The default Movable Type styles use color schemes in which certain colors are repeated in different style elements throughout the stylesheet. For example, the Independence style uses the same color red (#B22222) for the banner background color, the link hover color, the content h2, the calendar caption, and the sidebar h2 and border colors. In the comments section of the LMT tutorial Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font, developer Brad Choate remarked that you could easily use the MTSetVar tag to define a color and the top of your stylesheet, and use the MTGetVar tag throughout your stylesheet wherever you wanted that color to be used. This works because the stylesheet is a...

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One of the most powerful and least-known sets of tags for Movable Type is the MTSetVar and MTGetVar pair, which Elise uses to good effect to set standard colors at the top of a CSS template and then retrieves wherever that color is used in the template.

Creating variables this way isn't limited to CSS templates, of course, and there are many clever ways to use this functionality in HTML templates as well.

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MTSetVar

Sets the value of a variable.

Attributes: • name - The name of the variable. • value - The value to be assigned to the variable.

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In Movable Type, we use tags for defining the flow within a template and for accessing the database. You can influence a tag's behavior with the help of attributes. These attributes define a value for some parameter.

Unfortunately, the value for an attribute may only be a constant. However, you will sometimes have the need for setting the value to the result of another tag. Movable Type will not support such a situation, but a plugin will help.

An Example

Suppose you have a template module that you want to include from many different places. For example, you want to call this module from both an individual entry archive and the main index. Inside the template, you then want to...

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In Comparison needed for conditional Generation I showed how to use the Compare Plugin for managing variations of a page type. The plugin allows comparing values and optionally inserting one or the other code segment into the output stream. However, the simple condition "if one value equals another value" is just the beginning. We are also able to create complex conditions. It is not even that difficult.

Basics

The Compare Plugin offers a number of tags, as for example MTIfEqual, MTIfNotEqual, MTIfGreater, MTIfGreaterOrEqual, MTIfLess, etc. Most of them work the same way: they take at least two mandatory attributes, a and b. The plugin compares the values of those two...

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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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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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Page: 1 2 2 Pages.

Publishing Custom Pages with Movable Type

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...

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Posted on 08/02/2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ajax Archive Drop Downs

In this thread, Gary highlighted how to have drop downs of archives that basically redirected to the appropriate page once an archive was chosen. With this tutorial, I'll take that one step further and use...

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Movable Type templates aren't too difficult to write, but they can be difficult to read. So I've whipped up another plugin to fix that. Simple Template is a plugin that provides an alternative syntax for Movable Type templates 1.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsimpletemplate-1_21.zip

Installation

To install, place the ‘simpletemplate.pl' file in your Movable...

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The first thing you might want to do when customizing your Movable Type blog style is to change the color of the background, banner, headlines, or text. This is pretty easy to do; the adjustments are made in your weblog's stylesheet template.

Before you start, you should have a basic understanding of how colors are coded into a web page. Open up your stylesheet from the templates menu in your MT edit screen. If you scroll down you will see several instances of the word "color" followed by a # sign and six characters comprised of letters and or numbers. These six characters represent a color; the first 2 characters affect the RED tones of RGB, the third and fourth characters...

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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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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1.4 (2002.01.07)

• New default templates no longer use <label> tag in the Remember info? checkbox for the ``remember me'' JS, because it was breaking XHTML validation. • Fixed Linked File Templates so that, when linking a template to a new file that doesn't yet exist, the permissions will be set correctly (based on umask settings in mt.cfg). • Added new default templates and made them customizable by stylesheets. • Added the Comment Error Template to specify the layout of the page a user receives when there is an error with his/her...

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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...

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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...

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Two of the most powerful and probably the least widely used tags in Movable Type are MTSetVar and MTGetVar. These tags allow you to set and get a variable like so <MTSetVar name="foo" value="bar"> <MTGetVar name="foo">

and can be used for a great variety of uses. If you use PHP, this can be done in a much easier way like so

<?php $foo = "bar"; ?>

and you can get the value of that variable by just using $foo within a block of PHP code (this method is more powerful than using MTSet/GetVar because you can use MT tags within PHP.)

Using MTSet/GetVar (or manually setting the variable in PHP) has several uses. Elise covered one of them with her tutorial on font colors but you can use them in several ways, especially in cases in which you would like a conditional display. A conditional display is a visual display that changes when certain conditions occur....

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01: Installation and Upgrade

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

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We don't usually promote music events, but this one seems like a good fit... popular Movable Type-powered weblog network Gothamist is promoting a show at the Knitting Factory in New York next month entitled Movable Hype. There will be a number of DJs spinning, and presumably some moblogging going on.

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Arvind Satyanarayan shows why his site Movalog is one of the most popular references on Movable Type with his post about Movalog: Variables and Conditional Display. Explaining the obscure, but extremely powerful, Movable Type template tags MTSetVar and MTGetVar, Arvind shows how they can be used in combination with some simple PHP scripting to allow for conditional display of content on your Movable Type-powered pages.

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Continuing on from yesterday's post showing how to make a slideshow from posts in your Movable Type weblog, you might be interested in other ways to present your blog posts so that people who don't read blogs can keep up with what you're publishing.

Today we'll look at Microsoft Office's support for XML, particularly WordML, the XML Schema used to make documents in Microsoft Word's XML format. (If you just want to see the end results, take a look at wordml.xml, showing the Professional Network blog as a WordML file.)

To understand how this works, it helps to know a little bit about how WordML works. John R. Durant's blog has some indispensable links about this topic. If you want to...

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