This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for looping through a list of values, repeating a portion of a template for each value in the list.

Installation

To install the Loop plugin, upload the file Loop.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] staggernation [DOT] com, or post them in the Plugin Development area of the Movable Type Support Forum.

MTLoo...

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Installing Movable Type on Windows

Problem

You want to run Movable Type on a Windows system.

Solution

Movable Type has been developed to run on a wide variety of operating systems including Windows, although this entails some additional considerations.

Discussion

One of Movable Type's strengths as a platform is that it runs in a wide variety of environments, letting you choose the operating system, web server, and database. As a Perl-based application though, Movable Type has historically been most at home on Unix-based operating systems like Linux, BSDs, or Mac OS X.

If you have chosen Windows as...

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This very simple Movable Type plugin implements a template tag for displaying the first N words of an entry or any other text. While Movable Type's MTEntryExcerpt tag will automatically generate an excerpt consisting of the first N words of the entry body. However, you must configure the value of N for an entire blog, so you can't have excerpts of one length on one template and another length on another. This plugin allows you to display excerpts of different lengths in different places, and also lets you excerpt text other than an entry body.

Installation

To install the FirstNWords plugin, upload the file FirstNWords.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying the first letter of a section of text as a "drop cap." A drop cap is a large initial letter of a paragraph that spans more than one line of text. The CSS2 standard lets you create drop caps using the first-letter pseudo-element. However, this will not display properly in older browsers, and it also doesn't allow you to use images for your drop caps. This plugin is designed to let you do drop caps the old-fashioned way, by using an HTML table or image with align="left", which will cause the paragraph to wrap around the drop cap.

The DropCap plugin currently only formats the first letter of the entire piece of text you...

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This Movable Type plugin implements template tags and a global tag attribute for displaying text wrapped into lines of a specified length.

Installation

To install the TextWrap plugin, upload the file TextWrap.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.

The TextWrap plugin requires the Perl module Text::Wrap, which is a standard module that should be included in any Perl installation.

Contact

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

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for defining a section of text and/or HTML code as "glue" that will appear between items (entries, categories, comments, etc.) in a listing, and will not appear after the last item in the listing. The functionality is similar to that of the glue attribute of Movable Type's MTEntryCategories tag, although the way the plugin is used within a template is somewhat different.

Installation

To install the Glue plugin, upload the file Glue.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...

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It turns out that it was surprisingly easy to move from one host to another. I'd love to think it's simply my own brilliance, but let's be honest here. Much of the work was easy because I had a copy of the data on my own PC. It was a bit out-of-date, but the general structure was in place. That saved a load of time, especially as I couldn't get FTP access to my prior host.

I did happen to snag a MySQL export from the old host earlier this week, when it seemed as if I was having problems. That was really the magic piece. So I created a new database on the new host, then ran the script as an import. Very sweet indeed.

At first, I couldn't get Movable Type running again. Turns out...

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MTImageURL

The absolute URL of the image that was uploaded. Images tags can only be used in the "Uploaded Image Popup" system template.

Permalink

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MTImageHeight

The height of the image that was uploaded. Images tags can only be used in the "Uploaded Image Popup" system template.

Permalink

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MTImageWidth

The width of the image that was uploaded. Images tags can only be used in the "Uploaded Image Popup" system template.

Permalink

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It's a shame MT doesn't provide year-based archives because some of us have enough entries for them even if Movable Type hasn't been out that long! Here's what my 2001 blogging year looks like. Well, you can create them manually-- and since you only have to do it once a year, it isn't too bad. Click the 'more' link for details...

All you have to do to build a year archive is create an index template...

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Note: This plugin used to be called LastModified, and had an MTLastModified tag. Since version 2.65, Movable Type has had a built-in MTEntryModifiedDate tag, making the plugin tag obsolete, but MTIfModified is still useful.

This Movable Type plugin implements a template tag for displaying a section of template code conditionally based on whether or not an entry was modified since it was created.

Installation

To install the IfModified plugin, upload the file IfModified.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.

Contac...

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As I mentioned before, I ported a few plugins I was using to the dynamic system. The first of the plugins I ported was for dashify my urls (replaces the spaces with dashes rather than underscores like in dirify).

I mainly use the very simple Dashify plugin to dashify my titles so here's a php port - modifier.dashify.php however for those of you that prefer to use the more powerful DirifyPlus I've made a php port for it too - modifier.dirifyplus.php.

To ensure that the files are formatted correctly I recommend you right click the links and click save as. Upload them to your php/plugins/ directory to enable them.

Syntaxing remains the same e.g. <MTEntryTitle dashify="1"> or...

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Question

Various errors of this type, what they mean, and the solutions.

Answer

Error: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 316.

This is related to the display of the Movable Type News Feed on the main page. Your server is most likely having trouble retrieving this feed.

You can disable this feature in mt-config.cgi1 file with the following line: NewsboxURL disable

Remember to edit mt-config.cgi only in a plain text editor, and upload it back to your server in ASCII mode after making changes.

Error: Use of uninitialized...

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This is a hack I began using recently, in an emergency situation. Blog comment spam was creating a huge CPU load on my web server, to the point that it was causing server crashes and CPU restrcitions from my (now former) web host. I have heard increasing report of web hosting banning the use of Movable Type on their hosting plans for the same reason.

This an MT-Blacklist hack that automatically blocks the IP address of someone trying to post commnent that matches your blacklist. It does this using htaccess, so repeated POSTs from that IP will never reach the MT scripts, thus saving your CPU.

First, let me be clear that I agree with Jay Allen and Adam Kalsey's comments about the...

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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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UploadPerms

In addition to controlling permissions via umask settings, you can also use the HTMLPerms and UploadPerms settings to control the default permissions for files created by the system (either as output files or uploaded files). The only real use of this is to turn on the executable bit of files created by the system--for example, if MT is generating PHP files that need to have the executable bit turned on, you could set HTMLPerms to 0777.

Default value: 0666

Example: HTMLPerms 0777

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Everyone loves having a great looking site, but for most people who aren't well versed in the technical details of HTML and CSS, tweaking your blog's look isn't easy. Being able to easily pick a style from a rich library of choices is essential.

So, we made the move in Movable Type 3.2 to a new set of Six Apart standard styles that are shared with both our TypePad and LiveJournal services. There's an immediate benefit of being able to use any one of a number of existing styles. But in the future, with over ten million blogs sharing the same single set of styles and markup, there's going to be a new and rapidly expanding base of additional styles available that we think is...

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Question

When I run an upgrade script, I get this error message:

You have not yet upgraded to the #.# version of MT. Please do that before you run this script. Exiting...

where #.# is the version number I am trying to upgrade to.

Answer

When you see this message, it means Movable Type is still detecting files from the previous version on your server.

Make sure that you have uploaded all of the files from the new version package, and that all of the files from previous versions on the server were overwritten with the new files....

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Similar to the weighted category list, the weighted keyword list builds a list of keywords used on your site and uses varying font sizes to show how popular they are. This list might be more representative of what your site is about than the weighted category list is. Here's the list for this site:

adobe backup book camera camporee car cars cat category cd christmas collection collector color com computer cow danandsherree detail digital dpi dvd elsewhere file files film fire florida image life light links monitor movable movie news nikon page paper park photo photos photoshop php pinball print profile radio raw river scan scanner...

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