Blogs that have multiple authors sometimes have the need for a 'credits' page or something like that that lists everyone. This plugin allows you to do just that by providing a <MTAuthors> tag that Movable Type lacks. Continue reading for documentation and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtauthors-1_32.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'authors.pl' file in...

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03.20.2003

Developing Movable Type Plugins

Timothy Appnel has published a fantastic guide to developing plugins for Movable Type. He discusses adding simple tags to the templating system, creating text formatting plugins, and using the data persistence framework to store plugin data. This is a great tutorial for beginning plugin authors, and will hopefully open up plugin authoring to a new group of developers.

In other plugin-related news--if you haven't seen it recently, mt-plugins.org is the best resource for finding and using MT plugins. A bugtracking system was added recently to get users in touch with plugin developers about problems with the...

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11.30.2004

Interview with Nick Bradbury

A good interview with Nick Bradbury of TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, with tips on becoming an independent software vendor:

If you plan to do this for a living, focus on building tools that make peoples lives easier or more interesting, and chances are youll last longer and find your work more fulfilling.

Posted by Anil in Blog Strategy at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

11.30.2004

More on the MT3 Bible

Rogers Cadenhead talks a bit more about the newly-released Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, and is very generously giving away five author's copies to people who comment on, or link to, his post...

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

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Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

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04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

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This tutorial is co-authored by LMT guest author Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting and Elise Bauer of elise.com.

Movable Type allows you to create categories and sub-categories for organizing your entries. The default MT3.2 Main Index template includes code to list these categories in the sidebar section. This tutorial will attempt to explain the tags used in this code and how they work together.

Categories, Sub-categories, Parent, Child, and Levels

The only difference between a category and a sub-category is that the latter will always have a "parent" category. The sub-category is still a category, and everything else remains the same as any other category. But by having...

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Learning Movable Type is now hosted on a new server and now has its own domain name - http://www.learningmovabletype.com. In the process of changing servers and changing URLs, we may have created some broken links or other site hiccups. If you encounter something that just doesn't seem to be working properly, please email me using the contact form.

Humongous thanks to Chad and Arvind for their invaluable assistance with this move.

If you link to Learning Movable Type (and we hope you do) please, please, please change the URL in your link to the new one. That way, Google will find us more easily, and those using Google to find things regarding Movable Type will find us more easily too....

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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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Another day, another plugin. This one lets you manipulate images. You can gather size, height, weight information from them and you can even resize them for whatever purpose you'd like. Nifty, eh?

Availability

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

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later • ImageMagick and the Image::Magick perl...

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07.13.2005

Announcing Movable Type 3.2 Beta

Over the past two weeks, we've been telling the world a lot about Movable Type 3.2 and now it's time to show it.

Today, we are releasing the first beta version of Movable Type 3.2 and we encourage everyone to download it and see for themselves.

You can find the details over on the Beta Blog. We hope to see you over there!

Posted by Jay Allen at 06:19 PM | Permalink

07.05.2005

Intermittent "500 Server Errors" in MT (RESOLVED)

If you are experiencing intermittent "500 Server Errors" while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause...

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As you probably already know, Movable Type 3.2 was released and boasts a stunning featureset. I personally have plenty of plugins, tools and other announcements to make which are all related to this release. The first of which you've probably guessed by the title. I present the Movable Type Style Generator. Quite simply, click on any element on the page and a box will appear allowing you to change any of the element's properties from background color to font faces and styles. After you're done, hit the Download button to get the stylesheet, 3.2 compatible! The beauty of this style generator is since it creates 3.2 compatible stylesheets, you can use them across any of Six Apart's...

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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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03.25.2005

InfoWorld review of Movable Type

InfoWorld has just published a review of Movable Type 3.15, with the ultimate conclusion that "Overall, Movable Type delivers a solid blogging experience." There's a useful overview of the platform's features, along with some legitimate points about what needs improvement, but we're just as glad to see users explaining why Movable Type is the right choice for them as well.

Posted by anildash in Press Mentions at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

03.25.2005

Politicians with Permalinks

The Christian Science Monitor has a broad look at politicians using blogs to better communicate with their...

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Updated MT-Notifier to include the change that apparently was lost earlier. Stand-alone subscription forms should work now.

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The beta testing began Tuesday when we let the first fifty public testers into the fold. Releases, beta or final, are always an incredibly stressful time on both emotional and physical levels -- getting to this milestone was no exception.

In fact, getting to this milestone was particularly difficult, for 3.0 will be the most significant release of Movable Type since we formed the corporation and accepted funding.

During this past year, as Six Apart's visibility has increased, we've been acquainted with the scrutiny that companies 100 times our size face. We have our critics and, through the process, have gained much thicker skins. Luckily, we feel that we've operated in a manner that...

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There are several ways to make your life easier whilst having fun with HTML markup and CSS design.

Learning, the fun way

When I first tinkered around with HTML and CSS, I was a bit unsure and un-inspired as to what to do, but I employed a technique that some may frown upon. Using a variety of tools, I took a peek at stylesheets that had produced something I like. I didn't steal them but rather learnt from them on how to do such and such a thing. I would recommend trying this out as it is a hands on way to learn what various bits of CSS code do - and its much nicer to see it in action done the right way.

Sidebar Panels

If you use Mozilla/Firefox as your browser, you are in luck. EditCSS and...

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07.09.2004

Movable Type 3.01D bug fix release

We've just released Movable Type 3.01D. You can download the new version by logging into your Movable Type Account and using the "download" link for the appropriate license. If you're upgrading from 3.0D, there's no need to run any upgrade script for this release: just upload the files to your server and you should be ready to go!

This release fixes a number of bugs that were present in 3.0D. The lot of it boils down to this: • Comment preview is no longer dropped (see below for instructions) • Default templates now have valid HTML in a few places where they didn't before. • Lots of bugs fixed with export...

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May 2004

05.13.2004

Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition

Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition is finally here, and we've got a lot to say about it. Mena's explained the thinking that went into this new version over at Mena's Corner, where you can get the full story. First, information on our new licenses, new prices, and our commitment to a free version:

As I hope you already know, today we launched the Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, what you may not know is that with this release...

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