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....

continue reading ...

Matt Haughey has a great article on how he uses Movable Type to do it all (apparently, Kottke does too… can't wait to see his article).

Anyhow, I wanted to share a tidbit in that vein. I've just set this up recently, and I'm in the process of moving the rest of my static content to use it. What I did: • Created a new Movable Type blog and named it "bradchoate.com: Static Content". • Deleted all the Index templates. • Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template. • Made sure individual archives were enabled. • Made the archive path the root...

continue reading ...

I've read several HTML references, online and off, and all seem to make some mention of the dichotomy of style and content, presentation and structure, appearance and substance. The good designer is admonished to keep them separate in order to ward off various woes: unmanageability, unusability, professional shame.

I think this is a myth. I think it has persisted for four different reasons. I don't think web designers need be concerned about it at all.

Vital to good web design is architecting data so the site is usable and maintainable. This begins only after a thorough grasp of mission and means. A textbook web site may fit together nicely with one simple separation,...

continue reading ...

Deleting entries

Problem

You need to delete one or more entries

Solution

Use the Delete Entry button on the Edit Entry screen. For multiple entries, use the Delete action button on the Entries Listing screen.

Discussion

Delete entries with care, as the content will be permanently removed from the system. You can unpublish an entry and hide it from view by switching its status to "Draft."

Click the Delete Entry button on the button bar of the Edit Entry Screen. To remove multiple entries at once, check off multiple entries on the Entries Listing screen and then click the...

continue reading ...

Assign Multiple Categories to an Entry

Problem

You want to assign more then one category to an entry.

Solution

Follow the Assign Multiple Categories link found on the New/Edit Entry screen.

Discussion

As discussed in "Posting a New Entry", you can assign a category to an entry with the Primary Category pulldown menu. Assigning multiple secondary categories works a bit differently.

From the New/Edit Entry screen, click the Assign Multiple Categories link under the Primary Category pulldown menu. A list will appear with the names of every category in the system. The primary...

continue reading ...

Creating a new entry

After you have uploaded a file, you have the choice of either creating a new entry using that uploaded file, or just displaying the HTML used to link to the file. For example, if you have uploaded an image, and would like to create a new entry with a link to that image in a popup window, select Create a new entry using this uploaded file, and press POPUP IMAGE. If you are already editing an entry, then you won't want to create another new entry (and perhaps lose the one that you are working on); so in that case, click the Show me the HTML button and click POPUP...

continue reading ...

Question

How do I use the formatting buttons and keyboard shortcuts when editing my entries on the Create New Entry or Edit Entry screen?

Answer

To use the formatting buttons and keyboard shortcuts, you must first highlight the text you wish to format, and then either click the appropriate button, or press the appropriate keyboard shortcut combination.

Formatting buttons are not available in all browsers. Please see Formatting buttons are missing for more information.

Keyboard shortcuts work in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. • Bold - Ctrl-Shift-b...

continue reading ...

After you have uploaded a file, you have the choice of either creating a new entry using that uploaded file, or just displaying the HTML used to link to the file. For example, if you have uploaded an image, and would like to create a new entry with a link to that image in a popup window, select Create a new entry using this uploaded file, and press POPUP IMAGE. If you are already editing an entry, then you won't want to create another new entry (and perhaps lose the one that you are working on); so in that case, click the Show me the HTML button and click POPUP IMAGE. This will display the HTML code for...

continue reading ...

Setting Up Scheduled Post Services

Problem

You want to enable Scheduled Post services on your Movable Type System.

Solution

Install the run-periodic-tasks to run under cron or other similar system utility.

Discussion

To set up scheduled posting you need to be able to set up a "cron" job on the server. There a number of ways these services can be implemented and will vary depending on your server environment. Some hosting providers will allow one and not the other.

After you've set up post scheduling, when you save an entry with a post status of "Scheduled," it will be...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Question

When viewing my pages, characters in my language are encoded incorrectly.

Answer

When encoding characters into HTML entities (either for editing, or when you use the encode_html global tag attribute), Movable Type uses the HTML::Entities Perl module, if your server has it; otherwise, it uses a simple encoding that encodes <, >, and & into the proper entities.

In some cases, however, HTML::Entities will not work properly for your characters. This may happen, for example, if your characters are encoded in a different character...

continue reading ...

0.04 (2001.09.27)

• Changed internal timestamp format so that timezone offsets are not recalculated on every rebuild. Changed from epoch time (seconds since 1970) to YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. • Added uneditable name of template to top of editing page for non-index templates; this limits possible confusion over which template you are actually editing. (Steven Jarvis) • Made MTCommentAuthorLink web links open in new window. (Steven Jarvis) • Bookmarklet Javascript now works in IE 5.5 (needed to use document.selection in that browser). (Caroline van Oosten de Boer)...

continue reading ...

Introduction

Categories provide an alternate means to the weblog's traditional chronological form of organizing entries. Movable Type allows you to enter a list of categories using a variety of methods and assign one or more to each of your entries. You can use MT's categorization facilities to group related entries despite chronology or simply as a means of filtering entry listings in the CMS more easily.

Each entry can be assigned one primary category and any number of secondary categories. The primary category is used when you wish to display information about just one of the...

continue reading ...

Page: 1 1 Page.

Blog Selective Hacks

One of the biggest problems of simple hacks to the system is that they occur system wide, e.g. if you hacked the entry page to specify a default category, that category would become the default for all blogs on the...

Continue reading "Blog Selective Hacks"

Posted on 07/30/2005 | Permalink | Comments (3)

More Intuitive Quicktags

Since my latest upgrade to 3.16, I haven't bothered to implement my quicktags hack so I was left with the default quicktags. Out of habit, I hit the quicktags to create the necessary HTML then enter my content, however with...

Continue reading "More Intuitive Quicktags"

Posted on 06/20/2005 |...

continue reading ...

Question

Various errors of this type, what they mean, and the solutions.

Answer

Error: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 316.

This is related to the display of the Movable Type News Feed on the main page. Your server is most likely having trouble retrieving this feed.

You can disable this feature in mt-config.cgi1 file with the following line: NewsboxURL disable

Remember to edit mt-config.cgi only in a plain text editor, and upload it back to your server in ASCII mode after making changes.

Error: Use of uninitialized...

continue reading ...

Question

How can I add my own links to the sidebar on my weblog page?

Answer

Templates in Version 3.2 and Higher

You will need to edit your Main Index Template and insert the appropriate HTML code within the sidebar area.

Look for the following code in the Main Index Template: <div id="beta"> <div id="beta-inner" class="pkg">

Then insert the following HTML after that section, wherever you want the links to appear. As an example, if you'd like the display to appear similar to that for the Recent Posts listing in the same template, you might add a section like this:...

continue reading ...

Question

My archive pages are getting too long, so I'd like to change them to just a listing of entries with titles and permalinks, rather than showing the full body for every entry. How do I do this?

Answer

Go to the Edit Template screen for the Archive Template you want to change. Look for the section of code that starts with <MTEntries> and ends with </MTEntries>; then replace it with code similar to this: <ul> <MTEntries> <li><MTEntryDate format="%x"> - » <a...

continue reading ...

0.10 (2001.10.06)

• Added the <$MTCGIPath> tag and the CGIPath config file setting for easy linking to your MT CGI scripts. • Added a config setting for setting the default value of the ``Status'' field on the create an entry page; so you can set it to Release if you always want it set to Release by default. (Christina Wodtke) • Added an ``allow anonymous comments?'' config option; if set, no checking is done to determine if the visitor making the comment has provided an email address and author name. If unset, both author name and email address are...

continue reading ...

Question

How can I keep an entry on the top of my weblog's main page?

Answer

Sometimes, you may have an announcement or other important entry that you'd like to stay above the other entries on your weblog. There are several ways to do this.

Post-Date the Entry

The easiest method is to change the Authored On date of your entry to a future date. This will keep it at the top of any listings sorted by date, until an entry with a later date is published.

Edit the Main Index Template

For a note that will always stay on the top and rarely needs to...

continue reading ...

2.0b4 (2002.02.25)

• Added border="0" for thumbnail image after choosing popup image; also fixed the invalid XHTML. • Fix thumbnail creation error by providing Image::Magick with the image format on $magick object creation. • Fix bug on category-editing page where an error will be displayed if the user who created a category has been deleted. • When creating a new author, give an error if no password is provided. • Fix bug with Convert Line Breaks being unchecked for pre-2.0 entries even if the default in blog config is set to on. blog • Cache format hashes for dates after creating them....

continue reading ...