Required: MT26x, MT3x

This one was hard for me because I was hung up on the whole plugin thing. But it turns out to be stupidly simple.

Start with Brad's MTMacro plugin. This page is about 10 miles long and scared the crap out of me. In the end, all I really needed was this part:

To install, place the "macros.pl" file in your Movable Type "plugins" directory. The "macros.pm" and "postproc.pm" (the "postproc.pm" file is only necessary for Movable Type 2.21) files should be placed in a "bradchoate" subdirectory underneath your Movable Type "extlib" directory. Your installation should look like this:

(mt home)/plugins/macros.pl (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/macros.pm (mt...

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Question

I found a plugin that I want to use on my site. How do I install it?

Answer

These are the basic instructions for installing a plugin, but you should always review the readme file for the plugin if one is included. Some authors will require files be placed in a different directory structure, so follow their instructions on this. • Download and unzip/decompress the plugin file from the author's site.

• Use your FTP client to log into the directory where MT is installed on your server. If a plugins directory isn't there yet, create one.

If you use...

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There is a bug in MT3.1 that prevents MT from recognizing that a keyword search has been completed. Thus if you make a second search soon after your first search, you'll get the error message:

"Got an error: You are currently performing a search. Please wait until your search is completed."

The search function has a built-in throttle to prevent a user from a single IP address from flooding the system with search requests while existing searches are being conducted. This throttle is 60 seconds by default. Normally MT sees that a search has been completed and allows you to start another one. However, this is not happening and everyone is being subjected to the 60 second throttle.

For a temporary solution to...

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Question

How do I make changes to the default search template visitors see when searching my weblog?

Answer

You can modify the search template by downloading the search_templates/default.tmpl file from your server and editing it with a plain text editor. Then upload it back to your server in ASCII mode.

Power Tip

You can more easily manage your default search template (and any alternate search templates) by linking them to a new Template Module.

Create the new Template Module, and enter the full server path to the default search template in the...

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WeblogsActionMenu is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type.

The dropdown menu of available weblogs in the header of every Movable Type screen is a handy way to jump from one weblog to another. What's not so handy is that you have to first go through the other weblog's menu in order to do anything with that weblog. WeblogsActionMenu lets you jump directly to a specific action for a different weblog than the one you're in.

Requirements

WeblogsActionMenu requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the WeblogsActionMenu distribution.

WeblogsActionMenu is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher.

Installation

To install the WeblogsActionMenu plugin, upload the file WeblogsActionMenu.pl...

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Question

When installing Movable Type, I get an error message that says Can't find default template list; where is 'default-templates.pl'?

Answer

First, make sure that a folder named lib exists in the same folder where you installed Movable Type, and that there are several folders and files inside of it. Then, make sure that the specific file lib/MT/default-templates.pl was uploaded there, and in ASCII mode.

The files are also case sensitive, so make sure it is lib/MT/default-templates.pl, not lib/mt/default-templates.pl, or Lib/Mt/Default-templa...

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UpdateAuthoredOn is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, you can click a button to set an entry's Authored On timestamp to the current date and time.

Requirements

UpdateAuthoredOn requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the UpdateAuthoredOn distribution.

UpdateAuthoredOn is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher.

Installation

To install the UpdateAuthoredOn plugin, upload the file UpdateAuthoredOn.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If BigPAPI.pl is not already present in your plugins directory, upload that as well.

Terms of Use

UpdateAuthoredOn is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license....

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Today we are releasing a patch to fix an issue for customers running Movable Type versions 3.16 or 3.17 and using UTF-8 character encoding on their weblogs. Specifically, a bug introduced in Movable Type 3.16 causes the dirify routine to preserve dashes in transformed text where, historically, it has suppressed them. This could be problematic because the dirify routine is used to create all URLs in Movable Type.

While default Movable Type installations are not adversely affected by this bug, there are certain common or legacy customizations (which will be detailed below) that could cause problems. For that reason, if you are using UTF-8 and MT 3.16 or 3.17, we suggest that...

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You may have noticed that commenters with Typekey identities display a hyperlinked image beside their names: This icon, which is used to signify commenters authenticated via Typekey, is copied to your blog directory when you first publish your blog.

If you like to keep things pretty, you might want to replace the original image (a dark charcoal color... so utilitarian) with one that is color coordinated with your site. Customizing nav-commenters.gif to coordinate with your blog's style is a snap.

How? you ask...

If you want to edit the image yourself, MT's original typekey commenters icon can be found in /path/to/mt/mt-static/images/nav-commenters.gif or, of course, in your...

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0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer) • Fix bug with spaces at the ends of lines in mt.cfg file. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer) • Fix bug with saving new entry--author was not being set for the new post. (Matt Haughey) • Fix bug with profile link in header linking to the wrong profile on the entry-editing page for an entry by another author. • Fix bug where creating a new author would switch your login credentials to those of the new author (ie. you...

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MainMenuRecent is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, MT's Main Menu will display the three most recent entries for each weblog.

Requirements

MainMenuRecent requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the MainMenuRecent distribution.

MainMenuRecent is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher. However, the Settings are only available under MT 3.2.

Installation

To install the MainMenuRecent plugin, upload the file MainMenuRecent.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If BigPAPI.pl is not already present in your plugins directory, upload that as well.

Terms of Use

MainMenuRecent is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license....

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Question

When someone tries to add their address to my notification list, this error comes up:

You need to set the EmailAddressMain configuration value to your own email address in order to use notifications at lib/MT/App/NotifyList.pm line 33.

Answer

You need to set the EmailAddressMain variable for your email address in mt-config.cgi1. Download the file from your server in ASCII mode and open it in a plain text editor. Look for this setting2: EmailAddressMain you@alternate-email.com

Replace you@alternate-email.com with your preferred email...

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Do you like seeing those little smiley emoticons in other people's blog? Then this is the plugin for you!

This plugin will add 13 smiley faces to your Movable Type edit entry screen. With a click, you can add any of the emoticons to your entry's body and extended entry fields, as in the screenshot at the left.

Installation

Smilies requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included in the distribution. Smilies has been tested on version 3.2 of Movable Type only, but should work with MT 3.16 and higher - I'd appreciate hearing if anybody is successful with other versions. • Download Smilies.zip and extract. (A donation will support continued development...

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Question

I have a MySQL database available on my server, and my hosting account uses CPanel. How can I set up my database?

Answer

If your host uses CPanel for your site management, you can use this visual interface to create the database. • Log into your CPanel (typically located at http://www.example.com/cpanel for your domain).

• Look for the option to work with databases - it may read Manage MySQL in the Databases box.

• Scroll down to where it says: Db: _________ [add]

• Enter your preferred database name. • Click Add.

This will create a database in...

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Question

Accented characters display incorrectly in my pages.

Answer

After Importing

If you are importing a weblog from an earlier version of Movable Type (before 3.0), your data is most likely encoded using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, but Movable Type 3.x is set by default to use the UTF-8 encoding.

To change the character encoding used by Movable Type, open mt-config.cgi1 in a plain text editor and find the line that reads: PublishCharset utf-8

Change utf-8 to the same encoding that was used in the PublishCharset option in your old...

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I really liked Phil Rignalda's PreviousNextInCategory that would basically show the Previous/Next entries in the same category as the current entry (kinda like <MTEntryPrevious> and <MTEntryNext>)

Unfortunately this plugin didn't work under the dynamic publishing system. So announcing PHP PreviousNextInCategory. There are two files in the zip file that will need to be uploaded to the php/plugins/ directory. The two files will provide the container tags <MTEntryPreviousInCategory> and <MTEntryNextInCategory> exactly like the perl version and are to be used in exactly the same way eg

<MTEntryPreviousInCategory> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>">&laquo; <$MTEntryTitle$><...

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Today we are releasing Movable Type 3.17. This release addresses four issues that do not affect the majority of installations, but are critical for users with certain configurations.

Version 3.17 is not a required upgrade if your Movable Type installation is not affected by these issues.

Changes in this release include: • Installation at the root of a domain no longer continually logs out the user. • Fixed URL-encoding of uploaded file paths (e.g. images%2fbeach-pic.jpeg) • Fixed a bug in the nofollow plugin which causes HTML sanitization of everything within an <MTPings> block. • Fixed a bug in mt-db2sql.cgi which caused it to fail in certain situations when subcategories...

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With MT 2.6x there was a really useful script called mt-rebuild-all.cgi that would rebuild all blogs. Unfortunately, this script didn't mix well with the MT 3.x interface.

So, I re-styled the script to fit in better with MT 3.x, the credit goes to the author ( -lc- on the forums). This is only compatible with MT 3.x and does not work in Opera (if you manage to figure this out drop me a line)

There is a major security risk with this script, as it doesn't use MT authentication, anyone can just execute the rebuild script.

Download mt-rebuild-all.zip or mt-rebuild-all.tar.gz

You can dump this file into your mt directory (the same location as mt.cgi) and it will extract the...

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UPDATE: An updated entry can be found here This is now out dated !

I loved the quicktags available in WordPress. They were just so much more powerful that then four offered within MT. So Carthik pointed my to quicktags the javascript used my WordPress.

So I hacked MT to remove the pathetic little buttons and put these more powerful ones on there - see the screenshot.

You will need two files: •

The Quicktags Javascript - put this file in your StaticWebPath •

edit_entry.tmpl - this file should go in MT_DIR/tmpl/cms/

I've not yet get it to work properly with the Extended Entry, currently it only work with Entry Body. If anyone is able to help me with this I'd appreciate it !

UPDATE: I uploaded another...

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Probably the most important element to maintaining a web site with Movable Type (or other CMS) is the database. If something happens to the database, you're in trouble. If you keep backups (and you should!) you can go back to the last copy. But how old is that - a week? A month? Nightly, automatic backups of your database are the best way to handle such a problem.

So, for a little while I was searching for a good way to make nightly, automatic backups. I've found a good, free tool for the MySQL databases I use: MySQL Database Backup. Setting up the script as a Cron job let's me make nightly backups, and the script can be set to keep as many nightly,...

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