You can have full control over Movable Type creating the HTML for your website. For making this happen, Movable Type can be configured by a couple of templates.

The templates define the style and the contents of the created pages. In the beginning you should best leave those templates untouched. After you have mastered the Movable Type basics, you can change any template for styling the website according to your wishes.

In the Beginning there is a Mess

If you study the templates, you will very soon realize that the templates are not perfectly organized. Rather often identical parts can be found in different templates. Regarding good structure and easy maintenance the templates will...

continue reading ...

MTInclude

Includes a template module or external file at this point. One and only one of the following attributes must be specified:

Attributes: • module - The name of a template module in the current weblog. • file - The path to an external file on the system. The path can be absolute or relative to the Local Site Path. This file is included at the time your page is built. It should not be confused with dynamic server side includes like that found in PHP.

The contents of the file or module are further evaluated for more Movable Type template tags.

...

continue reading ...

Using includes, you can modularize your template code making it easier to edit and rebuild your Movable Type templates. For example, instead of having all of your side bar and center content on the same Index template, you can set up a separate file to hold your side bar content and use an include to "include" it on your index template. This is especially handy if you use the same sidebar content on multiple index and archive templates.

There are two basic ways to use includes in Movable Type - the MTInclude tag and PHP includes. MTInclude is easy and anyone using MT can use it. The downside (slight) is that if you make a change to an include file, your sidebar for example, you have...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

To save space on your sidebar listing of categories or monthly archives, you might want to use a pull-down menu like so: Select Category Beginner Tips Categories Definitions General HTML and Javascript Install Marketing Reference RSS Security Servers Style Weblog Goodies

To do this for your category list, make sure that you have category archiving selected as an archiving option in your weblog config, and add the following code to your sidebar:

<form action="" name="pulldown1"> <select name="mypulldown1" onchange="document.location=pulldown1.mypulldown1.options[selectedIndex].value"> <option value="">Select...

continue reading ...

Question

I have a couple of categories. When using the MTCategories tag, these are sorted by name. However, I preferred if I could choose the order manually. There is a logical order of the categories, and the categories should be listed in that order. Can it be done?

Answer

Movable Type does not have a built-in function for achieving an arbitrary ordering of the category list. We have to use a plugin for that.

The idea for implementing the ordering is as follows: we will prefix all category names with some text, which is removed right before the category name is output to HTML. As an example please look at my top-level categories in the sidebar. These are... • Basics • Installation...

continue reading ...

When starting the Movable Type Weblog, I disabled the search function. There just weren't that many entries and a search dialog was not necessary.

Today, searching the Movable Type Weblog would be a good improvement. So I tried with the default Movable Type Search Engine. However, each search resulted in a CPU-intensive action. I tried to read the Perl code and saw that each search was done by selecting all entries from the database, then looping over all entries and finding the matching entries with string operations.

This is not the best way to do a fulltext search. Especially with large weblogs, this will probably lead to bad performance. The architecture does not scale very...

continue reading ...

There are several ways to make your life easier whilst having fun with HTML markup and CSS design.

Learning, the fun way

When I first tinkered around with HTML and CSS, I was a bit unsure and un-inspired as to what to do, but I employed a technique that some may frown upon. Using a variety of tools, I took a peek at stylesheets that had produced something I like. I didn't steal them but rather learnt from them on how to do such and such a thing. I would recommend trying this out as it is a hands on way to learn what various bits of CSS code do - and its much nicer to see it in action done the right way.

Sidebar Panels

If you use Mozilla/Firefox as your browser, you are in luck. EditCSS and...

continue reading ...

UPDATED 09/10: There was a problem with the files as phps so I've zipped them UPDATED 09/04: To fix SmartyPants

So you've downloaded the very new 3.1 with all the amazing features but you've found one problem, your plugins no longer work with the dynamic templating. Well its not only plugins, text filters also no longer work.... Here are some methods by which you can combat this problem, some may not work in all cases but its better than nothing for other cases.

• Text Filters In a previous tutorial I had linked to PHP Markdown, but a few people have contacted me about Textile as well. So I have collected PHP versions of Markdown, Textile and SmartyPants Just download the following...

continue reading ...

Chuck recently asked about adding a blogroll to MT. I pointed him to this tutorial rather than pointing him to Blogrolling.com.

Ever since Blogrolling changed ownership, I've felt that the service has been going downhill. A few months ago, when I removed the blogrolling php code off my site load times drastically decreased. One of my main peeves with blogrolling was that it was located on a remote server. During the transition period that server was often down, and caused load times on my site to shoot up - so high that my site was nearly unaccessible. Another problem with the Blogrolling involves the site Blogshares.com. Some script that were heavily relied on were deleted and caused...

continue reading ...

Question

I have a couple of categories. I preferred if entries belonging to one category were styled in a different way than entries belonging to another category. Can I have per category templates?

Answer

Movable Type does not allow this right out of the box. However, there are a couple of ways for achieving this behavior.

You can use the Supplemental Category Tags. This is a collection of several category-related tags. Among others, the collection also contains the »MTIfCategory« and »MTIfPrimaryCategory« tags for creating a condition based on an entry's category.

On MT Extensions, Per Category Templates you can read a tip about how to use the...

continue reading ...

This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying a portion of a template conditionally, depending on the results of a comparison between values. The values compared can be literal strings or numbers, or they can be pieces of MT template code that the plugin will build and evaluate, using the result in the comparison.

MT users have developed a number of techniques in PHP and JavaScript to implement various useful conditional-display features on MT-based sites. The tags in the Compare plugin should let you accomplish many of these same tasks within your MT templates, without using PHP or JavaScript tricks. For example: • Display different text in the Comments link for...

continue reading ...

There are a number of different implementations of Smileys for Movable Type. Here's mine.

The smilieys that I use on most of my sites display in both the entries and comments. The smileys images and javascript are borrowed from phpBB. For comments, the smileys are displayed above the comment form, enabled the comment author to click on a smiley to include with their comments.

Instructions

1. The MTMacro plugin is required for the smileys to work. If you don't already have it, click here to get it.

2. Download the smiley images and templates: mt-smiley.zip

3. Upload the smiley images to a folder called "images". This folder should reside within the local site path of...

continue reading ...

Using includes is a wonderful way to reuse code through modularity on your site. Elise over Learning MovableType has a great tutorial on using includes, and I suggest you read it if you haven't already since this article will take off where hers leaves off and discusses a problem that dynamic site owners encounter when trying to use includes.

In a dynamic environment most people feel that PHP includes is the way to go and generally they are right. When they try to include MovableType tags in a PHP include, however, a problem raises its ugly head. This article will explain why this happens, and how to fix it. NOTE: This article only applies to dynamically generated pages.

I won't go into how great PHP...

continue reading ...

Question

When saving an entry or rebuilding, I get an error that says Build error in template '[Some Template Name]': Error in <MTInclude> tag: Can't find included template module '[Some Module Name]'.

Answer

This error means you've used the <MTInclude> tag in the specified template to call a Template Module, but Movable Type cannot find that module.

Look on the Templates : Modules tab1 and confirm that you've created a module by the name referenced in the error message.

If you do not see the module listed, you will need to either...

continue reading ...

MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

continue reading ...

10.22.2001

Version 1.1 Released

We have released version 1.1 of Movable Type. Existing users should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the new upgrade instructions.

New users should download the full distribution after agreeing to the license agreement.

The new release provides some bug fixes as well as some new features; read through the changelog for a full list, or take a look at an abbreviated list of features here.

Posted by Benjamin Trott at 03:38 PM | Permalink

10.19.2001

New Release Scheduled

We are planning a new release of Movable Type for next Monday, October...

continue reading ...

1.3 (2001.12.11)

• Fixed bug where days="N" would override category="Foo" in <MTEntries> tag. (cwodtke) • Added DBM file locking (shared lock when reading, exclusive when writing). • Export process now exports excerpts, and import now imports them. • When you upload a file, if a file by that name (at that location) already exists, you now get a confirmation screen to overwrite the file, or not. (Requires that File::Temp is installed.) • Added search and replace functionality. • You can now upload files into specific directories...

continue reading ...

Question

I want to have the most recently published entries in the sidebar. My code works most of the time. However, the category archive and the date-based archive only show some of these entries. How can I show all entries?

Answer

You have probably saved the code for the sidebar in a module template, and include that template from the Main Index Template, the Category Template, and the Date-based Template. Alternatively, you simply copied the code for the sidebar into the three templates (if so, please read Organize your Templates with MTInclude for learning an important feature of Movable Type).

Your code for showing the ten most recently published entries might be as...

continue reading ...

I want to display a list of categories in a sidebar on my Category Archive Template page. If I enter the code from the Main Index, my category archive sidebar comes up empty (literally, it displays nothing under the categories heading). To fix that, I am calling that same code into my category archive template as a php include.

Create a new index template called categories.php and place in it the sidebar code (from main index template) for your CATEGORIES:

<MTSubCategories> <MTSubCatIsFirst><ul></MTSubCatIsFirst> <MTIfNonZero tag="MTCategoryCount"> <li><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"...

continue reading ...