MTCategories

A container tag representing a list of categories in a weblog. This tag produces output for every category with no regard to their hierarchical structure. • show_empty

Setting this optional attribute to true (1) will include categories with no entries assigned. The default is false (0), where only categories with entry assignments are displayed.

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In Comparison needed for conditional Generation I showed how to use the Compare Plugin for managing variations of a page type. The plugin allows comparing values and optionally inserting one or the other code segment into the output stream. However, the simple condition "if one value equals another value" is just the beginning. We are also able to create complex conditions. It is not even that difficult.

Basics

The Compare Plugin offers a number of tags, as for example MTIfEqual, MTIfNotEqual, MTIfGreater, MTIfGreaterOrEqual, MTIfLess, etc. Most of them work the same way: they take at least two mandatory attributes, a and b. The plugin compares the values of those two...

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Categories provide an alternate means to the weblog's traditional chronological form of organizing entries. Movable Type allows you to enter a list of categories using a variety of methods and assign one or more to each of your entries. You can use MT's categorization facilities to group related entries despite chronology or simply as a means of filtering entry listings in the CMS more easily.

Each entry can be assigned one primary category and any number of secondary categories. The primary category is used when you wish to display information about just one of the categories to which an entry is...

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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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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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A while ago I read What's this blog about?, which showed a weighted list of keywords that appears on his site. I thought that was a cool idea, to show - based on font size - the most written-about topics.

What I put together isn't anywhere near that complex. The weighted category list simply assigns a font size to the category name based on the number of entries associated with that category. Here's a snapshot of danandsherree.com's weighted category list:

About Dan (Old Stuff) Boy Scouts Christmas Computers Crafts danandsherree.com News Elsewhere in our Life Girl Scouts Movable Type Music, Movies and Television Photography Pinball the Cat...

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UPDATE: If you have any feature request I'm all ears. Gearing up for the release I want to see if there are any feature requests I can implement, I think I've fixed all the bugs that were reported so expect a release in the next few weeks.

I had released this to ProNet a few days ago but have not gotten much feedback. That can be either that people are waiting for the point release and don't want to install a beta or that there aren't many bugs in this beta. Either way I want to open up testing for MT Blogroll 2.0 (I'm still thinking about that version number). I'm going to copy my post to ProNet here to save me some time.

I've re-written Blogroll to use its own tables in the DB so...

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2.0b1 (2002.02.18)

• Lots of changes to the UI: leftnav, topnav, edit-entry screen, new-entry screen, etc. • Blog Editing Menu has now changed greatly to provide space for a welcome message (editable in blog config), blog stats, and links to 5 most recent posts and comments. • Added the ability to do NFS-safe database locking using .lock files and link(). This is not something most people should worry about; if it affects you, it's likely that you will know it. :) Thanks to Kelsey Cummings for ideas and code. • Hold and Release are now Draft and Publish...

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Working with Category Tags

Problems

You need to display category data in your published pages.

Solutions

Use the template tags prefixed with MTCategory.

Discussion

Category tags can be used to display a list of categories and their information in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical forms. These tags can be used in MTArchiveList archive_type="category", MTEntryCategories, MTCategories or MTSubCategories tag contexts. Category tags may also be used anywhere in a Category Archive template.

The basic tags when working with non-hierarchical data are as follows. (For an...

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If you have a lot of content - entries, categories, sidebar information - sooner or later things may begin to look a little cluttered on your weblog. One way to address this is to make some of your lists expandable and collapsible, as I have done with LMT's Table of Contents. There are probably many different ways to do this. I have found one method, based on Javascript, that is simple to implement and appears to work fine, from Bleeding Ego.

1. Upload listmenu.js to your server.

Copy the following script into a new file with a texteditor. Save the script as "listmenu.js". Upload the script to a location within the public directory of your server using an FTP program. (You can...

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A specialized version of MTEntries that is aware of subcategories.

Attributes: • category - The value of this attribute is a category label. This will include any entries to that category and any of its subcategories.

Since it is possible for two categories to have the same label, you can specify one particular category by including its ancestors, separated by slashes. For instance if you have a category "Flies" and within it a subcategory labeled "Fruit", you can ask for that category with category="Flies/Fruit". This would distinguish it from a category labeled "Fruit" within another called "Food...

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Until recently, I depended solely on the most excellent FilterCategories plugin to, well, filter my category list. For instance, on the archive page and on the software page, I present a subset of my entire category list. The latest hurdle in my static-to-dynamic conversion is dealing with the problem that this plugin doesn't work in a dynamic publishing environment.

I started with the software page. Incidentally, this page is now being published dynamically. It just took me a bit to get there.

To start my journey, I took an in-depth look at the MTCategories container within the PHP code. It turns out that this accepts a "label" parameter, designed to allow you to select one...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a pair of template tags that allow you to filter a listing of categories by specifying the categories either to include in or to exclude from the listing.

Installation

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

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A container tag representing a list of categories in a weblog. This tag produces output for every category with no regard to their hierarchical structure. • show_empty

Setting this optional attribute to true (1) will include categories with no entries assigned. The default is false (0), where only categories with entry assignments are displayed.

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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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Question

I have a couple of categories. When using the MTCategories tag, these are sorted by name. However, I preferred if I could choose the order manually. There is a logical order of the categories, and the categories should be listed in that order. Can it be done?

Answer

Movable Type does not have a built-in function for achieving an arbitrary ordering of the category list. We have to use a plugin for that.

The idea for implementing the ordering is as follows: we will prefix all category names with some text, which is removed right before the category name is output to HTML. As an example please look at my top-level categories in the sidebar. These are... • Basics • Installation...

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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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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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01: Installation and Upgrade

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

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2.5 (2002.10.08)

• Localization: the MT interface can be available in multiple languages, on a per-author setting. • Integrated Jay Allen's mt-search (Thanks, Jay!). We've made the following changes from version 1.31b: • Rewrote ``new comments search'' to make it more scalable (using recently_commented_on functionality) • Added a search log through the Activity Log. • Added search request throttling, to help against denial of service attacks. • Merged mt-search.cfg directives into mt.cfg....

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