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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With the newest addition to our collection of Power Tools, we've made some interesting new functionality available for Movable Type users. The Tags plugin lets you easily add tags to your Movable Type entries, by modifying the Keyword entry field to allow you to enter tags, and automatically creating categories for each of the tags you submit. Creating archives for tags or including the tags in your XML feeds then becomes simple.

The Tags plugin also makes use of Movable Type's alternate application template functionality.

Brad Choate is one of our developers on the Movable Type team, and long before that he was a member of the Movable Type development community. Brad created Tags both in response to demand for a better user experience for labeling content and to show off some of the newly-polished features in Movable Type....

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This plugin changes the original MT interface to new one. I named it as alogblog MT interface. It's for anyone fully accustomed to MT 3.2's menu system, because it has no visible menu title, just only icons.

Features

• 720px fixed width(essentialy wider than the original) • center located • round cornered box • top located icon menubar • switchable alternate stylesheets • configurable to each blog • disabling plugin restores original MT interface

View Screenshots

Installation

Download this plugin and place files like this: • (mt home)/plugins/BigPAPI.pl • (mt...

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Updated

The default templates in Movable Type list archives by month, not by category. See the following steps for configuring your weblog for category archiving, creating and assigning categories, adding a category list in your sidebar, and adding a "Posted to" line at the end of each entry.

1. Edit your weblog configuration for category archiving. In your weblog config window, tab over to "archiving". Put a check in the checkbox next to "category". Save and rebuild your weblog.

2. Create and assign categories. When you create a new entry, right next to the Title window is a scroll bar for selecting a category. Scroll down to "Add new category". This will open a window for...

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This hack is deprecated in favour of the MT Protect plugin. Please use the plugin instead of this hack!

One of the biggest wants with MT is to password protect individual entries. There are several hacks and bits of code that allow you to password protect entries but many of them are long winded and many involve separate categories. I wanted a simple way to selectively password protect entries no matter what the category, what blog etc.

So I created a new field on the entry screen (click screenshot for a larger view) that would contain the password. For this to work you will need to be using MT 3.1x, mySQL and PHP. To see this in action see the front page on my blog, enter the password "password" and you will be granted access for 10 days....

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One measure to guard against spam is to close comments on old blog entries. This is easy enough to do.

At the bottom of your Edit Entry window is the pull-down for none, open, or closed comments. If you don't see this as pictured, click on "Customize the display of this page" link, select "Custom" and select the fields you wish displayed, including "Allow Comments".

You can also set comments to be open, closed or non-existent by default through the weblog config window, Preferences section. Under "Comment Configuration" see "Allow Comments" Default. Note that you can override this default via your selection on the individual entry.

Plugins

There are several plugins that can be...

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Yes, it's another anti-spam plugin. I would have called it MT-DSBL 2.0, but the feature set grew beyond the name, so a more generic name was chosen. This is a 2.0 release however… the plugin deserves more seniority than a 1.0 release, since it was built of the carcass that was MT-DSBL 1.1.

The first beta release is now available. Please visit the project page for SpamLookup to download it.

So, what does this thing do? Well, in a nutshell: • Filters inbound comments for all installed weblogs. • Filters inbound TrackBack pings for all installed weblogs. • Checks IP address of sender against DNSBL services....

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My favorite part of developing Workflow was implementing a plugin system for it. Now it is time for me to tell you folks about all of the ways you can extend and customize Workflow for your specific situations.

Workflow Callbacks

All Workflow callbacks can be added to through the add_callback method of the MT module: MT->add_callback ('Workflow::CALLBACK_NAME', $priority, $plugin, &subroutine_ref);

Creating a Workflow plugin

To add your own custom code to Workflow, simply create place your code in a .pl file in the /plugins/Workflow/plugins/ directory. What code are you going to put in that file? I will cover that next.

Adding a permissions setup option

The list of permissions setup...

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Now that I've played with the Movable Type 3.2 Beta for a bit, I have a thought. That thought is that it seems to me as if Six Apart is going for the ease-of-use crowd (in other words, people who haven't used it and for who it needs to be easy). This, in and of itself, isn't really a Bad Thing™.

But it does bug me when that line is crossed and the older users (uh, that's me), who have already taken that curve, get thrown for another one simply to make it easier for new users. So the existing crowd has to learn over and over, to make it easier for new people? I don't like that.

Two examples.

First, View Site. This friendly link has been lurking in the top navigation bar of the...

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After you have started to modify the Movable Type templates according to your own style, you will probably find out, that this "programming by tags" is a little bit restricted. Often you want to use a condition for creating the HTML output in one or the other way. But Movable Type isn't able to support this very well.

And again, a plugin will do the work.

What do you need Comparisons for?

In this weblog an entry's title area consists of two parts. On the left side there is the title describing the subject. On the right side there is the date of creation.

With some entries I do not want the date to be visible. For example the entry »help« should be...

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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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For a few months, I had deliberated adding a WYSIWYG Editor into the Movable Type entry screen and when Typepad implemented an editor into its interface I got jealous. So, here's a way to implement the very powerful HTMLArea into Movable Type (currently only Internet Explorer, Mozilla browsers and other Gecko based browsers supported)

1. Download HTMLArea 3.0 rc-1 and upzip it 2. Upload the files to a folder called htmlarea in your StaticWebPath 3. Open up tmpl/cms/header.tmpl and add the following in <head>...</head> tags

<script type="text/javascript"> _editor_url = "<TMPL_VAR NAME=STATIC_URI>htmlarea/"; _editor_lang = "en"; </script>...

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In the early days of MT 3, when I had unreg'd comments set to moderate, I really wanted to have an approval all button as I would read the comment in the email notification I received. Since then that feature request has not progressed so I decided to take matters into my own hands. As the screenshot shows, at the end of this hack you will end up with two buttons on the comments listing screen. This buttons will allow you to mass approve/moderate comments by checking the boxes of the corresponding entries.

First of all open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and find on approximately line 32 the following

'approve_comment' => &approve_comment,

and right after it

'approve_confirm' =>...

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• 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 mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

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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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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

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

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MainMenuRecent is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, MT's Main Menu will display the three most recent entries for each weblog.

Requirements

MainMenuRecent requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the MainMenuRecent distribution.

MainMenuRecent is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher. However, the Settings are only available under MT 3.2.

Installation

To install the MainMenuRecent plugin, upload the file MainMenuRecent.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If BigPAPI.pl is not already present in your plugins directory, upload that as well.

Terms of Use

MainMenuRecent is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license....

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Things you probably didn't realize you could do with MT-Textile 2: • Hyperlinks for Amazon, IMDB and Google searches. For example (search term can be placed after the last ‘:', or will default to the hyperlinked text): • "James Bond":imdb:Sean+Connery becomes James Bond • "Tangerine Dream":amazon becomes Tangerine Dream • "Movable Type":google becomes Movable Type • ["MT plugins by Brad Choate":google:movable type plugin choate] becomes MT plugins by Brad Choate • Float images to the left and right; center stuff too: • !>/images/me.jpg! (floats...

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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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Question

My database has been corrupted. Is there any way to avoid losing my data?

Answer

This answer depends a great deal on the level of corruption, the type of backups you have, and how much information is still accessible from within your existing installation (as opposed to being in external files such as the static pages Movable Type has generated from the data).

Does your host maintain backups for your account?

If so, do they have any which would include copies of your database files prior to the time corruption appears to have occurred?...

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