MTEntries

A container tag which iterates over a list of published entries from a weblog. The default behavior is set according to the "Entries to Display" and "Entry Order" controls in the General Settings. These settings can be overridden with the use of these optional attributes.

Attributes: • author - Filters the entries by the given author's username. • category - Filters the entries by the given category label. Multiple categories can be defined in the value of the attribute and can include boolean "AND" and "OR" logic. Boolean logic may not be mixed. For instance "Foo AND Bar...

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In a nutshell: how to display entries by last posted NOT by creation date.

I created a blog as an educational outreach for a group of historic interpreters. The blog is actually a fictional "journal" based on several historically-based and fictional personas. One (real live) author creates the entries. The entries are categorized by persona and the "authored on" date is edited to reflect the (fictional) date of the persona's journal entry. (ie. 1771-04-26, 1774-10-17, etc.) Because the entries are posted non-chronologically, I need them to be displayed on the blog in the order they are posted rather than by the MT's default "authored on" (entry_created_on) date. I considered...

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Displaying Entries

Problem

You need to display entry data in your published pages.

Solutions

Use the template tags that are prefixed with MTEntry.

Discussion

Entry tags can be used to display the contents of an entry and its related information. These tags can be used in MTArchiveList or MTEntries tag contexts. Entry tags may also be used anywhere in a Individual Archive template.

Here are some of the more common Entry tags used in templates: • MTEntries

MTEntries is the most powerful and adaptive template tag in Movable Type. It is a container tag representing a list of...

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Google recently released some useful tips on how to optimize the use of Google Adsense on one's web pages. No surprise - the hottest "hot spot" for the best click-through returns lies right in the middle of your content.

How does one place a Google Adsense ad (or any other ad, bit of text, or image for that matter) between entries on the main index page of your MT weblog? By using a simple trick of the "lastn" and "offset" attributes outlined in the MT manual here.

Normally on your Main Index template, you would have your MTEntries section laid out like so:

for MT 3.2:

<MTEntries> <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> <MTDateHeader><h2 class="date-header"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2></MTDateHeader>...

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A question that is raised by serious professionals considering Movable Type for their CMS needs is "What about static page?" Obviously MT was made for dynamic pages. Turning a list of entries into well organized websites is what MT does best. But it's those individual, doesn't-quite-fit-in-the-flow, static pages that can cause grief, consternation and if nothing else, confusion.

Our primary goal is to create pages that are both easy to manage and easy to update (so we're not quite talking about static pages). There are many ways to handle individual pages, I'll deal with two:

via Archive Mapping

This only works well in certain situations, and you'll see...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for identifying invalid link URLs within entries.

If your site has been around for a while, a few or many of the pages you've linked to in the past may have ceased to exist or moved to new locations. Also, if you tend to link to a large number of pages, you might not be in the habit of clicking on each and every link to check it, so some URLs might not have been valid in the first place. The CheckLinks plugin tries to access all the URLs linked to in your entries (or a subset of your entries), and lets you display a list of the ones it can't successfully access.

These tags are intended to be used on an index template, most likely...

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Introduction

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...

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One area where plugins have greatly enhanced MT functionality is in categories. Here's a list of some of the things you can do:

How to exclude entries of certain categories from lists of entries. Say you want to list out your 20 most recent entries in your sidebar, except for the entries in the Special Announcements category. This is easy enough to do with the Exclude Categories plugin. The code would look like this:

<MTEntriesExCat category="Special Announcements" lastn="20"> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br /> </MTEntriesExCat>

How to list entries only from certain categories. This trick doesn't require a plugin at all. Just add the category attribute after the MTEntries tag like so:...

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Last week, CSS guru Eric Meyer posted his system called S5, a simple and elegant way to publish an XHTML file that can be displayed by any modern browser as a slideshow.

Using his primer and a little bit of custom templating in Movable Type, it's easy to create a template that can show your recent blog posts as a slideshow. (If you just want to jump to a live example, you can view the Professional Network blog as a slideshow.)

The key to making S5-compatible slideshows in Movable Type is to create a template that generates output with the appropriate markup to work with the CSS and Javascript that S5 requires. Here's the simple template we're using on the Professional Network: • <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">...

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I saw a chunk of code today that made my eyes pop out because of its lack of promise. Well, not its lack of promise, but its absence of MT::Promise. The MT::Promise class, new in Movable Type 3.0, solves a common coding problem so it's worth getting the word out about what it does.

What made my eyes pop out was this chunk of code, in the definition of a container tag for looping over categories: my $needs_entries = ($ctx->stash('uncompiled') =~ /<$?MTEntries/) ? 1 : 0; if ($needs_entries) { my @entries = MT::Entry->load(@args); $ctx->{__stash}->{'entries'} = delay (sub{@entries}); $ctx->{__stash}->{'category_count'} = scalar @entries; } else {...

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Question

In Movable Type, entries or comments or other objects are often shown in lists. For example, the main index shows the most recent entries, a category archive also shows entries, or an individual entry archive shows comments. I preferred if not all items in such lists were styled the same. For example, there should be an alternating white / gray background. How can this be done?

Answer

Fortunately, the answer can be given in a generic way. The technique that I am going to show can be used with all types of objects (entries, comments, categories, etc.) and any number of different styles.

For showing the basic idea I will create a list of entries using 3 different styles....

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Updated. Originally posted April, 2004

Adding a Recent Comments section to your weblog is easy and straightforward. There are two basic approaches. The first is to list the last N number of recent comments; the second the last N most recently commented on entries.

The most recent comments

In this example of Recent Comments the last 10 comments are listed, regardless of how many times there may have been comments to the same entry. The comment authors names are linked to their respective websites, if they have them, and the entry title is linked to the author's comment in the entry.

For most recent comments like shown in the example to the left, add the following code to the...

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I am going to describe the basics of Movable Type in a short introduction. You do not have to know anything about Movable Type for understanding it. However, when following this three-part introduction, you will learn to know the most important components and gain a good overview. • Movable Type Basics / 1 • Movable Type Basics / 2 • Movable Type Basics / 3

Templates

In the previous part we explained that entries are stored in a database. However, you will not find the website's HTML in the database. Instead, just the attributes of an entry are stored as columns in a database table. But how does Movable Type create HTML out of this?

In Movable Type there are a number of...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for collecting information from specified HTML tags in your entries, and collating and displaying that information. This lets you enhance your MT-based pages in a variety of ways. For example, you could: • Display footnotes for the links or images that appear within each entry. The StripTags plugin could also do this; since this plugin can do everything StripTags can do and much more, StripTags is superseded by Collect and will no longer be updated. See the Usage Examples section, below, for some examples of how to duplicate the functionality of StripTags with Collect. • Generate a "Recent Links" listing to display in your sidebar. • Create "by citation" or "by quotation" archives, similar to the ones Mark Pilgrim has on...

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It is a common scenario to have a list of entries sorted by date of publication. As this list may be rather long, it is reasonable to group entries and mark each group with a distinct group header. If you want to group by day, you can use the MTDateHeader tag for this task. However, what can be done, if you prefer to group by months?

An example

Suppose you have a couple of entries. Then you might want to create a structured list as follows:

Jan 16th, 2005 - First entry from Jan 16th, 2005 - Second entry from Jan 16th, 2005 - Third entry from Jan 16th, 2005 Jan 20th, 2005 - First entry from Jan 20th, 2005 - Second entry from Jan 20th, 2005 Feb 3rd, 2005 - First entry from...

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A container tag whose contents will be displayed if the entry in context was posted on a different day than the following/next entry in the list.

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

MTDateHeader

...

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Updated June 12, 2005. Originally posted in Spring of 2004.

The default Movable Type installation automatically publishes RSS feeds for your weblog. The three formats supported are Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. You can find the templates associated with these syndication formats in the templates section of your MT edit screen.

The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication feed templates for MT version 3.x produces a feed with the content in your MT entry body. The default Atom feed template produces a feed with both the entry body and the extended entry. The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds in MT version 2.661 generated feeds with only the entry excerpt.

You may or may not want to...

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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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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

continue reading ...