Professional Network member Kevin Shay doesn't just keep busy by writing for McSweeney's or Modern Humorist, he's busy writing entire new plugin options for Movable Type.

Kevin's latest (and most impressive) addition to his stable of Movable Type plugins is BigPAPI. The amusing name belies some seriously powerful functionality: BigPAPI lets you transform any part of Movable Type's user interface programmatically, or if you want a soundbite: "server-side Greasemonkey for Movable Type".

With BigPAPI in place, you can manipulate the entire experience of working with Movable Type, creating your own plugins that layer on top of BigPAPI with custom functionality. As Kevin shows,...

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As many of you know, there are hundreds of plugins in the Movable Type plugin directory through which you can completely customize and modify the way that the application works. This has always been a great strength of the Movable Type platform and we put great effort in every release to give plugins even more ways to enhance the system.

What you may not know is that since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, dozens of plugins built specifically for v3.2 have been created. Some of the new capabilities of these plugins include plugin actions for acting on checked items in a listing screen, UI enhancements thanks to BigPAPI, feedback scoring and Junk processing.

We're happy to announce...

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ParentCategoryRebuild will rebuild the category archives for any parent categories for the categories in which the entry just saved belongs.

Download: • parentcategoryrebuild-2.0.2.tar.gz • parentcategoryrebuild-2.0.2.zip

Recent Development Activity: • ParentCategoryRebuild 2.0: Here is a version of ParentCategoryRebuild built for Movable Type 3.2. You now have the option to turn on or off the parent category rebuilding behavior on a blog by blog basis (it defaults to off). So hop on over...

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When starting the Movable Type Weblog, I disabled the search function. There just weren't that many entries and a search dialog was not necessary.

Today, searching the Movable Type Weblog would be a good improvement. So I tried with the default Movable Type Search Engine. However, each search resulted in a CPU-intensive action. I tried to read the Perl code and saw that each search was done by selecting all entries from the database, then looping over all entries and finding the matching entries with string operations.

This is not the best way to do a fulltext search. Especially with large weblogs, this will probably lead to bad performance. The architecture does not scale very...

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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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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:##...

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If Movable Type creates an archive file, it converts the entry's title into a filename. With this conversion all blanks from the title are replaced by underscores. But if you want to achieve a good ranking in Google, this is no good replacement. Fortunately the behaviour can be changed.

Factors influencing Google

There are a number of factors that have an influence on the ranking of a page in Google's result lists. Of course the page's content is analyzed with respect to the searched keywords. However, the words appearing in the domain name and the file name also have some influence on the results. Thus, for achieving the best result it is important to know, how Google splits a URL...

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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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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for identifying invalid link URLs within entries.

If your site has been around for a while, a few or many of the pages you've linked to in the past may have ceased to exist or moved to new locations. Also, if you tend to link to a large number of pages, you might not be in the habit of clicking on each and every link to check it, so some URLs might not have been valid in the first place. The CheckLinks plugin tries to access all the URLs linked to in your entries (or a subset of your entries), and lets you display a list of the ones it can't successfully access.

These tags are intended to be used on an index template, most likely...

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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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Installing Plug-ins

Problem

You want to extend Movable Type's functionality and install a plug-in.

Solution

Installing a basic plug-in requires you to place a file with an .pl extension into the plugins directory; however more advanced plug-ins may have additional steps.

Discussion

Plug-ins are Perl scripts with a .pl extension that reside in the subdirectory named plugins under the Movable Type application directory. (If you are running an older version of MT that was upgraded and have not installed a plug-in before, you may have to create this directory.) Each time MT is...

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Everyone loves having a great looking site, but for most people who aren't well versed in the technical details of HTML and CSS, tweaking your blog's look isn't easy. Being able to easily pick a style from a rich library of choices is essential.

So, we made the move in Movable Type 3.2 to a new set of Six Apart standard styles that are shared with both our TypePad and LiveJournal services. There's an immediate benefit of being able to use any one of a number of existing styles. But in the future, with over ten million blogs sharing the same single set of styles and markup, there's going to be a new and rapidly expanding base of additional styles available that we think is...

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Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:## line:##]

This error message provides useful information that can help you...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for displaying text in multiple columns. Your text will be broken up into approximately equal portions, and the HTML formatting you specify (i.e. a table cell) will be repeated once for each portion.

Installation

To install the Columnize plugin, upload the file Columnize.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you do not already have a plugins directory, create one before uploading the file. For more information about Movable Type plugins, see the documentation.

Contact

Please address questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, interesting usage examples, etc., to mtplugins [AT] staggern...

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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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After having played with Movable Type and saving all data in the filesystem for a couple of days, it was time to migrate to an SQL database. As a developer for MS SQL Server or Oracle I do know SQL. However, I have never had any experience with MySQL. Although I am not the best man for this job, the installation succeeded.

Installing MySQL

MySQL is a true SQL Server. It is under an Open Source Development and has won rising acceptance in the previous years. It is offered in the so-called "Dual Licensing Model". Suppose you develop an application but you do not want to publish the source code. If you then want to distribute MySQL as part of your own application, you have to...

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Today marks the fourth anniversary of the release of Movable Type. Since its start in 2001, millions of people have downloaded, blogged with, and read sites powered by Movable Type, and we're thrilled to mark the birthday by saying thank you to the community that's made it possible.

From professional bloggers to plugin developers to people running personal communities, we've been inspired and motivated by all of you, so thanks for making the platform a success around the world. Whether it's seen as a powerful blogging tool or a lightweight CMS or just "the way we talk to the outside world", we're proud that it's inspired thoughts like the ones below:

From SFist, We Love Movable Type!...

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We're happy to announce that this afternoon we released Movable Type 3.1.

We're extremely excited about this new release, and also about how quickly this free update is coming on the heels of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition. Whereas it took more than a year between 2.6 and 3.0, we're now releasing 3.1 only three months after 3.0 Developer Edition. The release of 3.0, combined with the changes in licensing, has allowed us to recommit resources to Movable Type development, and that's a big reason why you're seeing major features in a free update released so soon after 3.0.

Here's a look at the major features in Movable Type 3.1.

DYNAMIC PAGES

The Best of Both Worlds

The most prominent new...

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Skip navigation. • TypePad • Movable Type • LiveJournal • About Us • Support

August 2004

08.31.2004

Movable Type 3.1 Launched

We're happy to announce that this afternoon we released Movable Type 3.1.

We're extremely excited about this new release, and also about how quickly this free update is coming on the heels of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition. Whereas it took more than a year between 2.6 and 3.0, we're now releasing 3.1 only three months after 3.0 Developer Edition. The release of 3.0, combined with the changes in licensing, has allowed us to...

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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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