The default Movable Type layouts don't give you a lot of choice in terms of navigation. Clicking on the top bar with the title of the weblog will take you back to the main page of the weblog. Every other nav element is in the sidebar. You can however, pretty easily add a horizontal nav bar, with links to important-to-first-timers, or frequently used areas of your site, such as archives, about, or contact links.

Adding horizontal nav bar requires adding a few lines of code right underneath the banner section in your index and archive templates and adding a few new elements to your style sheet. Once you've created your navigation code, the most efficient way to add the code to the...

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Lead-ins are an eye-catching mechanism usually found in print publications. Recreating that effect for the web is easy to do, but it could be easier. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a 'leadin' tag that you could use to identify the word or phrase you want to style like that? Well...

MT-Macro to the rescue! Actually, the technique described here utilizes 3 of my Movable Type plugins. All functioning...

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After talking to Brad about the new version of MT, I felt it deserves a whole blog post about it just to talk about how amazing it is and get rid of all this excitement building up in me

First of, David's Subcats being built into the application. Well I knew it ! In #mt-plugins, David told me and a few others that he would not be entering his plugin into the contest - on further questioning he said that there was another party involved. Well once he said that it wasn't too hard to guess the right answer and we were helped by the fact that when he guessed it he either changed the topic or kept quiet ! Never-the-less I am very excited about this because Sub Categories are vital for many...

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I was having a heck of a time calling includes into dynamic archive pages (php files, no extensions). The syntax I used in my Main Index template was NOT working in my dynamic archives. What I found out was that I was using a php shortcut syntax which is not enabled on all servers (and perhaps in my case not in all cases? not sure about that yet - I'll look into an .htaccess solution although I have no reason to believe there is one - just a gut instinct to try)

These worked in the main index, but not in archives:

<? include "http://domain.com/tagline/rotator.php"; ?>

or

<? include "tagline/rotator.php"; ?>

This syntax works in both index AND archives:

<?php include...

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The current date and time at publishing. Date format tags may be applied with the format attribute along with the language attribute. See Appendix C.

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MTElse

...

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Question

I want to change my weblog's banner. However, this is a laborious task. The banner is defined in several templates. Do I always have to change each of these?

Answer

Indeed, the original templates that are distributed with Movable Type are not structured very well. Many parts seem to be copied from template to template. Fortunately, there is a special tag that enables us to write a section for a template once and use it in different situations. Maintenance will be easy, as the changes have to be done at just one location.

Please read Organize your Templates with MTInclude for learning about the MTInclude tag.

mgs

Feedback is welcome!

What do you think about this...

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Question

The larger my weblog gets, the longer my rebuilds take. How can I improve rebuild time?

Answer

You'll want to take a look at our Professional Network article on How to Speed Up Publishing in Movable Type.

One thing not mentioned in that article is that heavy use of the MTInclude tag can also slow down your rebuilds. If you're re-using a lot of content across multiple templates and files, you may want to consider using PHP or SSI includes instead of the MTInclude tag.

...

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Required: MT26x, MT3x

This one was hard for me because I was hung up on the whole plugin thing. But it turns out to be stupidly simple.

Start with Brad's MTMacro plugin. This page is about 10 miles long and scared the crap out of me. In the end, all I really needed was this part:

To install, place the "macros.pl" file in your Movable Type "plugins" directory. The "macros.pm" and "postproc.pm" (the "postproc.pm" file is only necessary for Movable Type 2.21) files should be placed in a "bradchoate" subdirectory underneath your Movable Type "extlib" directory. Your installation should look like this:

(mt home)/plugins/macros.pl (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/macros.pm (mt...

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Reusing Template Markup with Modules

Problem

You want to reuse a piece of markup or text.

Solution

Create a template module for reuse where necessary.

Discussion

Template Modules allows you to keep all common markup in one area so that modifications can be made from one place. Modules can contain bits of template tags, text, and other markup that are never directly output as a page. Instead they can be arbitrarily included into any other template, as many times as needed.

For instance, you could create a template module named "Copyright" as such: <p>Copyright...

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Module Aggregation

David Raynes' MultiBlog is a must have plugin for anyone interested in content aggregation, but it's uses are far greater than just sharing text.

Take for instance storing a master stylesheet in your main blog and sharing it with other blogs (i.e. a FAQ blog) on your system to keep your look consistent. You could also share template modules across an installation, giving you the freedom to structure different parts of your site uniquely while still being able to share common elements (header, search box, category list) painlessly.

Consider this example, where I've shared the header modules from blog 2 with the blog I'm currently working...

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1.2 (2001.11.04)

• Fixed bug when system's crypt implementation uses MD5 passwords (MT was not picking up the proper salt). (Monica Reyes) • Added form-validity checking to mt-comments.cgi for checking email address and URL. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Set $CGI::POST_MAX to 1MB, which means that uploads must be 1MB or less, to prevent denial of service attacks. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Added mt-export.cgi, which will export all of your MT entries into a format that can be suitably re-imported through the import mechanism. It is also useful for keeping backups...

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Many thanks to Elise over at Learning Movable Type for allowing me to reprint this tutorial, in it's entirety, here.

Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X

Movable Type 3.0 ushered in a whole new look for its default style templates, based on what we've seen with Typepad default styles. The new stylesheets can be found here in the Movable Type documentation.

The new stylesheets do not work with the default templates for MT2.661 or earlier versions of Movable Type. The old stylesheets are no longer posted on the MT website, but they can be found here at the Internet Archive.

You can update your MT2.661 (or earlier version) stylesheet with one of the new MT3 default styles (with or...

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Movable Type 3.0 ushered in a whole new look for its default style templates, based on what we've seen with Typepad default styles. The new stylesheets can be found here in the Movable Type documentation. The new stylesheets do not work with the default templates for MT2.661 or earlier versions of Movable Type. The old stylesheets are posted on the MT website here. You can update your MT2.661 (or earlier version) stylesheet with one of the new MT3 default styles (with or without updating to MT3), but if you do so, you need to change your templates so that they will work with the stylesheet. The new MT3 templates are posted on the Movable Type website here. The templates that you...

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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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Things you probably didn't realize you could do with MT-Textile 2: • Hyperlinks for Amazon, IMDB and Google searches. For example (search term can be placed after the last ‘:', or will default to the hyperlinked text): • "James Bond":imdb:Sean+Connery becomes James Bond • "Tangerine Dream":amazon becomes Tangerine Dream • "Movable Type":google becomes Movable Type • ["MT plugins by Brad Choate":google:movable type plugin choate] becomes MT plugins by Brad Choate • Float images to the left and right; center stuff too: • !>/images/me.jpg! (floats...

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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

• Introduction • Choosing the Right Weblog Platform • Finding Perl on your Server...

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Well, it looks like this weblog is becoming just a Movable Type how-to blog. Well, in keeping with that theme, here's a little "part two" companion piece for Doing your whole site with MT (one of my worst blog titles, ever).

Now that you've got your whole site MT-powered, what about your RSS feed? Chances are you, have one for your weblog, but what about one for everything? I've created one for my site, called sitewide.rss. It lets folks keep track of every update that happens to my site, whether it be part of my weblog or not.

To get it to work, you have to do a little bit of...

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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...

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2.5 (2002.10.08)

• Localization: the MT interface can be available in multiple languages, on a per-author setting. • Integrated Jay Allen's mt-search (Thanks, Jay!). We've made the following changes from version 1.31b: • Rewrote ``new comments search'' to make it more scalable (using recently_commented_on functionality) • Added a search log through the Activity Log. • Added search request throttling, to help against denial of service attacks. • Merged mt-search.cfg directives into mt.cfg....

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• Initial beta release

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0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer)...

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