MTEntryDate

The authored on timestamp for the entry. Date format tags may be applied with the format attribute along with the language attribute.

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Updated

The default templates in Movable Type list archives by month, not by category. See the following steps for configuring your weblog for category archiving, creating and assigning categories, adding a category list in your sidebar, and adding a "Posted to" line at the end of each entry.

1. Edit your weblog configuration for category archiving. In your weblog config window, tab over to "archiving". Put a check in the checkbox next to "category". Save and rebuild your weblog.

2. Create and assign categories. When you create a new entry, right next to the Title window is a scroll bar for selecting a category. Scroll down to "Add new category". This will open a window for...

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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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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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The default Movable Type templates place the date that an entry is posted near the title of the entry and a time posted at the end of the entry. You can easily change the formatting of how these dates appear by changing the MTEntryDate tag in your index and archive templates.

The default date format that appears near the title of an entry looks like this:

February 15, 2004

The MTEntryDate tag that generates this date and format looks like this:

<$MTEntryDate format="%x"$>

What follows "format=" is what determines the format of the date and time displayed. The Movable Type User's Manual has a long list of all the different date strings (the bits of code that...

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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...

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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.

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MTDateHeader

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The idea is pretty simple: returning visitors get to see only new content, not the old stuff. After all, if they're returning, that's probably what they want.

Using a cookie, I can track when you've last visited the front page. If any content is newer than the cookie, it gets published. If not, a "no new entries" message gets displayed. And so I dubbed it "Cookie Publishing."

You'll need to be able to use PHP to implement this feature. Visit danandsherree.com's front page to see it work - first a cookie will be set, then refresh to see it in action - or keep reading for details of how to set this up yourself.

2005/08/02...

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Sometimes you would like to display the age of an entry as compared to a specific date. In the case, of my daughter's blog, I've displayed her actual age at the time of each post, based on her birth date and the authored-on date of the entry.

Updated to support time difference too.

Updated to correct date_delta function's accuracy.

This is a Movable Type/PHP tip. I haven't...

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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.)...

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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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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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After you have started to modify the Movable Type templates according to your own style, you will probably find out, that this "programming by tags" is a little bit restricted. Often you want to use a condition for creating the HTML output in one or the other way. But Movable Type isn't able to support this very well.

And again, a plugin will do the work.

What do you need Comparisons for?

In this weblog an entry's title area consists of two parts. On the left side there is the title describing the subject. On the right side there is the date of creation.

With some entries I do not want the date to be visible. For example the entry »help« should be...

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Formatting a Date

Problem

You want to format the timestamp of a date tag.

Solution

Use the format attribute with the Date Tag Format codes.

Discussion

Movable Type provides added functionality to tags that handle date and time information. These tags will recognize a format attribute that defines the explicit date/time format to output. These formats are based on the strftime utility found on all Unix systems. A complete listing of the codes can be found in Appendix C.

For instance, if you were to insert this template markup into the context of an entry: <$MTEntryDate...

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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...

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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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The default entry URL file name structure for Movable Type 2.6 looks something like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/archives/000123.html

This structure puts all of the files into one archive directory and assigns each of them a number corresponding to the number of entries you have entered so far in your weblog.

What if you would prefer to have the URLs for your entries include the actual name of the entry and maybe even the category they are in? Something like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/archives/name_of_category/title_of_entry.html

Easy.

1. Using the entry title instead of the entry number. On the left hand side of your weblog edit window, click on "weblog config" navigation...

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In a recent thread on the MT forums, a person asked how you could make the dates on entries relative to the current time. This means instead of "Posted on August 1st 2004" it would be "Posted 3 days ago." You could use the RelativeDate plugin but that would require you to rebuild your pages everyday (of course this can be done via a cron job).

Lucky I found this PHP script written by Kristine (kadyellebee on the forums). For this code to work, you will need to be using PHP enabled templates. Towards the top of your templates you should find a tag similar to <$MTEntryDate$>

Just replace that with <?php //offset is how many hours away you are from your server. $offset = "0";...

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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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