Here's a little plugin that provides some new Category tags for Movable Type.

Availability

You can download this plugin from here: mtcatx-1_5.zip

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later • MT-Regex (if using the 'pattern' attribute of the IfCategory or IfPrimaryCategory tag).

Installation

To install, place the 'catx.pl' file in your Movable Type...

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MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

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Movable Type comes with a default search capability that your site visitors can use to search for keywords in your weblog entries. You can add functionality to the search form that people see on your site, and make adjustments to the templates that govern how the results are displayed.

Keyword Search Templates

Suppose you want to change the way the search results look when someone uses the default MT search function to do a search on your website.

Movable Type's templates that govern the MT keyword search results pages operate differently than the other weblog templates. (You may have noticed this if you have changed the name of your default weblog stylesheet away from...

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The Better Upload File Template has been superceded by the Better File Uploader plugin.

As any regular reader of danandsherree.com likely knows, Sherree and I use the Upload File tool in Movable Type to put a lot of photos on this site. The tool works pretty well, but requires a lot of manual intervention: specify a file, an upload folder, a new entry or HTML, and a thumbnail and its size. If there are many photos to add, it becomes a lot of work!

I edited the Upload File templates to better suit our needs: "Show me the HTML" is the default option, clicking "Create a thumbnail…" will resize a thumbnail to the proper dimensions, and a "For...

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Smarty Docs

Now that Smarty is built into MT, you've got a whole load of new features that you can use. Just have a look at the documentation everything discussed in those docs are available to MT users, the only difference is instead of single braces you need to use double, for example where in the Smarty docs it gives you a line like this {include file="sidebar.php"}

when you implement that into MT it will need to become {{include file="sidebar.php"}}

This was chosen over the single braces because the single braces can cause problems when you start writing Javascript. None-the-less if you really wish to use single braces, find in your mtview.php template the following line (thanks...

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Introduction

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...

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There are several ways to make your life easier whilst having fun with HTML markup and CSS design.

Learning, the fun way

When I first tinkered around with HTML and CSS, I was a bit unsure and un-inspired as to what to do, but I employed a technique that some may frown upon. Using a variety of tools, I took a peek at stylesheets that had produced something I like. I didn't steal them but rather learnt from them on how to do such and such a thing. I would recommend trying this out as it is a hands on way to learn what various bits of CSS code do - and its much nicer to see it in action done the right way.

Sidebar Panels

If you use Mozilla/Firefox as your browser, you are in luck. EditCSS and...

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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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For those of you with multiple MT weblogs, have you ever wanted to move an entry from one blog to another? or the entries from only one category from one to another weblog? You can copy the entries from the first weblog and paste them into the second, but how to move the associated comments or trackbacks?

Here's one fairly straightforward method.

1. Create a new index template in the weblog that contains the entries you wish to move. Give the template name any name you wish. Call the output file mt.txt. Copy and paste the following code into the new index template:

<MTEntries lastn="1000" sort_order="ascend" category="Your Category Name Goes...

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In Movable Type, we use tags for defining the flow within a template and for accessing the database. You can influence a tag's behavior with the help of attributes. These attributes define a value for some parameter.

Unfortunately, the value for an attribute may only be a constant. However, you will sometimes have the need for setting the value to the result of another tag. Movable Type will not support such a situation, but a plugin will help.

An Example

Suppose you have a template module that you want to include from many different places. For example, you want to call this module from both an individual entry archive and the main index. Inside the template, you then want to...

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After talking to Brad about the new version of MT, I felt it deserves a whole blog post about it just to talk about how amazing it is and get rid of all this excitement building up in me

First of, David's Subcats being built into the application. Well I knew it ! In #mt-plugins, David told me and a few others that he would not be entering his plugin into the contest - on further questioning he said that there was another party involved. Well once he said that it wasn't too hard to guess the right answer and we were helped by the fact that when he guessed it he either changed the topic or kept quiet ! Never-the-less I am very excited about this because Sub Categories are vital for many...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

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Movable Type templates aren't too difficult to write, but they can be difficult to read. So I've whipped up another plugin to fix that. Simple Template is a plugin that provides an alternative syntax for Movable Type templates 1.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsimpletemplate-1_21.zip

Installation

To install, place the ‘simpletemplate.pl' file in your Movable...

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By default, Movable Type offers two formatting options for the text in your entries: None and Convert Line Breaks. The former leaves your entry intact without any conversion and is appropriate for HTML-formatted entries. The latter includes basic formatting of paragraphs and line breaks allowing you to write as you would normally.

The Movable Type Plugin API allows you to add additional options via plugins such as the popular Markdown and Textile.

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

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I am going to describe the basics of Movable Type in a short introduction. You do not have to know anything about Movable Type for understanding it. However, when following this three-part introduction, you will learn to know the most important components and gain a good overview. • Movable Type Basics / 1 • Movable Type Basics / 2 • Movable Type Basics / 3

Templates

In the previous part we explained that entries are stored in a database. However, you will not find the website's HTML in the database. Instead, just the attributes of an entry are stored as columns in a database table. But how does Movable Type create HTML out of this?

In Movable Type there are a number of...

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Creating an Archive Template

Problem

You want to create pages that provide different views of a weblog's entries.

Solution

Create an archive template that is mapped to a particular archive type.

Discussion

Archive Templates allows for pages to be created for different views of the weblog's entries. MT supports a few date-based archives -- daily, weekly, and monthly -- in addition to individual entry and category archives. These templates are used to create multiple pages, one for each "unit" (time-period, entry or category) of the archive.

Movable Type ships with Archive...

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UPDATED 09/10: There was a problem with the files as phps so I've zipped them UPDATED 09/04: To fix SmartyPants

So you've downloaded the very new 3.1 with all the amazing features but you've found one problem, your plugins no longer work with the dynamic templating. Well its not only plugins, text filters also no longer work.... Here are some methods by which you can combat this problem, some may not work in all cases but its better than nothing for other cases.

• Text Filters In a previous tutorial I had linked to PHP Markdown, but a few people have contacted me about Textile as well. So I have collected PHP versions of Markdown, Textile and SmartyPants Just download the following...

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The default Movable Type MT3 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code? MT3.1 and...

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Question

My database has been corrupted. Is there any way to avoid losing my data?

Answer

This answer depends a great deal on the level of corruption, the type of backups you have, and how much information is still accessible from within your existing installation (as opposed to being in external files such as the static pages Movable Type has generated from the data).

Does your host maintain backups for your account?

If so, do they have any which would include copies of your database files prior to the time corruption appears to have occurred?...

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