Less Is More

One key principle of interface design is not to overload your users by dumping every choice available on your site right there on the front page. Users don't mind drilling for information that needs to be drilled for. Important stuff should be readily and easily accesible, and category archives falls into the category of important stuff, especially since they're one of the primary ways someone navigates your site. But for anyone who posts on a regular basis, your category section can become rather large and unweildy, very quickly falling under the category of "choice dumping". Fifty-one categories and seventy-two months listed on your sidebar...

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We've just launched Movable Type 3.16, which we previewed to Professional Network members on the email list and members-only blog last week. We've heard a lot of good feedback from you about Movable Type since the launch of the Professional Network a few months ago, and this release addresses many of your requests.

The focus for Movable Type 3.16 is on code quality and cleaning up little issues and bugs that have crept into the code base, either in the past year or, in some cases, since Movable Type was first released.

To get started, you can get Movable Type now, or log in to your account to upgrade. Or, read on to find out more details.

A solid, high-quality platform

First, above all you've told...

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Question

I'm using a plugin, and the output does not change when I refresh the page.

Answer

Most Movable Type plugins are static, which means they only change when the templates are rebuilt. If you want something that will change every time your browser refreshes, you need a dynamic solution.

Examples of dynamic solutions are PHP, SSI, and Javascript. If you are using the MySQL backend, you can also use PHP to connect directly to the database.

With the implementation of dynamic publishing in version 3.1 of Movable Type, more and more plugins...

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Until recently, I depended solely on the most excellent FilterCategories plugin to, well, filter my category list. For instance, on the archive page and on the software page, I present a subset of my entire category list. The latest hurdle in my static-to-dynamic conversion is dealing with the problem that this plugin doesn't work in a dynamic publishing environment.

I started with the software page. Incidentally, this page is now being published dynamically. It just took me a bit to get there.

To start my journey, I took an in-depth look at the MTCategories container within the PHP code. It turns out that this accepts a "label" parameter, designed to allow you to select one...

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Hi everyone, my name is Jay Allen and I am the Product Manager for Movable Type. I'm writing today to address - what else? - comment spam.

This is an issue that, as many of you know, I have spent several thousand waking hours working on since its first appearance back in the fall of 2003, both as the author of MT-Blacklist and as the maintainer of the Comment Spam Clearinghouse. This is an issue which Six Apart takes very seriously, as evidenced not only in the improvements in Movable Type v3.x but also, in some part, by my hiring to this position.

Over the last month, we have been devoting a great deal of resources to solving the comment spam problem once and for...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

• The auto-expiration of Junk feedback items only occurs when a user visits the main menu for that weblog. In future versions, auto-expiration of junk items will be triggered system-wide when a new junk feedback item is received. • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, duplicate TrackBack pings may be sent out • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, the entry basename may be incremented or, if the title was changed, altered to fit the new title. • Subcategories are not alphabetically sorted in the category assignment listings on the entry editing...

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Today I was working with someone and having a bear of a time getting their 3.17 install working on their GoDaddy hosting account. It turns out that the way the script name was accessed had changed - and since GoDaddy runs under sbox, it was returning sbox as the name when it redirected you back to the page! So with a few small edits to App.pm, I got around this issue and made things work.

I'm still having problems with getting dynamic publishing to work on GoDaddy, but at least we're making progress. If you are installing Movable Type on your GoDaddy host, and running into problems, take a look at our Movable Type Consulting Services to see how we can help.

Update: I think I have...

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09.03.2004

Movable Type 3.11 Released: Bugs fixed

We've just released Movable Type 3.11, an update to version 3.1 which corrects some problems that were preventing many users from upgrading their installations.

If you downloaded the general release of Movable Type 3.1 and had trouble using it straight off the bat, this update is for you. Some other bugs were corrected as well; here's a complete list of changes from version 3.1: • Corrected some problems with upgrades: from 3.0x to 3.1x with Berkeley DB, or from 2.6x to 3.0 with any database system. • Updates to templates were not reflected on dynamic pages after saving an entry; that's now fixed. • In some older versions of Perl, a syntax error blocked any use of the...

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Question

When viewing dynamic archive pages, I see an error which says Notice: Undefined index: SchemaVersion in /mt/php/mt.php on line 180.

Answer

"Notice" messages are informational and come from PHP, not from Movable Type.

Check the php.ini file on your server for an "error_reporting" setting. The default value should be: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE which excludes "notice" messages from being output.

See PHP Manual: Error Handling and Logging Functions for more information.

...

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Question

When viewing dynamic pages, I see the following error: Warning: main(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/full/path/to/cgi-bin/movabletype/php/mt.php) is not within the allowed path(s): (/full/path/to/tmp) in /full/path/to/blog/mtview.php on line 2

Answer

This error indicates that your host has enabled the PHP open_base_dir setting on your server. Your host needs to add your Movable Type installation folder to the allowed paths for this setting (i.e., add the file path referenced in the error as "not within the allowed...

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There are two methods to create a random entry, pulled from your weblog database (if you aren't using dynamic publishing). The easiest is David Raynes' MTRandomEntries plugin. However, MTRandomEntries generates a random entry only when you rebuild the page on which the MTRandomEntry code is located. If you want a random entry to be generated each time the page is refreshed in a browser, you can do that with a PHP script that pulls the data from your MySQL database. For this method to work your blog needs to be PHP enabled and you need to be using a MySQL database.

This tutorial will outline variations of a PHP script you can use to generate random entries, similar to what can be seen...

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Upgrading or installing Movable Type can be rather intimidating. There are few things I have screwed up so badly attempting, even when they say it is super easy, idiot-proof. I always seem to be the idiot who still can't make it work. I have now upgraded two separate MT installs to MT 3.2 and thought I would share my notes with you. Please note that Jay Allen (Product Manager of Movable Type), Chad Everett (of Don't Back Down and Everitz Consulting), and Arvind Satyanarayan ( Movalog) have all helped me at various stages in upgrading, and if I didn't have friends who knew what they were doing, honestly I just wouldn't attempt this on my own. But that's me, and I have over 20 blogs...

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Using includes is a wonderful way to reuse code through modularity on your site. Elise over Learning MovableType has a great tutorial on using includes, and I suggest you read it if you haven't already since this article will take off where hers leaves off and discusses a problem that dynamic site owners encounter when trying to use includes.

In a dynamic environment most people feel that PHP includes is the way to go and generally they are right. When they try to include MovableType tags in a PHP include, however, a problem raises its ugly head. This article will explain why this happens, and how to fix it. NOTE: This article only applies to dynamically generated pages.

I won't go into how great PHP...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

Updated Nov 16

The default styles that come with MT are known as 'fixed' styles. This means that size and position of layout elements, such as columns, are fixed and are defined in pixels (px). This also means that no matter what a person's screen resolution, everything will be the same width and in approximately the same position. The alternative to a fixed design is a fluid design. A fluid design uses percentages when defining size and positions, so the sizes of elements on the page are relative to the user's screen resolution. A fluid design also removes the horizontal scroll bar. With a fluid...

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So you want to create alternating background colors for your (dynamically published) comments? I just came across a sweet little *gem in Hacking Movable Type about Smarty's "cycle" function... worth the price of the book, IMO. But, I digress. :-)

If you are using dynamic publishing for your individual entry archives, you can very simply edit your template to create alternating comment background colors (or any alternating style) with Smarty's "cycle" function.

The "cycle" funtion will, as the name implies, cycle through a list of values each time it is used within a loop. This is a perfect little solution for the task at hand. An added bonus is that it can cycle through more than two...

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Coming soon...

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Rebuild with indexes

Coming soon...

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Question

When clicking View Site from within Movable Type, I get a 404 Not Found error.

Answer

• Have you created and saved a new entry with a status of Published (rather than Unpublished); or used the REBUILD SITE option to generate your weblog files?

• Is your Main Index Template set to rebuild automatically? Make sure the option for "Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates" is checked on the Edit Template screen.

• Do you get any errors when publishing an entry or rebuilding your site? If so, resolve the errors...

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Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. Powerful customization gives you control over everything you publish and the elegant interface keeps things simple and clear.

Features

• Unlimited Blogging

Movable Type offers the ability to publish an unlimited number of blogs quickly and easily through a single installation of the application. And the platform supports posting by as many authors as you need, with no limit on the numbers of entries, comments, or TrackBacks the system supports. • Powerful management...

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Question

I see that in the examples in the documentation, some tags use $ and some don't. What is the difference?

Answer

Movable Type allows you to put $ in certain tags to distinguish them from other HTML tags if you wish. However, there are two basic types of Movable Type tags: variable tags and container tags.

A variable tag is a substitution tag. It is a placeholder for a dynamic piece of information. For example, the <$MTEntryTitle$> tag is replaced with the title of the entry.

A container tag contains what might be called a...

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Updated again Monday night, midnight, Oct 4

This post is in reference to: Attacked!. I've posted the following update on that post and here.

One possible way that this attack could have happened is if someone else on my shared web server used a simple php script to read my database username and password. With this information, he or she could have accessed my MySQL database and made changes to the templates. I have sent a request to my web host to address how they handle PHP security. In particular, I was advised to suggest that my web host start using a PHP directive called "open_basedir" to restrict the files that PHP can open. The information on this directive can be found...

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