Via PhotoMatt I found a very interesting comments thread on what is basically an argument of Movable Type vs. WordPres. Now everyone knows that I worship Movable Type, but I wish to voice some thoughts on this topic.

Movable Type and Wordpress are aimed at completely different audiences. If you upgraded to MT 3.0 you would have seen that the title was no longer "MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System" but now was "Movable Type Publishing Platform." As can be seen from this post at Mena's Corner

One final thing. You'll notice that we're no longer describing Movable Type as a "Personal Publishing System" -- we now call it a "Publishing Platform." While "personal" remains a major...

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A great way to easily customize the look of your Movable Type weblog is to replace the default title banner with a banner image. There are two basic methods for adding a banner image - adjusting the CSS or adjusting the index and archive templates.

Before making template adjustments, you first need to prepare your banner image. You might choose to use an image that will take up the entire banner space, or you might want more of a logo-like image that would only take up a part of the banner space, with a solid color making up the difference. Photographic images that extend to the edges of your weblog's container work best for banners in "fixed width" styles, such as in the default...

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After a lot of requests, its finally here. This hack will give you a more powerful listing whilst assigning multiple categories to an entry that includes the category hierarchies. As usual open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 2772 find

$cats{ $cat->id } = $cat->label;

(make sure it is in the edit_placements subroutine) and replace it with

my @cats = $cat->parent_categories; @cats = ($cat, @cats); my $glue = " > "; my @res; while (my $c = pop @cats) { my $label = $c->label; push @res, $label; } $cats{ $cat->id } = join $glue, @res;

Finally open up tmpl/edit_placements.tmpl and replace the two occurances of style="width: 175px;" with style="min-width: 175px;"...

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There are several situations in which you might want to combine two or more blogs into one. You might want to create a "Portal" blog which displays the most recent entries or headlines of entries from various blogs. You might want to create a Sideblog or Linkblog (see tutorial). Or you might want to have what looks to be just one blog (such as Learning Movable Type) but is actually a combination of several.

The tools you have at your disposal are David Raynes' MultiBlog plugin, PHP Includes, SSI - Server Side Includes, and RSS, among others. This tutorial will focus on the easiest of these alternatives - how to use the MultiBlog plugin to combine blogs from a single installation of...

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UPDATE: Donors check your Paypal emails!

I'm incredibly proud to announce CustomFields 1.0. This is a plugin set consisting of two plugins, one for entries and the other for authors, that allow you to (finally) define custom fields in a powerful way rather than resorting to hacks. This plugin consists of: • Author custom fields - this allows you to define custom fields to allow you to rebuild proper author profile/bio pages. • Author Archiving - This author plugin in the set builds on Brad Choate's Authors plugin, which means you have all those tags available. These tags can be used with the powerful author archiving system I've built into this plugin that mimics Movable Type's current...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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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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Question

What are all those templates used for? Will I need each and every one, if I want to work with Movable Type? What template should I try to understand first?

Answer

Actually, you do not have to look at the templates at all. If you are satisfied with one of the default templates, or you find a template for download somewhere, you will not have to dig into this subject.

But even if you want to change your weblog's style, you will not have to look into each and every template. Fortunately, most templates are not needed in the beginning. The most important templates are as follows: • The Main Index Template is responsible for creating the start page of your weblog. It is...

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Chuck recently asked about adding a blogroll to MT. I pointed him to this tutorial rather than pointing him to Blogrolling.com.

Ever since Blogrolling changed ownership, I've felt that the service has been going downhill. A few months ago, when I removed the blogrolling php code off my site load times drastically decreased. One of my main peeves with blogrolling was that it was located on a remote server. During the transition period that server was often down, and caused load times on my site to shoot up - so high that my site was nearly unaccessible. Another problem with the Blogrolling involves the site Blogshares.com. Some script that were heavily relied on were deleted and caused...

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Assign Multiple Categories to an Entry

Problem

You want to assign more then one category to an entry.

Solution

Follow the Assign Multiple Categories link found on the New/Edit Entry screen.

Discussion

As discussed in "Posting a New Entry", you can assign a category to an entry with the Primary Category pulldown menu. Assigning multiple secondary categories works a bit differently.

From the New/Edit Entry screen, click the Assign Multiple Categories link under the Primary Category pulldown menu. A list will appear with the names of every category in the system. The primary...

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I really like the "Build All Templates Statically" option on the Templates page, however I really wanted a Build All Templates Dynamically option. I posted a feature request on the subject but I don't think it was taken any further, so I took the matter into my own hands, see the screenshot (click for larger image).

Open up MT/App/CMS.pm and search for the following block of text, line #4842.

} elsif ($dcty eq 'archives') { require MT::Template; my @templates = MT::Template->load({ blog_id => $blog->id }); for my $tmpl (@templates) { $tmpl->build_dynamic($tmpl->type ne 'index'); $tmpl->save(); } } elsif ($dcty eq 'custom') {...

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This hack is deprecated in favour of the MT Protect plugin. Please use the plugin instead of this hack!

One of the biggest wants with MT is to password protect individual entries. There are several hacks and bits of code that allow you to password protect entries but many of them are long winded and many involve separate categories. I wanted a simple way to selectively password protect entries no matter what the category, what blog etc.

So I created a new field on the entry screen (click screenshot for a larger view) that would contain the password. For this to work you will need to be using MT 3.1x, mySQL and PHP. To see this in action see the front page on my blog, enter the password "password" and you will be granted access for 10 days....

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This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

• Introduction • Choosing the Right Weblog Platform • Finding Perl on your Server...

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I further discussed my previous post with many pepole and felt I needed to clarify some doubts I and many others had about the new dynamic MT, so here's a follow up post ! Brad explained how the new MT/Smarty/PHP system will work. The template gets pulled from the database; there is a pass over it to make it smarty-compatible; then it gets executed by smarty. so if you have a real simple template like this: <MTEntries> <MTEntriesHeader><ul></MTEntriesHeader> <li><MTEntryTitle></li> <MTEntriesFooter></ul></MTEntriesFooter> </MTEntries>

it gets changed to this: {Entries} {EntriesHeader}<ul>{/EntriesHeader} <li>...

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UPDATE files are bundled in an archive.

I was very impressed with the WordPress Suggest plugin and wanted to port it over to MT. The porting was easy but the query was very slow and pulled some bad results from the database. Chad helped me last night and we had almost cleaned it up until v0.2 was released which seems to have fixed the problems I had. Try it using the search form on the sidebar.

This plugin is similar to LiveSearch (and the MT implementation) however the difference is it lets you keep the mt-search.cgi functionality which I liked. Also this plugin works slightly differently to LiveSearch, I prefer this!

Implementing it with MT is very easy, you need to have PHP and be...

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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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Adding Alternate Search Templates

Problem

You want to create an alternate layout for your system's search engine.

Solution

Create the template and use the AltTemplate configuration directive to define its use.

Discussion

Typically, when a search is performed, the default template, search_templates/default.tmpl, is rendered in order to display the results. The built-in search can perform a comment search in which the template search_templates/comments.tmpl is used.

If you have multiple weblogs that use the search tool, you will want the search results from one weblog to look...

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Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:## line:##]

This error message provides useful information that can help you...

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Warning: main(/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90 Warning: main(): Failed opening '/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc' for inclusion (include_path='') in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90

With MT you can have multiple authors on the same weblog, making it easy to have a friend contribute to your blog as a "guest author" or to create a group weblog to which many people contribute. You can even customize to a small degree, aspects of the author-specific Individual Entry pages.

Adding an Author

To add an author in MT 3.2...

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