Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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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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One area where plugins have greatly enhanced MT functionality is in categories. Here's a list of some of the things you can do:

How to exclude entries of certain categories from lists of entries. Say you want to list out your 20 most recent entries in your sidebar, except for the entries in the Special Announcements category. This is easy enough to do with the Exclude Categories plugin. The code would look like this:

<MTEntriesExCat category="Special Announcements" lastn="20"> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br /> </MTEntriesExCat>

How to list entries only from certain categories. This trick doesn't require a plugin at all. Just add the category attribute after the MTEntries tag like so:...

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This plugin enables you to use WYSIWYG editor easily and customzably in Movable Type. There are many available open WYSIWYG editors. I've used HTMLArea and FCKeditor. Both are very good, even though they give some loads to your PC. But as time goes by, this load could be trivial.

My alogblogMTinterface plugin uses many alternate templates. Therefore the users who use my alogblogMTinterface might have some troubles in personally adapting other WYSIWYG editors. Of course I also have the same trouble whenever new W~G editors or its MT plugins are released. So I decided to provide W~G in it independently.

One of the powerful features of FCKeditor is the Media...

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World Wide Web has been mainly constructed with US-ASCII, even for URL. But in now and future, WWW will shift from US-ASCII only world to Internatinalized world with the help of Unicode, UTF-8, IRI, and so on.

If you are European, or Asian, or others, you would write an entry by your own language, therefore the title of it also will be with yours. However, the default MT removes or deforms non US-ASCII characters in title to make an entry basename for permalink URL(It is completely right in URI side). As a result, they couldn't enjoy full features of MT that can create Cool URI. Only English users could do.

This plugin makes your permalinks as Cool IRI...

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<MTOnThisDay> Movable Type Plugin

The plugin support for Movable Type 2.2 is fantastic! And now we can develop the stuff that Ben just hasn't gotten around to yet. Here's one-- I've created a container tag that lets you pull entries that match the current system/entry month and day.

If you want to read more about it, visit the MT Plugin support forum page I've set up for this plugin.

To download the plugin, click here.

Updated on July 5. See included readme.txt file for details.

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Newsgator Toolkit

Although not directly related to Movable Type, many bloggers I know have been asking for such a tool. The Newsgator Toolkit is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that will eventually provide you with a series of complex and powerful tools...

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Posted on 10/13/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updates to the Style Generator

At long last I've made some updates to the Style Generator to better fit with Six Apart's standard. This means that you can finally apply the tips discussed in this tutorial to stylesheets created using the style gen. Most of...

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It is a common scenario to have a list of entries sorted by date of publication. As this list may be rather long, it is reasonable to group entries and mark each group with a distinct group header. If you want to group by day, you can use the MTDateHeader tag for this task. However, what can be done, if you prefer to group by months?

An example

Suppose you have a couple of entries. Then you might want to create a structured list as follows:

Jan 16th, 2005 - First entry from Jan 16th, 2005 - Second entry from Jan 16th, 2005 - Third entry from Jan 16th, 2005 Jan 20th, 2005 - First entry from Jan 20th, 2005 - Second entry from Jan 20th, 2005 Feb 3rd, 2005 - First entry from...

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Question

I have a couple of categories. When using the MTCategories tag, these are sorted by name. However, I preferred if I could choose the order manually. There is a logical order of the categories, and the categories should be listed in that order. Can it be done?

Answer

Movable Type does not have a built-in function for achieving an arbitrary ordering of the category list. We have to use a plugin for that.

The idea for implementing the ordering is as follows: we will prefix all category names with some text, which is removed right before the category name is output to HTML. As an example please look at my top-level categories in the sidebar. These are... • Basics • Installation...

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Movable Type templates aren't too difficult to write, but they can be difficult to read. So I've whipped up another plugin to fix that. Simple Template is a plugin that provides an alternative syntax for Movable Type templates 1.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsimpletemplate-1_21.zip

Installation

To install, place the ‘simpletemplate.pl' file in your Movable...

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I've received only a small taste of the trackback spam that has been floating around. Yet it's still enough to be annoying. Especially since I didn't really have any good way of addressing it. With comments, I can moderate them. I can make sure they have approval. Not the case with trackbacks.

Luckily, Jacques has put together a nice little modification of Brad's DSBL plugin. I installed it, though I have yet to receive any messages, so I really have no idea if it works or not. I just thought I'd give it a shot, because it uses a method close to my own heart. Namely, it sits there and does the work so that I don't have to worry about it. At least, that's the idea.

If you have any problems...

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For a complete list of the new features in v0.6, click here.

MTTrackbackEntry is a Movable Type plugin and hack that enables you to create new entries from the Trackbacks that you receive. In other words, it enables other people to post new entries in your blog, simply by pinging an entry or category on your blog. The title of this plugin/hack could just as easily be called TrackbackCrosspost, since it can act as a trackback-based cross-posting tool.

Currently, entries are created AND pings are received and recorded by default. In v0.6, actual ping entries can be optionally turned off. So if you turn off pings, TrackbackEntry will only record a new entry. Personally, I can't...

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This plugin is for blocking feedback[ct(=comment) and tb(=trackback)] spams by adding an additional CCode(hidden ct input field) or adding TCode to original tb ID in tb URL, and then obfuscating that Code for the purpose of not easily guessing it.

MT 3.2's enforced anti-spam system is performed mainly after getting feedbacks. So if many spams are arrived, then it also uses system/MT user resourses when filtering, junking, unpublishing, and deleting spams although it becomes comparatively easy than pre 3.2.

CCode and TCode works in before saving spam feedbacks to MT system. CCode/TCode make it very difficult for spam-bots to guess tb URL and required ct input...

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Byrne Reese is our product manager for TypePad, but he's also a true geek whom you might know from his work on such fan-favorite Perl modules as SOAP::Lite.

Byrne's just released two new Movable Type plugins, QuickLink and his updated version of BookQueueToo, so it seemed like a good chance to interview him about Six Apart, his code, and blogging in general.

Let's start with some background: What were you doing before joining Six Apart? How did you start being a geek?

I think my friends will tell you I have always been a geek. But I would say that my true hacker like geek-dom began when I took an interest with a close friend of mine in computer programming. Inspired by our...

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This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel="nofollow" which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it's interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six Apart Professional Network, and a little more generic info is at Google.

Either I don't fully understand what nofollow is supposed to do, or it really is a dumb idea. I'm confident it's the latter.

Well, ok, those who implement nofollow will definitely help in not raising a spammer's Google PageRank. But that's the only benefit. As has been pointed out, a legitimate commenter's link won't count...

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Movable Type is set up for doing date-based archives by day, week, and month, but not by year. There are a few plugins and methods out there that will help you create a yearly calendar of your archives, for example, Brad Choate's Year Archives in MT Perl script plugin will produce a calendar archive ( example). Lummox JR's ArchiveYear plugin will produce a similar calendar ( example).

I prefer a yearly archive to show a list of entries by month, as I've set up on one of my blogs ( example). An archive page like this can be accomplished using the ArchiveYear plugin with some simple changes to the sample code given. Update August 1, 2005 The ArchiveYear plugin seems to not be in its...

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Seeing the flurry of activity around Inline Editing on Wordpress ever since Jay Allen mentioned it on his panel at SXSW, I thought it was time us MT'ers had something similar. Download the plugin. This animation better highlights what this plugin does (600kb)

Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

I'll need to talk you through installing this. For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've...

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UPDATE: Multiblog 1.1 has been released which fixes bugs with the GlobalListings. I have updated the tags in this tutorial to correspond to MultiBlog only.

Have you got two or more blogs that you would like to 'merge.' By merge I mean show all entries on one page, chronologically and inline - for a greater understand take a look at my blog. The front page shows entries from the main blog plus the sideblog - the sideblog entries are formatted differently, the little bars !

The plugins you will need are: * MultiBlog * GlobalListings

Multiblog does have the GlobalListings plugin built into it, but at the time of writing this tutorial that section of the plugin didn't work. So I am using...

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Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. It's basically a Movable Type interface to the extremely handy XML::Simple Perl module. The plugin will work with any well-formed XML document that can be retrieved via an HTTP GET request.

The GetXML plugin is extremely generalized, and to use it you'll have to understand the structure of the XML data you want to work with. There are specific MT plugins available for certain particular types of XML data, such as RSS feeds, Amazon content, and weather forecasts. If there's a specific plugin out there for the XML resource you're interested in, by...

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