Question

How do I show all entries from the same month or category as the current entry on an Individual Archive?

Answer

If you want a list on the Individual pages which only shows entries in the same month or category as the entry, you will need to do this with a second Archive Template and a PHP (or SSI) include.

Create The New Template

Navigate to Templates and click the Archives tab1. Click Create New Archive Template.

Assign the template a name of your choosing (to distinguish it from your normal Monthly or Category Archive Template). In...

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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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Question

Can I use PHP code in my templates?

Answer

Movable Type templates generate standard HTML pages; so any coding language which can be used in a standard web page can also be included in your templates.

Here are some important tips to remember about using PHP in your templates:

No shortcut tags in dynamic templates

If you are using PHP in a dynamic template, you should not use the "shortcut" opening tag: <?

Instead, you should use the full version: <?php

Template Tags are processed differently in static templates than...

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This tutorial is written by LMT author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and LMT.

With the release of Movable Type version 3.2, Six Apart opted to not include the calendar feature that had been included by default in earlier versions. The reason for this is that calendars, with the days linking to blog archives, are resource intensive; they can significantly lengthen rebuild times. Six Apart has posted the code that was used in previous versions of MT. However, many users have found that simply copying and pasting the code as given doesn't yield a properly formatted calendar.

The following code will create a calendar that will be correctly formatted and...

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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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MTDynamic is a Movable Type plugin that is designed to facilitate the dynamic rendering of Movable Type blogs, using URL parmaters to control the display of entries and comments.

Download (v0.6)

Installation

1. Movable Type ships with a dynamic viewer (mt-view.cgi), which is described as an "experimental feature". To use to the viewer, you must turn "SafeMode" off. To do this, edit your "mt.cfg" file such that it includes the following:

SafeMode 0

There should already be a SafeMode section near the bottom of the cfg file.

2. Download and extract Dynamic.pl to your hard drive.

3. Upload Dynamic.pl to the "plugins" directory in your MT Installation.

Template Tags

MTDynamic creates two new...

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MTDynamic is a Movable Type plugin that is designed to facilitate the dynamic rendering of Movable Type blogs, using URL parmaters to control the display of entries and comments.

Download (v0.5)

Installation

1. Movable Type ships with a dynamic viewer (mt-view.cgi), which is described as an "experimental feature". To use to the viewer, you must turn "SafeMode" off. To do this, edit your "mt.cfg" file such that it includes the following:

SafeMode 0

There should already be a SafeMode section near the bottom of the cfg file.

2. Download and extract Dynamic.pl to your hard drive.

3. Upload Dynamic.pl to the "plugins" directory in your MT Installation.

Template Tags

MTDynamic creates two new...

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There are two types of ways you can show recent comments on your sidebar. The first method is to shown last N comments.

<MTComments lastn="5" sort_order="descend"> <MTCommentEntry> [<a href="<MTEntryLink archive_type="Individual">#c<$MTCommentID$>" title="Comment Permalink">#</a>] </MTCommentEntry> <$MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect="1" show_email="0"$> <MTCommentAuthorIdentity>: <MTCommentBody convert_breaks="0" trim_to="50" remove_html="1"> <MTCommentEntry> [<a href="<MTEntryLink...

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Question

A list of all known issues in the latest version of Movable Type. Please be sure to review this list before using the product or opening a support ticket.

Answer

As of Version 3.16, released April 18, 2005 • Configuration • A new application method ("app_path") prevents the login cookie from being set when Movable Type is installed in the root folder, rather than a subfolder. See Keep getting login screen for the solution. • Archives • It is impossible to produce files with no file extension by using the File extension for archive...

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Question

After making some changes to my template, I rebuilt my site, and Movable Type gave me an error saying I used a tag out of context. What does that mean?

Answer

Most Movable Type tags are context-dependent, meaning that they should only be used in the appropriate context. Context is generally determined by either the surrounding template or the surrounding container tags.

For example, since <MTEntryTitle> depends on reading a particular entry in order to return results, it must be placed inside either an MTEntries container, or used...

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Here's a quickie I've been meaning to post for a while. From time to time, people ask me, "Hey Brad - how do you do those dividers inbetween each post for a single day? How do you get MT to do that?"

Well, it's not asked very often since I rarely post twice a day (or even once a day here lately). But here's how you can do it, without using even one of my fantastic plugins. 1

...

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Really, this is just stretching the work I did to create the previous weighted lists ( keywords and categories). This weighted post date list shows when you've posted the most to your Movable Type weblog(s), sort of like the BlogTimes plugin - but completely different.

Below is the weighted post date list for this web site:

april august december february friday january july june march may monday november october saturday september sunday thursday tuesday wednesday 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1976 1987 1989 1990 1991 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001...

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The idea of "tags" and "tagging" has become very popular in the recent past. The idea behind tags is really that of organization and cross-referencing, though specific implementation and implementation with Movable Type varies. TechnoratiTags and ishbadiddle's subject index are examples of two different tag uses. This article is not about implementations; to find this useful you'll want to be using tags already.

I think tagging is great way of thinking. The problem, however, is that it's easy to create near-duplicate tags: "photo" or "photos," "MovableType" or "Movable Type," for example....

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I recently stumbled across David Raynes' excellent SubCategories plugin. This plugin allows you to define existing categories as parents and children of one another. For instance, I have a Movable Type category. This category has been defined as a parent of my SomeDays and ModCheck categories.

So when you go to my Movable Type category archives, you will see those entries (such as this one) that are entered directly into the category, as well as those entries that belong on the child categories of SomeDays and ModCheck. Meanwhile, SomeDays and ModCheck can exist as their own separate categories too.

The problem that I ran into while doing this is that the most excellent Supplemental...

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Question

Can I put an image next to each entry based on its category?

Answer

Create an image for each category in your weblog. Save each image using the category name, but without any special characters and replacing spaces with underscores (this is called "dirifying" the file name). For example, if your category name is Exciting News, save the file as exciting_news.gif.

Upload the images to your server. You may wish to create a special subdirectory within your weblog folder named images.

To put the image next to your entry, add this...

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Question

I rebuilt my site, but no entries appear on my main page.

Answer

Check The Post Status For The Entry

Make sure that your entries are set to a status of Published and not Unpublished1. If you change the setting, you must remember to save the entry to update your site.

Check Your Default Weblog Display Settings

By default, Movable Type will use the Entries to Display setting in Settings > General : Default Weblog Display Settings2 to determine how many entries to display on the page (as well as on your other index templates).

If you've chosen...

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I further discussed my previous post with many pepole and felt I needed to clarify some doubts I and many others had about the new dynamic MT, so here's a follow up post ! Brad explained how the new MT/Smarty/PHP system will work. The template gets pulled from the database; there is a pass over it to make it smarty-compatible; then it gets executed by smarty. so if you have a real simple template like this: <MTEntries> <MTEntriesHeader><ul></MTEntriesHeader> <li><MTEntryTitle></li> <MTEntriesFooter></ul></MTEntriesFooter> </MTEntries>

it gets changed to this: {Entries} {EntriesHeader}<ul>{/EntriesHeader} <li>...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

• The auto-expiration of Junk feedback items only occurs when a user visits the main menu for that weblog. In future versions, auto-expiration of junk items will be triggered system-wide when a new junk feedback item is received. • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, duplicate TrackBack pings may be sent out • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, the entry basename may be incremented or, if the title was changed, altered to fit the new title. • Subcategories are not alphabetically sorted in the category assignment listings on the entry editing...

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With v3.2 of Movable Type, Six Apart removed the calendar from the sidebar of the default templates citing rebuild times as the reason. They did post the code that was used in previous versions. However, many users found that simply pasting the code in didn't yield a properly formatted calendar. So after a little digging around, I've come up with the following code which will create a calendar that will be correctly formatted and fit in with your stylesheet. Simply copy the code and put it in your sidebar - a good location would be just above <div class="module-search module">

<div class="module-calendar module"> <h2 class="module-header"><$MTDate format="%B %Y"$><...

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John Gruber found (as I did recently) that the Movable Type RSS 0.91 template doesn't validate using the new RSS validator (kudos to Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby for developing the tool. Mine validates now.). John offers a way to fix it using a new custom plugin, <$MTrfc822BlogTimeZone$>. For those that already have my Regex plugin installed, you can do this instead: <lastBuildDate><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S"$> <$MTBlogTimezone regex="s/://"$></MTEntries></lastBuildDate> <pubDate><$MTDate format="%a, %d %b %Y...

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