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...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

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.)...

continue reading ...

There are several situations in which you might want to combine two or more blogs into one. You might want to create a "Portal" blog which displays the most recent entries or headlines of entries from various blogs. You might want to create a Sideblog or Linkblog (see tutorial). Or you might want to have what looks to be just one blog (such as Learning Movable Type) but is actually a combination of several.

The tools you have at your disposal are David Raynes' MultiBlog plugin, PHP Includes, SSI - Server Side Includes, and RSS, among others. This tutorial will focus on the easiest of these alternatives - how to use the MultiBlog plugin to combine blogs from a single installation of...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

• Once an entry or category has been set to receive TrackBack pings, disabling pings for it through the UI will not actually refuse pings to that item but will suppress display of those pings. • Rebuilds will fail silently after saving an entry if a problem exists in your templates (for example, mismatched tags or a missing include module). An error will be shown, however, upon manual rebuild using the "Rebuild Site" functionality. • The nofollow plugin will cause a spurious warning for users with older versions of Perl upon running mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

continue reading ...

Atom is a standardized format for describing weblog content. With a standard format, you can exchange weblog content not only between web services but between command line tools--that's the idea behind some Java programs called "atomflow." To the same end as the atomflow project, I'm delighted to present a Perl module for creating command line Atom tools. I'm using it to post Flickr photos to a TypePad sidebar, but I'm sure you'll have many more ideas for it.

XML::Atom::Filter

The Atom format is being designed as a lingua franca of weblog content. Recognizing that a standard format makes meaningful integration between software programs easier, Diego Doval, Matt Webb, and Ben Hammersley invented...

continue reading ...

One of Movable Type's most powerful traits is its flexibility to adapt to practically any weblog design or use you can imagine. For the average user, most of this flexibility comes from Movable Type's template engine.

The template engine is crucial to automating the process of publishing and is what makes a publishing system go. When a rebuild is performed, templates are merged with content to create a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

These templates are what control the design and layout of your site and what keeps that design separate from the content. Templates describe where you want...

continue reading ...

Sometimes you may want to keep an entry, or all entries within a certain category, at the top of your weblog, above all of your other entries. For example, you may want to highlight announcements at the top of your site, or you might have a site explanation or introduction that you wish to maintain at the top. There are several ways to accomplish this.

1. Changing the date of the entry.

If all you want to do is to put one particular entry at the top of your blog, perhaps only for a limited time, the easiest way to accomplish this is to give it a date that is posted at a later date than all of the other entries. To do this, in the edit entry window, scroll to the bottom of the page....

continue reading ...

All roads in weblogging lead to posting entries, for without posted entries there is no weblog. It should come as no surprise that the Entries Listing and New/Edit Entry screens are where most users will find themselves when working with Movable Type.

In these screens a user can view what entries are in a weblog, filter them based on certain criteria, make new posts and edit existing ones.

Entries Listing

The Entries Listing screen displays either all the entries for the weblog or just the entries made by you. What gets displayed depends on whether or not you have been granted Edit All Posts access.

...

continue reading ...

Movable Type is set up for doing date-based archives by day, week, and month, but not by year. There are a few plugins and methods out there that will help you create a yearly calendar of your archives, for example, Brad Choate's Year Archives in MT Perl script plugin will produce a calendar archive ( example). Lummox JR's ArchiveYear plugin will produce a similar calendar ( example).

I prefer a yearly archive to show a list of entries by month, as I've set up on one of my blogs ( example). An archive page like this can be accomplished using the ArchiveYear plugin with some simple changes to the sample code given. Update August 1, 2005 The ArchiveYear plugin seems to not be in its...

continue reading ...

This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying a portion of a template conditionally, depending on the results of a comparison between values. The values compared can be literal strings or numbers, or they can be pieces of MT template code that the plugin will build and evaluate, using the result in the comparison.

MT users have developed a number of techniques in PHP and JavaScript to implement various useful conditional-display features on MT-based sites. The tags in the Compare plugin should let you accomplish many of these same tasks within your MT templates, without using PHP or JavaScript tricks. For example: • Display different text in the Comments link for...

continue reading ...

In Movable Type, we use tags for defining the flow within a template and for accessing the database. You can influence a tag's behavior with the help of attributes. These attributes define a value for some parameter.

Unfortunately, the value for an attribute may only be a constant. However, you will sometimes have the need for setting the value to the result of another tag. Movable Type will not support such a situation, but a plugin will help.

An Example

Suppose you have a template module that you want to include from many different places. For example, you want to call this module from both an individual entry archive and the main index. Inside the template, you then want to...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

1.4 (2002.01.07)

• New default templates no longer use <label> 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...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Sometimes I want to make a post "sticky" so it stays at the top of my entry list for an extended length of time, even after posting newer entries. There are several ways to accomplish this.

One, perhaps the simplest, is to post-date the "sticky" entry so that it will stay in place as long as that date is still in the future or no entry has usurped it's place by post date.

Another option is to just hard-code the sticky text into your index template where you want it. (yuck, but it works)

A third option and my preferred method is to use the MTEntry plugin which gives you the MTEntry tag, allowing you to call one specific entry id...

Place your code above the regular MTEntries code....

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

continue reading ...

The default Movable Type MT3 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code? MT3.1 and...

continue reading ...