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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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...

continue reading ...

Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before...

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Seeing as how Elise is having fun with PHP and databases I though I'd show you how to easily play around with the database in dynamic publishing. This is all stuff I've picked up when talking to Brad Choate, the man behind the amazing dynamic system.

Movable Type 3.1+ comes with a dynamic publishing system that has EZSQL rolled in for all the SQL databases MT supports and as a result interaction with and manipulating of the DB becomes a piece of cake. At the moment, however, this system works only for MySQL databases.

First of all to call the DB, you just need three simple lines:

<?php include('<$MTCGIServerPath$>/php/mt.php'); $mt = new MT(<$MTBlogID$>, '<$MTCGIServerPath$>/mt.cfg...

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Note: This tutorial was first published on October 29th for members of the Professional Network. If you'd like to get access to the benefits of membership in the network, sign up now.

Our last tutorial covering dynamic publishing provided a high-level technical overview of its implementation. In this tutorial, we will examine the way you create plugins for the PHP dynamic publishing model. It varies a bit from the Perl model, since we have built the template processing on top of Smarty, a popular and powerful templating engine for PHP.

Use the Source, Luke!

To get you started, there are a whole host of MT tags that have been ported from Perl to PHP. These would be the core...

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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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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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Enabling Dynamic Publishing

Problem

You want to enable the dynamic publishing features in Movable Type.

Solution

Configure your web server so requests are routed through mtview.php, the Dynamic Bootstrap Handler.

Discussion

• 1. Turn on the dynamic page option in Movable Type.

Select whether to publish all of your archive templates dynamically or set your templates' publishing modes individually. See Specifying the Publishing Model. • 2. Set up the template cache directory.

In your weblog's root directory, create a new subdirectory named templates_c. The directory should...

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While entries make up the content of a weblog and templates control how these entries are displayed, it is the process of publishing that makes a weblog go. Movable Type refers to the process of publishing as rebuilding -- a reference to its static page generation roots. When a rebuild is performed, templates and your content are merged to publish a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

Choosing Between a Static or Dynamic Publishing Model

Movable Type provides the flexibility to choose between either static page generation or dynamic pages to optimize weblog performance on a per-template...

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Multiblog is an indespensible plugin that allows you to display content from other blogs. Unfortunately, in its current version it doesn't work with dynamic publishing. A few days ago I was investigating the best way to duplicate MultiBlog's functions in the dynamic templating system. As it turns out, Movable Type's powerful dynamic templating system makes it easy to include content from other blogs.

With dynamic publishing all you need to do to pull content from other blogs is to change the blog context of the page. Every tag is parsed within a context which affects the content it outputs. For example, with the MTEntries tag the correct entries are outputted because Movable Type...

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It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and SQLite.

With Movable Type 3.2, we now extend this database support with our powerful...

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I know. Movable Type isn't designed to be a completely dynamic publishing system. If you use dynamic publishing, you risk your site going down because it takes more resources or MySQL isn't running. While valid, I'm less concerned about that last point, as a part of the site that I enjoy is the commenting process. Without MySQL, comments won't happen either. Plus, I love what I can do with Smarty.

So I'm staking my hopes on my site, and more specifically, MySQL, continuing to run, and I'm making most of the site dynamic in nature. The biggest change recently was the introduction of comment pagination - this means if there are a billion comments on an entry, they don't all load at...

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Dynamic publishing

This option controls whether Movable Type publishes files statically (the default), dynamically or some combination of the two. For more details see the article entitled "Specifying the Publishing Model".

Permalink

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Long day today. I've been trying to get dynamic publishing working, specifically with the category archives. Well, I think I'm finally there. Thanks to some of Brad's amazing Smarty-fu, a whole lot of testing and a fair number of insults hurled in the way of the server, my category templates are now dynamic.

Perhaps more importantly, they are now paginated as well. Visit any category page with more than 12 entries and you'll see what I mean. No more having the entire category archive on one page. Now you get to see a svelte 12 entries at a time, in their entirety (no more excerpts here).

Frankly, I'm very impressed. Not only because it works, but because that navigation piece was...

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Two of the most prolific people independently documenting Movable Type are Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer, and now they've teamed up to write a terrific new tutorial that appears on both of their sites.

With the addition of Movable Type's new PHP support and dynamic publishing features, knowing a little bit about how the .htaccess file controls your Apache server's configuration can go a long way to helping streamline the display of your dynamic pages. Take a look at this great new tutorial, complete with screenshots, to get a fuller picture of what's possible.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: ABCNEWS.com on TypePad's new mobile features

Next Entry: PHP Dynamic Publishing: Architecture Overview...

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The full URL (including http:// and your site's domain name) to your public weblog. This URL should not include the filename of your index file; for example, if your index file is located at http://www.example.com/blog/index.html, then the value for Site URL should be http://www.example.com/blog/.

This is a required field.

Example: http://www.example.com/blog/

You should never set your Site URL to the same value as your Movable Type application URL (i.e. your CGIPath). Publishing your weblog content to the Movable Type directory is a security hazard and can lead to numerous problems such as...

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Preparing the way from the dynamic system that's going to be coming in MT 3.1 lets discuss the differences between a dynamic and static way of managing content and clear up any doubts.

Static templating is how MT has been all these years. Everytime you make the smallest change or post a new entry you need to rebuild every single page it is connected to for the change to show up. Rebuilding these pages cause physical files to appear in various directories.

With dynamic templating this is all resolved. No more files, no more rebuilding. With 3.1 you can chose how you want MT to act ie: •

Fully Dynamic - every single template is taken and parsed from the database when requested •

Fully Static - there are...

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Enable dynamic publishing

Coming soon...

Permalink

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For those who aren't using the dynamic publishing feature of Movable Type (see below), experiencing slow rebuild times is not an infrequent complaint especially as the size or complexity of the blog and its templates grows. While there are very good reasons to rebuild, there are no good reasons for it to be painfully slow.

In this essay, we will detail a number of reasons why your rebuild times might be slow and steps you can take to drastically reduce or completely eliminate the time you spend waiting for Movable Type to finish its work.

Upgrade to Movable Type 3

Has anything significant happened to you in the 16 months? Probably so. Well, the same can be said for Movable...

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You've seen it before. An article gets hot and soon you have 50 to 60 comments attached to it. Getting in on the tail end of the conversation can be annoying with that many posts to wade through. So we create a handy little convention that will highlight (change the class of) the comments posted by the author of the post.

There are many, many ways this can be done (plugins, php, etc.) and even more ways to implement it (mutliple author highlighting, specific images for certain commenters, etc.), but we're going to look at two important facets: static and dynamic.

Static vs. Dynamic

This is a debate which we will leave to the professionals. I will only...

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