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01: Installation and Upgrade

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

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Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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Moving your Movable Type blog to a new server or to a new host is much more perilous than you might think. If not done properly, you could lose all of your entries. I recently went through this exercise and what saved me was a set of instructions from MT user Russcam. What I've done here is reworked Russcam's instructions for what worked for me with moving a site with multiple MT blogs. In some cases in this document I copy his words, word for word. I may get skewered for plagarism here, but I hate PDFs and need a web-findable record of what I did. This is essentially Russ's work, with my tweeks and ammendments. Please leave comments, questions, or proposed amendments in the...

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Question

How do I install the StyleCatcher Plugin?

Answer

• Download the StyleCatcher plugin1 and unzip the file to your local computer. The files should be organized into two folders within a StyleCatcher folder. For example, after unzipping the file for version 1.0 of the plugin, you would have the following two folders, each with other folders and files inside them:

• StyleCatcher-1.0/mt-static/ • StyleCatcher-1.0/plugins/

• Open your FTP program and log into your server.

• Navigate to your mt-static directory2, and upload3 the contents of the StyleCatcher-1.0/mt-static/...

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Looking for a way to incorporate a Photo Gallery into your MT blog? Check out Photo Gallery Templates from StopDesign.com.

There are many ways to create a web-based photo album or photoblog in Movable Type. This tutorial addresses just one method for creating a photo album, and is based on the steps I took to create my MT-based photo album. This tutorial is for experienced MT users and assumes familiarity with plugins, CSS, creating a new weblog, category archiving, and uploading images. Although long, the tutorial is easier than it looks, especially if you want a photo album that works just like mine. It's always the customizations that take time. In this tutorial I will give...

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Movable Type is being used to store a list of classes, and we need to make those class titles available in a form field (class registration) as a dynamically linked list box. The user will be presented with two list boxes, the first with a list of categories, the second (which is disabled until a category is chosen) with a dynamically generated list of the titles in the selected category.

Ingredients

We're going to need two important things here. First, a handy DHTML script from Xin Yang called Chained Selects that's going to power our linked list boxes. The script that you'll be dropping into your directory is called chainedselects.js.

Second, a javascript file...

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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.)

An htaccess file is a simple ascii text file which you create or edit in a text editor. The dot (.) before the word htaccess indicates that .htaccess is a file extension. Some text editors will add on an additional .txt file extension when you save your document. When you upload it to your server however, make sure the final file is named .htaccess and set the file's permissions to 644. The (.) in .htaccess also makes...

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I really need to learn Perl. I can look at some code and stumble through it to figure out what's happening, and I can hack it with minor changes - but I really don't know what I'm doing. And once I learn Perl I can learn to write some MT plugins.

I've had ideas for a few plugins floating around in my head: • A plugin to change the file upload behavior. I've hacked the file upload template and CMS.pm to add a Photo Gallery option that formats the URI as I need it and insert it into a new entry; I think this could be made into a plugin with BigPAPI. Done: Better File Uploader. • A file management plugin. It doesn't need to be terribly...

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Creating a new entry

After you have uploaded a file, you have the choice of either creating a new entry using that uploaded file, or just displaying the HTML used to link to the file. For example, if you have uploaded an image, and would like to create a new entry with a link to that image in a popup window, select Create a new entry using this uploaded file, and press POPUP IMAGE. If you are already editing an entry, then you won't want to create another new entry (and perhaps lose the one that you are working on); so in that case, click the Show me the HTML button and click POPUP...

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Question

When saving an entry or rebuilding, I see an error message that starts with Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0xb7) at extlib/DateTime/LocaleCatalog.pm line 25.

Answer

This error typically shows up when you've used a Mac to upload the files. If so, then upload the file again, but this time, use BINARY mode.

Although most of the files in the distribution should be uploaded in ASCII mode, the extlib/DateTime/LocaleCatalog.pm contains non-ASCII characters and thus would technically need to be uploaded in BINARY mode instead....

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In this article, we'll build a simple, template-driven site that separates style, content, and structure in your website. We'll create a cross-browser stylesheet switcher that remembers the user's preferences, touching on php variables, cookies, if statements, and including pages with require_once.

Separating style, content, and structure

The separation of style from content has become the bugbear of the HTML developer. Traditionally, we've used well-written CSS and XHTML to achieve this separation, and we've seen how much easier it is to update our sites or provide multiple styles when we write our markup this way. By adding some...

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Question

How do I apply a new style from the Style Library?

Answer

Note: Styles from the Style Library are only compatible with the new 3.2 Default Templates.

Applying the Style Manually

• Download the zip file for the style of your choice from the Style Library and unzip it to your local computer. All of the files should be organized into a single folder named after the style and prefixed with theme-. For example, after unzipping the file for the Beckett style, the folder would be named theme-beckett.

• Open your FTP program and navigate to your mt-static...

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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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Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

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Question

I'm getting messages about syntax errors in one or more files.

Answer

Syntax errors are an indication that there was a problem uploading the specified file to your server: either it was not uploaded in ASCII mode, or the file was truncated during transfer.

Upload the file(s) again, making sure to specifically choose an ASCII or plain text transfer mode; and verify that the file size on the server after the upload matches the original file size.

...

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LinkEntryToFile is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, you can specify a file on your server to link to the Entry Body or Extended Entry field. The linked file will be kept in sync with the entry, so that you can edit it in an external editor.

This plugin basically takes MT's handy "Link this template to a file" feature and applies it to entries. When using MT to manage certain types of content, especially content that contains extensive HTML formatting, it's useful to be able to use your favorite text-editing application, with syntax highlighting, Undo, search and replace, etc., without having to repeatedly copy and paste into the MT entry...

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Question

I get an error that starts with Unmatched right curly bracket at [path/filename].pm.

Answer

This error is an indication that there was a problem uploading the specified file to your server: either it was not uploaded in ASCII mode, or the file was truncated during transfer.

Upload the file again, making sure to specifically choose an ASCII or plain text transfer mode; and verify that the file size on the server after the upload matches the original file size.

If the file referenced in the error is extlib/DateTime/LocaleCatalog.pm, and is also accompanied by messages stating...

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2.1 (2002.05.02)

• Added webMaster, language, lastBuildDate, and pubDate to both RSS templates. • Added encode_html="1" to all RSS fields that didn't have it already. • Added Norwegian dates. • Added test for mt-check.cgi to determine whether we are running under cgiwrap or suexec. • Added a new global tag attribute encode_url (thanks to Scott Andrew LePera and others for the idea). • Changed the behavior of the publish flag in blogger.newPost; previously, if set to false the new entry would be saved as a draft. This was a bad idea, for...

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1.2 (2001.11.04)

• Fixed bug when system's crypt implementation uses MD5 passwords (MT was not picking up the proper salt). (Monica Reyes) • Added form-validity checking to mt-comments.cgi for checking email address and URL. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Set $CGI::POST_MAX to 1MB, which means that uploads must be 1MB or less, to prevent denial of service attacks. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Added mt-export.cgi, which will export all of your MT entries into a format that can be suitably re-imported through the import mechanism. It is also useful for keeping backups...

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As the campaign has been successfully completed, here's MT Blogroll 2.0. Thanks to all those that donated to the campaign, the donors will get priority if bugs or problems are faced. If you feel like donating, the campaign is now over, but feel free to use the donate button on the sidebar.

There are some new features including the ability to quickly add a blogroll entry by just entering the URI and having MT-Blogroll gather all the other information. I've also added the ability to define the the names of the author's of the blogs and the target of the blog.

I think all the bugs from the previous version should've been fixed, if you experience a bug, drop me a note.

If you are already using MT...

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