As mentioned previously, using Smarty for pagination isn't difficult. Of course, the simple example already given doesn't really do much - your users would still need to know about it, and manually construct the URL. That wouldn't be much fun. Using Smarty, we can do the work for them!

You'll need to start with a "total" count. I use MTCategoryCount, as I'm doing this on category archives. If you wanted to do a complete blog archive, you may want to use MTBlogEntryCount or something similar. You could also perform a similar process for comments with MTEntryCommentCount, trackbacks with MTEntryTrackbackCount, etc. {{capture...

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While my earlier example illustrated the concept of automating pagination with Smarty in your Movable Type archives, I had a couple of problems with it.

First and foremost was that if someone "hacked" the URL, to submit their own value for a start range, then the links wouldn't work right. They might start on entry number 2 instead of entry 1, and while the previous link would say 1-1 (itself a bit ugly), it would actually render entries starting with 1, but the page would biuld through the default limit or the end of the category, whichever came first.

So I played with adding a user-specified limit (with a maximum size). But it had the same problem, in that if someone specified a...

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As I mentioned yesterday, I'm now using Smarty to provide pagination in my category archives. The code is inserted directly into the template, and (apparently) when it rebuilds the template it parses that code prior to rendering the page. It's actually quite impressive. Thanks again to Brad, not only for giving me some sample code with which to play, but for showing me it is possible in the first place - I had no idea!

The first thing you need to do is set a Smarty variable with a value, and then you can use that value when creating the MTEntries container, using that variable to build the entries you need: {{assign var="offset" value="12"}} <MTEntries lastn="12"...

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Allows for breaking up posts and blocks of information into multiple pages. Requires pages to have PHP extension. For commercial usage, a fee is charged.

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This is a test with paged "more" text... implemented using a couple of PHP tricks. :)

Read on to see it in action and to see how it's done.

The implementation of paged content is pretty simple. I'll use this test entry to explain how I did it. First of all, you'll need PHP 4 installed on your server. You can use this same technique with other server-side tools like ASP, ColdFusion, etc., but this...

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For those who aren't using the dynamic publishing feature of Movable Type (see below), experiencing slow rebuild times is not an infrequent complaint especially as the size or complexity of the blog and its templates grows. While there are very good reasons to rebuild, there are no good reasons for it to be painfully slow.

In this essay, we will detail a number of reasons why your rebuild times might be slow and steps you can take to drastically reduce or completely eliminate the time you spend waiting for Movable Type to finish its work.

Upgrade to Movable Type 3

Has anything significant happened to you in the 16 months? Probably so. Well, the same can be said for Movable...

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I know. Movable Type isn't designed to be a completely dynamic publishing system. If you use dynamic publishing, you risk your site going down because it takes more resources or MySQL isn't running. While valid, I'm less concerned about that last point, as a part of the site that I enjoy is the commenting process. Without MySQL, comments won't happen either. Plus, I love what I can do with Smarty.

So I'm staking my hopes on my site, and more specifically, MySQL, continuing to run, and I'm making most of the site dynamic in nature. The biggest change recently was the introduction of comment pagination - this means if there are a billion comments on an entry, they don't all load at...

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Long day today. I've been trying to get dynamic publishing working, specifically with the category archives. Well, I think I'm finally there. Thanks to some of Brad's amazing Smarty-fu, a whole lot of testing and a fair number of insults hurled in the way of the server, my category templates are now dynamic.

Perhaps more importantly, they are now paginated as well. Visit any category page with more than 12 entries and you'll see what I mean. No more having the entire category archive on one page. Now you get to see a svelte 12 entries at a time, in their entirety (no more excerpts here).

Frankly, I'm very impressed. Not only because it works, but because that navigation piece was...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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The Touch of Hope web site is powered by Movable Type. It's more than your average blog site though. Don't let it's blogging slant fool you-- MT is a budding CMS!

The architecture is like this: • 1 blog for the site's basic content: welcome page, about page, Art for Hope page, request a site page, make a donation page, contact us page and the news and updates content. All of this is in...

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Anil Dash has posted about my forums powered by Movable Type. I started doing this more than a year ago, and I have evolved it on some sites into active forums with additional features. For example, take a look at Seinfeld Forum. As you can see, this Movable Type-powered forum has over 4,000 topics (entries) and over 15,000 replies (comments). Features include a "post count" (using the CommentLeaders plugin) and an associated status level based on post count. I recently added automication pagination of threads using my MTDynamic plugin (although I don't think I have released that version of the plugin yet). I have also added a search function that searches only the forum section...

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Question

When trying to view my Activity Log, I get a 500 Internal Server Error.

Answer

Note: This information refers only to Movable Type versions below 3.2. In 3.2, the Activity Log display is now paginated.

If you've not reset your Activity Log in a while, it's possible it has grown so large that any request to view it will time out on your server, resulting in an error.

In pre-3.16 versions of Movable Type, you can use the following URL to reset your Activity Log without having to view it first: http://www.example.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=reset...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'sql.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins'...

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