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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Developing with the Movable Type Perl API

Problems

You want to extend Movable Type and develop an extension to the base system.

Solutions

Six Apart provides numerous resources to get you started with developing including tutorials and MT source code documentation.

Discussion

Movable Type's open code base and APIs (Application Programmers Interface) make the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of publishing applications. Here are some pointers to that will get you started.

Perl API

The Movable Type code is written in an...

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Upgrading or installing Movable Type can be rather intimidating. There are few things I have screwed up so badly attempting, even when they say it is super easy, idiot-proof. I always seem to be the idiot who still can't make it work. I have now upgraded two separate MT installs to MT 3.2 and thought I would share my notes with you. Please note that Jay Allen (Product Manager of Movable Type), Chad Everett (of Don't Back Down and Everitz Consulting), and Arvind Satyanarayan ( Movalog) have all helped me at various stages in upgrading, and if I didn't have friends who knew what they were doing, honestly I just wouldn't attempt this on my own. But that's me, and I have over 20 blogs...

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In the default configurations for MT versions 2.661 and earlier, trackback links on your index and archive pages are set to generate a pop-up window containing the trackback information and pings. What if you would like to have the trackback pings appear on your individual entry pages, just as the comments do?

There are two straightforward methods for doing so. (Correction posted May 23, 2004) Both methods require that you rebuild your site in order for new trackback notices to appear on the individual entry pages. Method A method allows you to have trackback pop-ups as well as inline trackbacks. The second - Method B - involves a PHP include and requires that your site is in...

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As you know, I recently converted a number of my archives so that they would use dynamic publishing. Today, I continued the push by converting daily archives and also category feeds to dynamic publishing. Thus far, they seem to be working pretty well, and I've been able to clean up my web site considerably.

Along the way, however, I ran into a small problem in that I make use of the excellent Amputator plugin to relieve myself of the erroneous ampersand. The only problem is that it doesn't work with dynamic publishing. So off to Google I went.

I found my way to Shaun Inman's page on the subject of using the Amputator regular expression in PHP. This seemed to be perfect, I just...

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One way to set up a private, password-protected weblog is by adding a .htaccess file to the directory in which the weblog resides. 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. I've already described the fundamentals of .htaccess in another tutorial, see What is .htaccess? If you are setting up .htaccess for the first time, be sure to read this tutorial thoroughly.

1. Create .htpasswd

The first thing you need to do, before creating your .htaccess file, is to create a file called .htpasswd, which will hold the user...

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2.1 (2002.05.02)

• Added webMaster, language, lastBuildDate, and pubDate to both RSS templates. • Added encode_html="1" to all RSS fields that didn't have it already. • Added Norwegian dates. • Added test for mt-check.cgi to determine whether we are running under cgiwrap or suexec. • Added a new global tag attribute encode_url (thanks to Scott Andrew LePera and others for the idea). • Changed the behavior of the publish flag in blogger.newPost; previously, if set to false the new entry would be saved as a draft. This was a bad idea, for...

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The idea of "tags" and "tagging" has become very popular in the recent past. The idea behind tags is really that of organization and cross-referencing, though specific implementation and implementation with Movable Type varies. TechnoratiTags and ishbadiddle's subject index are examples of two different tag uses. This article is not about implementations; to find this useful you'll want to be using tags already.

I think tagging is great way of thinking. The problem, however, is that it's easy to create near-duplicate tags: "photo" or "photos," "MovableType" or "Movable Type," for example....

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Updated again Monday night, midnight, Oct 4

This post is in reference to: Attacked!. I've posted the following update on that post and here.

One possible way that this attack could have happened is if someone else on my shared web server used a simple php script to read my database username and password. With this information, he or she could have accessed my MySQL database and made changes to the templates. I have sent a request to my web host to address how they handle PHP security. In particular, I was advised to suggest that my web host start using a PHP directive called "open_basedir" to restrict the files that PHP can open. The information on this directive can be found...

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Several months ago, author Rogers Cadenhead released the first book detailing MT3 - the Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition. Since Anil mentioned the book in a MT news post on MT books, I thought I would put my 2 cents in about this book.

The first thing you should know is that the MT3 Bible is not a book for non-technically-oriented beginners. The book is filled with great information, but if you are looking for the simplified introduction to Movable Type, this isn't it. Many of Roger's instructions are in the form of Unix shell commands that you would use to manage files on a web server. In fact, the book's second chapter is on how to prepare your web server for Movable Type. If...

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Applying cryptographic functions for fun and profit.

I've got two books sitting on my desk, PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites by Larry Ullman which is absolutely fantastic for bringing yourself up to speed if you already have rudimentary programming skills in other languages (though it could stand for an update), and the PHP Cookbook, an O'Reilly book which (so far) seems like a good reference for getting beyond the basics.

So, any guess on what I've been working with lately? I've been running this site on a pretty basic PHP foundation for a while now, and by basic I mean aside from some PHP includes, passing a couple of variables from page to page, and...

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Updated 09/05 - Search Throttle

The search form that comes with default MT templates is very limited in what it lets you do - basically it only lets you search the current blog and allows you to not specify any oother options. Here are some things you can do with searches. The code listed here can go into any template but the code must be placed within the search form ie <form>....</form>. Also each block of code is independent. You don't need to use previous code for it to work - as long as it is placed within the search form it will work no matter what other code you have or have not implemented !

Search Where ?

Replace the search form code you have with something like...

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Updated

Occassionally databases get corrupted, servers fail or web hosts go out of business. So it's a good idea to back up your Movable Type blogs. There are many methods for doing so, a few of which I will cover here. The back-up process is much easier if you are using MySQL as your database, which, by the way, is one good reason to use MySQL over the default Berkeley DB.

TypeMover

TypeMover is a new plugin for the purpose of backing up, restoring, and/or migrating your Movable Type weblog. It is compatible with MT3 and later versions of Movable Type. From the TypeMover website:

TypeMover is a MovableType plugin. It adds backup, restore and migration features that let you get...

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Today I was working with someone and having a bear of a time getting their 3.17 install working on their GoDaddy hosting account. It turns out that the way the script name was accessed had changed - and since GoDaddy runs under sbox, it was returning sbox as the name when it redirected you back to the page! So with a few small edits to App.pm, I got around this issue and made things work.

I'm still having problems with getting dynamic publishing to work on GoDaddy, but at least we're making progress. If you are installing Movable Type on your GoDaddy host, and running into problems, take a look at our Movable Type Consulting Services to see how we can help.

Update: I think I have...

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There are several ways to get statistics about your Movable Type weblog. Most web hosts give you access to some statistics regarding your site as a matter of course - referral logs (list of sites that link to you in which someone has clicked on the link to get to your site), number of hits, number of page views, etc. If you want more information, i.e. the search terms used to find your site, the most recent entry pages to your site, the mix of browsers and OS platforms of those viewing your site, the length of time people spend on average on your site, you can use a site statistics service, also known as a hit counter. These services work by having you put a small piece of code on the...

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The Amazon Associates program allows you to receive a sales commission from the sale of Amazon products that you promote on your website. The easiest way to take advantage of the Amazon Associates program is to use Amazon's Build Links feature to build some simple links to specific products or groups of products. If you don't want to use the graphical ads that Amazon provides, you can customize the link and select a basic display to get the specific URL for the product you want.

Amazon.com also allows developers to tap directly into its product database through Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to simple product links, as an Amazon Associate, you can use a number of scripts,...

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WebCron is a pseudo scheduler for emulating Unix's cron on MT 3.2 platform. Unix's cron or MS's scheduler enable you to run some tasks on your predefined interval. If you have your own server or buy a premium hosting service, then you can absoluetly enjoy "cron"ing your scheduled tasks. In MT, we can set "Post Status" of an entry to "Scheduled". If you do, publishing of that entry will be postponed until that setting time. As you may predict, this feature needs to use "cron-like-scheduler".

But to poor MT users like ME, these cron-needed-features are "Pie in the sky". Yes it's BIG pie... I even didn't know it's delicious or not because it is in the sky. So I...

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For you Movable Typers who also use PHP, here's a little function that will let you link to content from previous years. Read on to see it.

This routine lets you link dynamically (or statically if you prefer) to blogs from prior years. Small caveat-- this requires that you archive entries on a daily basis. Here's the code-- just make necessary changes to the "archive_path" and "href_path" variables...

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Question

When trying to view a page I have chosen to publish dynamically, I get a Smarty error.

Answer

Error message: plugin function smarty_function_MTSomeTag() not found in /path/to/mt/php/lib/function.MTSomeTag.php, where SomeTag is the name of a standard Movable Type Template Tag

Make sure the file (i.e., function.MTSomeTag.php) was uploaded to your server in ASCII mode, and that it is located in the php/lib/ folder in your Movable Type installation directory.

Error message: unrecognized tag MTSomeTag, where SomeTag is the name of a Plugin...

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This plugin has been deprecated. The Santize plugin was incorporated (and extended) into Movable Type 2.6. For more information about this and how you would go about uninstalling this plugin, please read this article.

Sanitize is a Movable Type plugin that allows you to clean HTML and other markup that might exist in an comment entry. Read on for more information about how it works and what it's for. If you're using Movable Type and allow HTML comments on your site, you really need to read this...

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