Introduction

Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make...

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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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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Sarah Hughes of This Chick (aka Maddy in the MT Forums).

Many customizations for Movable Type call for using PHP scripts that require that your pages have a .php extension rather than a .html or .htm extension.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which involves a) the server looking at your pages for a PHP script, b) running the script, and c) outputting the results to the page. This is called "parsing". In order to successfully use PHP in your pages, you need to ensure that your account on your webserver is set up to parse your pages for PHP scripts. This feature is pretty standard these days, but check with your webhost before...

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This is a grouped list of all entries. It is sorted by title ascending.

You can also read a commented Sitemap or a simple list of all entries.

Basics

• In the Beginning nothing but Problems • Movable Type Basics / 1 • Movable Type Basics / 2 • Movable Type Basics / 3 • Weblog Spamming Basics

Installation

• Installation under Windows 2003 • Migrating to MySQL

Configuration

• Date Formats • Grouping a List of Entries by Month • Organize your Templates with MTInclude • What is a Permalink?

Plugins

• A Tag within a Tag • Avoid Spam Comments • Build Conditions with the Compare Plugin • Comparison needed for conditional Generation • Enabling Tags in an Entry...

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The full URL (including http:// and your site's domain name) to your public weblog. This URL should not include the filename of your index file; for example, if your index file is located at http://www.example.com/blog/index.html, then the value for Site URL should be http://www.example.com/blog/.

This is a required field.

Example: http://www.example.com/blog/

You should never set your Site URL to the same value as your Movable Type application URL (i.e. your CGIPath). Publishing your weblog content to the Movable Type directory is a security hazard and can lead to numerous problems such as...

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Question

When installing Movable Type (or trying to access the Configuration Menu for the Nofollow plugin in a version prior to 3.2), I receive an error saying Your DataSource directory does not exist.

Answer

Error occurs during installation

First, make sure you have created a folder named db, and that you have set its permissions to the equivalent of chmod 777 (if you are not running under cgiwrap or suexec).

Then, make sure you've specified the full server path1 for the DataSource setting in mt-config.cgi2. For example: DataSource...

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Installing Movable Type requires uploading many files to a web server using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. The files must be loaded in the proper format and then the correct permissions must be set for each of the files in order for MT to work. If you are new to FTP then the Movable Type instructions (see MT Installation Manual: Uploading Files) can seem a little confusing.

FTP

Installing Movable Type requires that you know how to use an FTP program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. There are many FTP programs available; typing "FTP" into Google will yield several. For my Mac, I use Fetch. Transmit and Cyberduck for the Mac have also had good reviews. Leech FTP has been recommended as a good Windows FTP client, as well as...

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This document describes the format required by the Movable Type import mechanism, which can be used to import entries and comments from other content management systems.

The basic import format is a list of entries, separated by the string -------- (that is eight - characters, followed by a carriage return). Each entry can be broken into two main sections; these sections are separated by the string ----- (that is five - characters, followed by a carriage return).

If you have HTML in the data that you are importing, it should not be encoded into HTML entities; the data that is in your import file is...

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07.13.2005

Announcing Movable Type 3.2 Beta

Over the past two weeks, we've been telling the world a lot about Movable Type 3.2 and now it's time to show it.

Today, we are releasing the first beta version of Movable Type 3.2 and we encourage everyone to download it and see for themselves.

You can find the details over on the Beta Blog. We hope to see you over there!

Posted by Jay Allen at 06:19 PM | Permalink

07.05.2005

Intermittent "500 Server Errors" in MT (RESOLVED)

If you are experiencing intermittent "500 Server Errors" while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause...

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UPDATE: If you have any feature request I'm all ears. Gearing up for the release I want to see if there are any feature requests I can implement, I think I've fixed all the bugs that were reported so expect a release in the next few weeks.

I had released this to ProNet a few days ago but have not gotten much feedback. That can be either that people are waiting for the point release and don't want to install a beta or that there aren't many bugs in this beta. Either way I want to open up testing for MT Blogroll 2.0 (I'm still thinking about that version number). I'm going to copy my post to ProNet here to save me some time.

I've re-written Blogroll to use its own tables in the DB so...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

• The auto-expiration of Junk feedback items only occurs when a user visits the main menu for that weblog. In future versions, auto-expiration of junk items will be triggered system-wide when a new junk feedback item is received. • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, duplicate TrackBack pings may be sent out • When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, the entry basename may be incremented or, if the title was changed, altered to fit the new title. • Subcategories are not alphabetically sorted in the category assignment listings on the entry editing...

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3-Column 404 Error About Page Absolute Pixel Sizes Accessibility Activity Log Add Your Links Here Adding An Author Additional Weblog Adsense Advertising Affiliate Programs Align Attribute Alphabetize Entries Alternative Search Template Amazon Amazon Web Services Archive Pages Archives Ascii Characters and Symbols Ascii Mode Audioblog Author Archives Authors Background Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Backup Banner Banner Images Berkeley DB Binary Mode BinHex Mode Blockquotes Blog Maintenance Bloglet Book Review Bookmarklet BookQueueToo Buttons Captcha Captions Categories Category Category Archive Category Archiving CGIWrap Changing Servers CHMOD Chron Job Clocks Closing Comments...

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3.17 (2005.06.02)

• Once an entry or category has been set to receive TrackBack pings, disabling pings for it through the UI will not actually refuse pings to that item but will suppress display of those pings. • Rebuilds will fail silently after saving an entry if a problem exists in your templates (for example, mismatched tags or a missing include module). An error will be shown, however, upon manual rebuild using the "Rebuild Site" functionality. • The nofollow plugin will cause a spurious warning for users with older versions of Perl upon running...

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Email. Can't live with it. Can't live without it -- although many of us wish we could.

Despite the introduction of new tools such as weblogs, wikis, aggregators and instant messaging, and the growing notion that email is "broken," it still remains the de-facto, baseline, catch-all choice for online communications and collaboration.

In this chapter we'll delve into various ways that email is utilized with Movable Type.

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0) ...

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Neil has apparently turned the corner with his second upgrade of the 3.2 beta. The first didn't go quite so well. This is a conversation that pops up all over the place when this sort of thing comes up. Invariably there are problems and everyone is scrambling to get back to where they were. With Movable Type, I don't understand.

This is because of the easy configuration of the product. All you need is a little extra space on your account, an extra MySQL database and a text editor.

When I get a new upgrade, even one that is a tiny upgrade that's said not to need any major changes, I take that upgrade and compare the files to the ones from the currently running version. Typically...

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Question

My webserver doesn't have sendmail; how do I use SMTP instead?

Answer

If you have tried to get sendmail working, or if you know that your webserver doesn't have sendmail (for example, if you're on a Windows server), Movable Type allows you to send email messages through SMTP. To do this, you will need to install the Mail::Sendmail Perl module; if you are on a Windows server, you can do this using Activestate's ppm tool. Launch ppm, then at the prompt, type install Mail::Sendmail

and ppm will do all of the work to install the module. If...

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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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Question

When running any of the Movable Type CGI scripts, I receive an error that says Can't locate Some/File.pm in @INC (where Some/File.pm is the name of a particular file).

Answer

• Run mt-check.cgi to ensure that all of the Perl modules required for Movable Type usage are installed on your webserver. If they are not, follow the instructions in the Installation Documentation. • Check to make sure that in the directory containing your CGI files (for example, mt.cgi), there is a directory called lib; inside that the file in the error message (for...

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04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

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After the dutchpink was released, I had an idea to skin Movable Type such that a user could easily switch between stylesheets. So after a lot of work with javascript, here is the package:

SkinningMT.zip SkinningMT.tar.gz

1. Extract the contents of the distribution 2. Upload the tmpl files in ASCII to the appropriate places (MTDIR/tmpl/cms) 3. Upload mt-styleswitcher.php and the styles/ directory into your StaticWebPath (if none then your into your MT Directory, same location as mt.cgi)

The drop-down menu shows up on the main menu ( screenshot) The only requirement is that your server runs PHP. The styles directory, its contents and mt-styleswitcher.php goes into your StaticWebPath. In mt-styleswitcher.php, change movalog.com to your domain name...

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