Updated. Originally published Jan 2, 2004

Error messages are the messages that are displayed when a visitor to your site encounters a server error. The most common error messages are 404: File Not Found and 403: Access Forbidden. The 404 error message is displayed when a visitor to your site tries to access a page that does not exist on your server. The 403 message is displayed when a visitor tries to enter an area on your site that is off limits to the public.

You can customize your error messages so that instead of seeing an ugly server message, your visitor sees instead a personalized note from you. The methods are different depending on if you are doing static (the default) or dynamic...

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The second plugin in the pluginset known as Ajaxify, this plugin adds a search suggestion feature to the Quicksearch box at the top when you search for entries, comments or trackback. There's very little to talk about this plugin but I should note that it is a little buggy when handling search terms with spaces for example "MT Blogroll". I've been trying to find a fix but the javascript is unreadble! None-the-less, it works quite well as can be seen from this screenshot. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. Go grab your copy.

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If you're building or maintaining a dynamic website, you may have considered the problem of how to get rid of unfriendly URLs. You might also have read Bill Humphries's ALA article on the topic, which presents one (very good) solution to this problem.

The main difference between Bill Humphries's article and the solution I will present here is that I decided to do the actual URL transformations with a PHP script, whereas his solution uses regular expressions in an .htaccess file.

If you prefer working with PHP instead of using regular expressions, and if you want to integrate your solution with your dynamic PHP sites, this might be the right method for you....

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Simple static site templating with a CSS focus.

I use a very lightweight templating system of my own devising on this site that strikes me as something that might be of value to someone, somewhere. No database required, although you could certainly use one in conjunction with this method if you feel so inclined.

This is pretty basic stuff, so feel free to skip this one if you're an old hand at server-side scripting. Then again, it sets up a lot of the CSS tricks I use around here, which may prove interesting even so.

Around 1998 or so, I maintained a semi-large site for a local ISP which grew pretty quickly, so templating was largely a matter of global find and replace. It...

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Seeing as how Elise is having fun with PHP and databases I though I'd show you how to easily play around with the database in dynamic publishing. This is all stuff I've picked up when talking to Brad Choate, the man behind the amazing dynamic system.

Movable Type 3.1+ comes with a dynamic publishing system that has EZSQL rolled in for all the SQL databases MT supports and as a result interaction with and manipulating of the DB becomes a piece of cake. At the moment, however, this system works only for MySQL databases.

First of all to call the DB, you just need three simple lines:

<?php include('<$MTCGIServerPath$>/php/mt.php'); $mt = new MT(<$MTBlogID$>, '<$MTCGIServerPath$>/mt.cfg...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before...

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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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Updated 12:30 am PST, Oct 4

Wednesday morning, September 29th, Learning Movable Type and some of the other MT weblogs hosted at elise.com were intruded by a spammer who placed popup generating code on the MT index and archive templates. Not being aware of the additional code on my templates, as I rebuilt the pages of my weblogs, the rebuilt pages included this code which generated an obnoxious spam popup window every time someone visited the page. I apologize to all who may have been inconvenienced by this, and thank those of you who brought it to my attention.

The good news is that the spammer could have done a lot of damage to the site, but didn't. The bad news is I'm not sure...

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While entries make up the content of a weblog and templates control how these entries are displayed, it is the process of publishing that makes a weblog go. Movable Type refers to the process of publishing as rebuilding -- a reference to its static page generation roots. When a rebuild is performed, templates and your content are merged to publish a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

Choosing Between a Static or Dynamic Publishing Model

Movable Type provides the flexibility to choose between either static page generation or dynamic pages to optimize weblog performance on a per-template...

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One feature I find lacking in MT is yearly archives. A yearly archive basically is just a page of twelve calendars - one for each month of the year - see mine in action here with permalinks to the days.

Now there are two ways you can do this, one easier than the other. The first - harder - way to do it is installing Brad Choate's PerlScript Plugin and then follow the steps he has laid out here. I call this the harder method because for every year you are blogging you need to create a new index template and call the template module.

The second method, all you need to do is setup the archiving and MT will do a lot for you - including tidying up you monthly archive list ! You will need...

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You've seen it before. An article gets hot and soon you have 50 to 60 comments attached to it. Getting in on the tail end of the conversation can be annoying with that many posts to wade through. So we create a handy little convention that will highlight (change the class of) the comments posted by the author of the post.

There are many, many ways this can be done (plugins, php, etc.) and even more ways to implement it (mutliple author highlighting, specific images for certain commenters, etc.), but we're going to look at two important facets: static and dynamic.

Static vs. Dynamic

This is a debate which we will leave to the professionals. I will only...

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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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Several users of MTLookup reported that sometimes the result lists' sort order seemed to be strange. Important entries were on position 10, and not so important entries reached top positions.

I analyzed the situation and compared the result lists that were generated by MTLookup with those that were created by Google and Yahoo. Some important facts could be found.

What is most important, the MTLookup ranking could be improved. Now it works consistent - no matter whether the keyphrase contains short or long words, or it contains words that appear often or seldom it the database.

I could even find some situations, where Google and Yahoo produced not so perfect result lists. It was...

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Ok, my games index is now live. It's a fairly complete list, although I know there are a bunch of DOS games that aren't on there just because I don't have them with me anymore (they're at home with Mom and Dad collecting dust). Anyway have a peek. If you're geographically nearby let me know if you'd like to borrow something. (While I'm at it, I might as well make this a Movable Type tip-- click the 'more' link for the goods.)

...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Lance McCord of lancemccord.com and Perpwalk

Including audio content on a blog is easiest when you can phone it in. Authors who use Blogger to manage their sites have free access to Audioblogger, a service that lets users dial a phone number and leave their audioblog content like a voicemail message. This content shows up on the user's blog as an image linked to an mp3 hosted on audioblogger.com.

Similar services (like audblog) are available for a fee, but with a little effort (and a very little bit of PHP) you can have the free benefit of this Blogger service on your Movable Type sidebar. For this to work, you must publish your Movable...

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Hey! That's mine!

Most web professionals are all too aware of the problems caused by hotlinkers. Leechers. Bandwidth thieves. People who use images hosted on your web server on their own pages.

For some lucky people who don't pay by the gigabyte for the amount of data they transfer, that's not too big a deal. Who cares if some little-trafficked weblog uses your photograph of snow falling in New York?

For other sites, however, it's a much bigger problem. If a 100K JPEG is hotlinked on a site that gets, say, 1,000 hits a day, that's 100MB of data transferred from your site without a single person actually visiting your site. If you have only a few gigabytes of...

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Sometimes you would like to display the age of an entry as compared to a specific date. In the case, of my daughter's blog, I've displayed her actual age at the time of each post, based on her birth date and the authored-on date of the entry.

Updated to support time difference too.

Updated to correct date_delta function's accuracy.

This is a Movable Type/PHP tip. I haven't...

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Validation matters. No it doesn't. Validation is hard. No it isn't. Standards are flexible. No they're not. Does this conversation sound familiar? Updated 18 Jun 2004

While variations of the debate over the ease and importance of following the standards to the letter have been flying around for years, the coming summer months appear to be heating up the arguments once more.

There's a cross-site conversation about validation happening at the moment, and you may have seen it in places I haven't. On this site anyway, a seemingly innocuous opinion piece from last week calling for moderation and sensibility saw the discussion fly completely off the rails...

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A little while ago I converted my site to use the Smarty for dynamic templating. I'm still using Movable Type for the content management though. Click the 'more' link for an overview of how it all works together...

Smart Templates

The Smarty template engine for PHP is pretty sweet. There's a lot of power in dynamic template rendering. The most important for me is that I can change the shape of my...

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Google's caching system offers several cool features; one of most useful is that the words you searched for are highlighted in the page. Most web users don't read pages carefully - they scan text for what they're looking for. This is why Google's cached-page highlighting is so useful. When the page is rendered, users don't need to read the entire page to find what they came for, the page shows them where it is. As a quick example, the words highlighted above most likely caught your eye before you actually got to reading them.

Usability heuristics state that users should not have to remember information from one...

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