Type search module in order to provide Last-Modified dates on my search results. This is useful, as it may help save in bandwidth costs. Instead of having a Last-Modified date of whenever the search was run, the Last-Modified date will be from the last modification of the search results.

If you want to see what I mean, use Web-Sniffer to pull up one of your search result pages. Chances are that you will not see a Last-Modified date on it (look in the HTTP Response Header section of your results). If there is one, it's likely the time you ran the request. This means that every time someone or some robot runs that search,...

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This new version introduces inline editing for comments by the commenters. A cookie is set when the person hits the post button on the comment form. The cookie is set to expire in 5 minutes so the person must make any edits within five minutes.

Download MT-InlineEditor_1.1.zip. Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've used MT Tags in those...

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I'm currently subscribed to www-style, the W3C's mailing list for CSS development. CSS-3 is being developed this very moment by engineers and programmers. Why aren't a few designers involved in building a language meant for style? I honestly don't know. Maybe none of us were ever asked. Maybe none of us ever volunteered.

Mike Pick started a wish list today with linked text boxes and alpha-channel runarounds, two features he'd like to see carried over from the print world. Both are logical to the designer, and already work in existing software applications. Here, then, are a few more to add to the pool.

Element Awareness

Visual design is all about...

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The history of science is crowded with stories about competitive researchers sprinting for new discoveries. First place gets patents, research money, and sometimes a Nobel. Second place gets a snarky note in the sidebar of junior-high science textbooks. While competition can foster innovation, scientific progress is retarded when researchers delay the publication of groundbreaking cancer research data in order to secure the most advantageous patents, or when research teams refuse to share information for fear of a licensing double-cross.

Happily, web development isn't genome science. Your reputation may be solidified if you work out a zingy new CSS technique or write a...

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After the dutchpink was released, I had an idea to skin Movable Type such that a user could easily switch between stylesheets. So after a lot of work with javascript, here is the package:

SkinningMT.zip SkinningMT.tar.gz

1. Extract the contents of the distribution 2. Upload the tmpl files in ASCII to the appropriate places (MTDIR/tmpl/cms) 3. Upload mt-styleswitcher.php and the styles/ directory into your StaticWebPath (if none then your into your MT Directory, same location as mt.cgi)

The drop-down menu shows up on the main menu ( screenshot) The only requirement is that your server runs PHP. The styles directory, its contents and mt-styleswitcher.php goes into your StaticWebPath. In mt-styleswitcher.php, change movalog.com to your domain name...

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Question

I have a couple of categories in my weblog. By default, these are listed on the start page. I want to hide a certain category. How can I do that?

Answer

The start page is based on the »Main Index Template«. We have to change that template for making categories disappear.

If you do not know the term »Main Index Template«, then please have a look at FAQ: Explaining the Templates. Moreover, we will need the Compare Plugin. If you do not know it, or it has not yet been installed, please read the entry Comparison needed for conditional Generation.

Open your Movable Type project. Click »Templates« in the left navigation bar. A list of...

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With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show you how to create the library javascript that allows you to browse themes, it simply shows you how to make your themes discoverable by StyleCatcher. In this tutorial, I shall use the example of Vicksburg, the default theme with 3.2.

Every style or theme should be in its own folder (with no subfolders) which should contain: • The css stylesheet. • Two thumbnails named thumbnail.gif and thumbnail-large.gif. These two files are used in StyleCatcher as previews of...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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On the forums, someone recently commented on how the listings in MT could be improved with greater sorting flexibility. I thought that it was a very good idea and so after a bit of hacking managed to get the entry listings to be sorted, it would be easy to adapt this for the comments and trackbacks listing.

This hack will add ascending and descending sorting capabilities to the title and date fields. The rest you can use the Filter option for.

First, you'll need CMS.pm, around line 2411 in the list_entries sub, find the following

my %arg = ( 'sort' => 'created_on', direction => $sort_direction, ($limit eq 'none' ? () : (limit =>...

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During my second lecture to an XML class at a local community college, I explained how XML lets you define your own markup language with custom tags and attributes. I had finished defining a simple markup language for use with a list of amateur sports clubs, and had displayed a sample document written with that markup. At that point, one student asked:

"Isn't it inefficient to have to type all those tags for every club? What good is this? It looks nice, but what can I do with this document? How can I put this in a web page or use it with other programs? Wouldn't it be easier to just use HTML or a database/word processor/fill-in-the-blank?"

The reason that we use XML...

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• Articles • Topics • About • Contact • Contribute • Feed

No. 202

Issue 202September 05, 2005

JavaScript Logging

by David F. Miller

Debugging got you down? Weep no more. David F. Miller introduces fvlogger, a script library that brings simple logging functionality to JavaScript and the browser and makes your life easier and more fun.

High-Resolution Image Printing

by Ross Howard

Your client looks up and says, "Why does our logo look funny when we print the pages?" Do you sigh dramatically, or learn about Ross Howard's technique for printing high-resolution images via CSS? We vote for...

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I recently stumbled across David Raynes' excellent SubCategories plugin. This plugin allows you to define existing categories as parents and children of one another. For instance, I have a Movable Type category. This category has been defined as a parent of my SomeDays and ModCheck categories.

So when you go to my Movable Type category archives, you will see those entries (such as this one) that are entered directly into the category, as well as those entries that belong on the child categories of SomeDays and ModCheck. Meanwhile, SomeDays and ModCheck can exist as their own separate categories too.

The problem that I ran into while doing this is that the most excellent Supplemental...

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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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If you are using Movable Type default templates, the titles of your entries on the main page of your MT blog are just that - titles. They look pretty but go nowhere. If you want to get from the entry on your main blog page to its individual entry page, you need to click on "Permalink" or "Continue reading".

Setting it up so that the titles of the entries themselves are hyperlinks to the individual entry page is fairly straightforward and requires edits to two templates - your Style Sheet and the Main Index template.

If you are using the default MT3.2 templates

1. The Stylesheet The MT3.2 default stylesheet is a huge file. The last time I printed one out it took 18 pages. It...

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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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UPDATE: Make your own

With Movable Type 3.12, Six Apart built in a more powerful set of quicktags and on the whole they worked pretty well and looked quite nice too. I didn't really want to go back to the clunky Quicktags of before. So here are a few hacks to port some of the most useful features (in my opinion) from the old quicktags, to the new. You will need the following files • edit_entry.tmpl, this is found in MTDIR/tmpl/cms • mt.js, this is found in your StaticWebPath (or if you have none in your root MTDIR folder)

I have decided to port over four functions, Spell Check, Encoding HTML and Insert Image

Spell Check

Add the following to the end of your mt.js file

function Spell(myField)...

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