Before you install Movable Type there are three fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, 1) should you really be using Movable Type as your blogging software?, 2) do you have everything you need to use Movable Type? and 3) should you do the install yourself or should you pay someone else to do it?

1. Should you really be using Movable Type?

As weblogs gain more public visiblity, more and more people are setting up their own blogs. Many turn to Movable Type as it is one of the more established and powerful tools available. Movable Type however requires much more technical expertise than hosted blog services such as Typepad and Blogger. The first requirement is that you know...

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The Touch of Hope web site is powered by Movable Type. It's more than your average blog site though. Don't let it's blogging slant fool you-- MT is a budding CMS!

The architecture is like this: • 1 blog for the site's basic content: welcome page, about page, Art for Hope page, request a site page, make a donation page, contact us page and the news and updates content. All of this is in...

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Chad Everett has released a plugin called MT-Approval that presents an effective way to combat the comment spam brought on by spam bots that make up 99% of the comment spam most Movable Type users experience.

MT-Approval requires MT version 3.1 or higher.

MT Approval works by requiring that a comment contain an "approval hash" - a list of data that is generated in the comment form by a new template tag called <$MTApprovalHash$> on the comment preview template. Spam bots don't use the form on the preview template; therefore they are missing the hash when they try to post the comment directly to the comment.cgi and thus their comments never post.

MT Approval requires that you force a preview...

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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

When uploading files, I get the following error:

Got an error: CGI open of tmpfile: No such file or directory

Or

Got an error: CGI open of tmpfile: Permission denied

Answer

No such file or directory

Movable Type can't find the tmp folder on your server; the value for this directory is controlled by the TempDir setting in mt-config.cgi1: # When processing uploaded files, if Movable Type notices that the file you # uploaded already exists, it will allow you to overwrite the original file, # by first asking for your confirmation. To do...

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1.4 (2002.01.07)

• New default templates no longer use &lt;label&gt; tag in the Remember info? checkbox for the ``remember me'' JS, because it was breaking XHTML validation. • Fixed Linked File Templates so that, when linking a template to a new file that doesn't yet exist, the permissions will be set correctly (based on umask settings in mt.cfg). • Added new default templates and made them customizable by stylesheets. • Added the Comment Error Template to specify the layout of the page a user receives when there is an error with his/her...

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Last week, CSS guru Eric Meyer posted his system called S5, a simple and elegant way to publish an XHTML file that can be displayed by any modern browser as a slideshow.

Using his primer and a little bit of custom templating in Movable Type, it's easy to create a template that can show your recent blog posts as a slideshow. (If you just want to jump to a live example, you can view the Professional Network blog as a slideshow.)

The key to making S5-compatible slideshows in Movable Type is to create a template that generates output with the appropriate markup to work with the CSS and Javascript that S5 requires. Here's the simple template we're using on the Professional Network: • <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">...

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Updated

Occassionally databases get corrupted, servers fail or web hosts go out of business. So it's a good idea to back up your Movable Type blogs. There are many methods for doing so, a few of which I will cover here. The back-up process is much easier if you are using MySQL as your database, which, by the way, is one good reason to use MySQL over the default Berkeley DB.

TypeMover

TypeMover is a new plugin for the purpose of backing up, restoring, and/or migrating your Movable Type weblog. It is compatible with MT3 and later versions of Movable Type. From the TypeMover website:

TypeMover is a MovableType plugin. It adds backup, restore and migration features that let you get...

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Turning unordered lists into elegant navigational menus has become the new favorite pastime for many web developers. Adding a unique id or class attribute to indicate which menu item reflects a user's current page, however, can become laborious. Even if you use body id attributes instead, as ALA does, some labor is involved and it is easy to make mistakes. But thanks to PHP, we can add these current-page indicators automatically.

Consider this tutorial a marriage of Christopher Robbins's Manage Your Content With PHP and Mark Newhouse's CSS Design: Taming Lists. The offspring of this marriage will be a single navigational document called navigation.php. Using PHP, we will include our one-size-fits-all navigational menu into every page of our site. Unlike other site-wide includes, however, this one will know which page the user is viewing and will adjust the current-page indicator appropriately....

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Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings - short, attention-grabbing blocks of text - it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We've become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

Most sites that replace text with images do so using hand-made images, which isn't so terrible...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Sarah Hughes of This Chick (aka Maddy in the MT Forums).

Many customizations for Movable Type call for using PHP scripts that require that your pages have a .php extension rather than a .html or .htm extension.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which involves a) the server looking at your pages for a PHP script, b) running the script, and c) outputting the results to the page. This is called "parsing". In order to successfully use PHP in your pages, you need to ensure that your account on your webserver is set up to parse your pages for PHP scripts. This feature is pretty standard these days, but check with your webhost before...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags related to calendar dates.

Note: The MTDaylightOrStandard tag, which was part of earlier versions of this plugin, is now part of its own plugin.

Required Modules

The DateTags code relies heavily on the Date::Calc Perl module. Depending on your or your ISP's installation, this may already be present on your system. To check whether Date::Calc is installed, open a shell connection to the host on which you're running Movable Type, and type: perl -e 'use Date::Calc'

Hit Enter. If this prints nothing, the module is installed. If it prints an error message, you'll need to install Date::Calc. (The MTIfDaysOfMonth and MTBirthstone tags do not require Date::Calc, so you should be able to use those without the module installed.)...

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Many Movable Type users have wished for the ability to define additional custom fields for entries. A future version of MT may include such functionality. This plugin is a stopgap measure until we have a version of Movable Type that allows custom fields. It lets you define custom fields on a per-weblog basis, by creating one or more SQL tables to store the additional data (this plugin has been designed to work only when using MySQL as your MT backend; see below for more on this).

Some users have managed to add custom fields to their copies of Movable Type by modifying the field definitions within MT. See this page and this thread and this thread. However, this approach has several...

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2.51 (2002.10.29)

• Added Windows right-click bookmarklet functionality, where you can use a Post to MT Blog right click option to open the bookmarklet. Thanks to Anil Dash for the code. • Added a generic <MTElse> tag, which can be used to supply an ``else'' condition to any conditional. Thanks to Brad Choate for the code. • Added an <$MTEntryPermalink$> tag, which does the right thing when displaying the link for an entry: if an individual archive, it is not followed by an anchor; otherwise, it is. • When rebuilding files, only rewrite the...

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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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Introduction

With the most difficult part of running Movable Type -- the installation -- behind you, it is time to get started using MT.

It all begins with The Movable Type Content Management System (CMS). This script is the heart and soul of what makes powerful weblog publishing possible.

The CMS contains the majority of the intelligence and work flow that makes Movable Type what it is. Whether it involves posting an entry, adding a colleague as an author, or publishing your content with a whole new style, it is the CMS that is doing the heavy lifting.

By default the CMS script is...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for identifying invalid link URLs within entries.

If your site has been around for a while, a few or many of the pages you've linked to in the past may have ceased to exist or moved to new locations. Also, if you tend to link to a large number of pages, you might not be in the habit of clicking on each and every link to check it, so some URLs might not have been valid in the first place. The CheckLinks plugin tries to access all the URLs linked to in your entries (or a subset of your entries), and lets you display a list of the ones it can't successfully access.

These tags are intended to be used on an index template, most likely...

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This hack is for versions of Movable Type prior to 3.2. This hack has been implemented into Movable Type 3.2

I'm a lazy person and hate having to click repetitively to do tasks and I get easily annoyed at having to keep hitting save and then rebuild whilst making changes to my site. So a hack later I have a Save & Rebuild button which will first save the template and then rebuild it with just one click!

Open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 1149 find

sub save_object{

and add underneath it

my $sr = 0;

Next on line 1340 find

$obj->text($text);

and add underneath it

if($q->param('sr')){ $sr = 1; $app->rebuild_indexes( BlogID => $obj->blog_id,...

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For a complete list of the new features in v0.6, click here.

MTTrackbackEntry is a Movable Type plugin and hack that enables you to create new entries from the Trackbacks that you receive. In other words, it enables other people to post new entries in your blog, simply by pinging an entry or category on your blog. The title of this plugin/hack could just as easily be called TrackbackCrosspost, since it can act as a trackback-based cross-posting tool.

Currently, entries are created AND pings are received and recorded by default. In v0.6, actual ping entries can be optionally turned off. So if you turn off pings, TrackbackEntry will only record a new entry. Personally, I can't...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying text in multiple columns. Your text will be broken up into approximately equal portions, and the HTML formatting you specify (i.e. a table cell) will be repeated once for each portion.

Installation

To install the Columnize plugin, upload the file Columnize.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you do not already have a plugins directory, create one before uploading the file. For more information about Movable Type plugins, see the documentation.

Contact

Please address questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, interesting usage examples, etc., to mtplugins [AT] staggern...

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