I had a problem with this on a couple blogs I admin, because we don't post everyday; on one, sometimes there's a month or more between posts. The "Number of Days Displayed" setting on the Weblog Configuration page will give you the last "x" number of calendar days - and since there is such a great gap between posts on this blog, it didn't take long before there weren't any posts on the index at all.

There are two ways to go about this. You can go for a set number of posts on your front page (i.e. - always have 10 posts displayed) or you can get the last 7 non-consecutive days worth of posts.

If you want a set number, on your index template change

<MTEntries> into <MTEntries...

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Creating an Archive Template

Problem

You want to create pages that provide different views of a weblog's entries.

Solution

Create an archive template that is mapped to a particular archive type.

Discussion

Archive Templates allows for pages to be created for different views of the weblog's entries. MT supports a few date-based archives -- daily, weekly, and monthly -- in addition to individual entry and category archives. These templates are used to create multiple pages, one for each "unit" (time-period, entry or category) of the archive.

Movable Type ships with Archive...

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Continuing on from yesterday's post showing how to make a slideshow from posts in your Movable Type weblog, you might be interested in other ways to present your blog posts so that people who don't read blogs can keep up with what you're publishing.

Today we'll look at Microsoft Office's support for XML, particularly WordML, the XML Schema used to make documents in Microsoft Word's XML format. (If you just want to see the end results, take a look at wordml.xml, showing the Professional Network blog as a WordML file.)

To understand how this works, it helps to know a little bit about how WordML works. John R. Durant's blog has some indispensable links about this topic. If you want to...

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Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own...

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Nofollow

The nofollow plugin is intended to help search engines understand which portions of your page are written by you and which are written by other people. The important element of this content is the hyperlink.

Many search engines use links between sites to understand how they relate. Comment/TrackBack spammers looking for higher placement in search engine rankings seek to exploit this heuristic in order to make their sites more relevant by linking to them from blogs.

By marking which links are part of your site versus part of third-party submissions, search engines can...

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If you want your Movable Type entries to be displayed in alphabetical order, substitute the <MTEntries> tag with:

<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

Use the same </MTEntries> closing tag.

Links: MT Forum thread on case insensitive sorting - sort_by="title" is case sensitive by default in Movable Type. This thread shows David Phillips' tip on how to adjust the perl code so that your sort_by attribute can be case insensitive.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).

Has this tutorial been helpful? Please consider linking to Learning Movable Type at...

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I will be using Movable Type's default RSS 2.0 template, simply for size reasons. These template changes can apply just as easily to Atom feeds or any other feed template you can come up with.

First, here is the default template: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="<$MTPublishCharset$>"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title> <link><$MTBlogURL$></link> <description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description> <language><$MTBlogLanguage ietf="1"$></language> <copyright>Copyright...

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Warning: main(/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90 Warning: main(): Failed opening '/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc' for inclusion (include_path='') in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90

With MT you can have multiple authors on the same weblog, making it easy to have a friend contribute to your blog as a "guest author" or to create a group weblog to which many people contribute. You can even customize to a small degree, aspects of the author-specific Individual Entry pages.

Adding an Author

To add an author in MT 3.2...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. It's basically a Movable Type interface to the extremely handy XML::Simple Perl module. The plugin will work with any well-formed XML document that can be retrieved via an HTTP GET request.

The GetXML plugin is extremely generalized, and to use it you'll have to understand the structure of the XML data you want to work with. There are specific MT plugins available for certain particular types of XML data, such as RSS feeds, Amazon content, and weather forecasts. If there's a specific plugin out there for the XML resource you're interested in, by...

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Multiblog is an indespensible plugin that allows you to display content from other blogs. Unfortunately, in its current version it doesn't work with dynamic publishing. A few days ago I was investigating the best way to duplicate MultiBlog's functions in the dynamic templating system. As it turns out, Movable Type's powerful dynamic templating system makes it easy to include content from other blogs.

With dynamic publishing all you need to do to pull content from other blogs is to change the blog context of the page. Every tag is parsed within a context which affects the content it outputs. For example, with the MTEntries tag the correct entries are outputted because Movable Type...

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Creating a Master Archive Index

Problem

You want to create a master index of your weblog's archives.

Solution

Create an index template using MTArchiveList and related tags.

Discussion

In "Creating an Archive Template" we discussed how to create pages that provide different views of a weblog's entries. No matter what type of archiving you use, you are likely to need a master list of all of your archives. Movable Type ships with such a listing as a template named Master Archive Index. In MT, the Master Archive Index is just an index template that uses the MTArchiveList tagset instead of...

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As I mentioned yesterday, I'm now using Smarty to provide pagination in my category archives. The code is inserted directly into the template, and (apparently) when it rebuilds the template it parses that code prior to rendering the page. It's actually quite impressive. Thanks again to Brad, not only for giving me some sample code with which to play, but for showing me it is possible in the first place - I had no idea!

The first thing you need to do is set a Smarty variable with a value, and then you can use that value when creating the MTEntries container, using that variable to build the entries you need: {{assign var="offset" value="12"}} <MTEntries lastn="12"...

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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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The <MTEntries> container tag has two often-used attributes: lastn and days. The lastn attribute will display the x most recent entries (regardless of whether they all occur on one day or 10 days, for example). The days attribute will display whatever entries occur in the last x days (regardless of whether there are 0 or 18 entries in that timeframe, for example). Each of these options is mutually exclusive, meaning they can't be used together. Or can they? A little PHP does the job!

Why would you want to combine these two attributes? Different display and entry listing options: show the 7 most recent entries, displaying a larger excerpt of any entry in the last 2...

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Question

How can I list recent comments to my blog on my Main Index page?

Answer

There are two basic variations on this type of display.

Via MTComments tag

You can put the following into your Main Index Template: <MTComments lastn="6" sort_order="descend"> <p><$MTCommentAuthor$> said:<br /> <$MTCommentBody$></p> </MTComments>

This will display the 6 most recent comments made on any of the entries in your weblog, and sort them in reverse chronological order (most recent first).

Via...

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Creating a Main Index

Problem

You want to create an index of your weblog's latest entries.

Solution

Create an index template using MTEntries and other tags.

Discussion

Weblogs are generally organized so that their entries are in reverse chronological order with the latest post on top. Movable Type ships with a template called Main Index with just such a listing. The Main Index is essentially the homepage for the weblog.

As an index template it has an implied context of the weblog. Entries (represented by the MTEntries tag) are selected based on Default Weblog Display Settings...

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Question

I've just installed Movable Type. How do I integrate my current site design into the system, so that the pages will now be updated with my Movable Type data whenever I publish a new entry?

Answer

Because each person's site is unique, there's not really a "one size fits all" way of integration with Movable Type; it's a process that differs according to your own preferences and needs. Overall, the best way to familiarize yourself with how the system works is to set up a test blog in a separate area of your site, and then make...

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Question

My archive pages are getting too long, so I'd like to change them to just a listing of entries with titles and permalinks, rather than showing the full body for every entry. How do I do this?

Answer

Go to the Edit Template screen for the Archive Template you want to change. Look for the section of code that starts with <MTEntries> and ends with </MTEntries>; then replace it with code similar to this: <ul> <MTEntries> <li><MTEntryDate format="%x"> - » <a...

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Movable Type templates aren't too difficult to write, but they can be difficult to read. So I've whipped up another plugin to fix that. Simple Template is a plugin that provides an alternative syntax for Movable Type templates 1.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsimpletemplate-1_21.zip

Installation

To install, place the ‘simpletemplate.pl' file in your Movable...

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Steve asks:

Quick question, how do you get the different icons to show up based on categories like you have in your personal site? Can you also do it by author?

This is quite simple to implement and can be done either with the use of plugins or doing it manually using MT Tags

Category Icons

You can either use TopicIcon to do this 'automatically' - just follow these instructions. Alternatively you can do it manually, add this code in your templates between the <MTEntries>...</MTEntries> tags.

<img src="http://www.movalog.com/images/cat_icons/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>.gif" alt="<MTEntryCategory>" />

So for example, if you had a category called...

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