If you use the Upload File feature in Movable Type, you've no doubt got a folder full of uploaded files. If you use the default "Local Archive Path" or "Local Site Path" destination, you've got a folder full of uploads mixed in with your web pages. I always want to keep my uploaded files separate from all of the web pages just for organization. But now my /uploads/ folder has over 1300 files in it and finding anything is impossible. I needed a better organization method and I didn't want to have to actively think about it.

2005/04/19 Update: The method has been refined quite a bit with The Easy Way, using JavaScript.

2005/05/10 Update: This method is superceded by...

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The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with one sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page. With a little template manipulation you can have an additional sidebar on the left - a 3-column layout.

The MT3.2 stylesheets and templates are designed to have the columns laid out in order, starting with the column named "alpha". The columns, in order are alpha, beta, gamma (for a 3-column layout), and delta (a hypothetical fourth column that one could create). In the default MT3.2 Main Index template, the sidebar is on the right and is in a column named "beta.

To add a third column, you will make a copy of the default "beta" column code and put it before the "alpha"...

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Setting Up Google Enabled Entries

Problem

You want to integrate Google search results into your entry.

Solution

Provide Movable Type with your Google API Key and use the MTGoogleSearchResult template tag.

Discussion

Movable Type is capable of making Google search queries and inserting the results into site layouts. This built-in functionality is geared toward inserting related links into an entry or a specific topic such as an author's name rather than providing unfettered access to the full power of the Google search engine. This is more a limitation of the Google API...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Sarah Hughes of This Chick (aka Maddy in the MT Forums).

Many customizations for Movable Type call for using PHP scripts that require that your pages have a .php extension rather than a .html or .htm extension.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which involves a) the server looking at your pages for a PHP script, b) running the script, and c) outputting the results to the page. This is called "parsing". In order to successfully use PHP in your pages, you need to ensure that your account on your webserver is set up to parse your pages for PHP scripts. This feature is pretty standard these days, but check with your webhost before...

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2.51 (2002.10.29)

• Added Windows right-click bookmarklet functionality, where you can use a Post to MT Blog right click option to open the bookmarklet. Thanks to Anil Dash for the code. • Added a generic <MTElse> tag, which can be used to supply an ``else'' condition to any conditional. Thanks to Brad Choate for the code. • Added an <$MTEntryPermalink$> tag, which does the right thing when displaying the link for an entry: if an individual archive, it is not followed by an anchor; otherwise, it is. • When rebuilding files, only rewrite the...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before...

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Posting photos and images to your weblog entry is easy in Movable Type.

1. Prepare your image for the web. First make sure your image is a manageable size. Whether you are using software that comes with your digital camera or specializied photo software such as Adobe Photoshop or PhotoElements, reduce the image size of your image so that it will comfortably fit in the space provided by your weblog at a resolution of 72 dpi. Most cameras take images at high resolutions so that they will be able to print out well on photo paper. Your computer's screen resolution however is a low 72 dpi (dots per inch). So if you want to see what your image will look like on your weblog, view it at...

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Page: 1 2 3 3 Pages.

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...

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

Feedback during Power Editing

Many people have asked me how to display the status of comments and trackbacks on the power edit entries screen. This hack will guide you through the process of adding two fields, as shown by the screenshot. One is...

Continue reading "Feedback during Power Editing"...

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For those who aren't using the dynamic publishing feature of Movable Type (see below), experiencing slow rebuild times is not an infrequent complaint especially as the size or complexity of the blog and its templates grows. While there are very good reasons to rebuild, there are no good reasons for it to be painfully slow.

In this essay, we will detail a number of reasons why your rebuild times might be slow and steps you can take to drastically reduce or completely eliminate the time you spend waiting for Movable Type to finish its work.

Upgrade to Movable Type 3

Has anything significant happened to you in the 16 months? Probably so. Well, the same can be said for Movable...

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Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make a post to their weblog for everything...

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UPDATE: EnhancedEntryEditing has been bumped up to v1.01 to fix a bug where popup windows wouldn't disappear after you were done with them. Grab the update, you only need to upload EnhancedEntryEditing.pl

Ajaxify is a series of BigPAPI plugins that adds various javascript and AJAX widgets into Movable Type's interface. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. The first of which is EnhancedEntryEditing. This plugin adds two widgets into the entry screen: • Resizable Textareas - I personally find the textareas on the entry screen too small and find it annoying to hack the stylesheet everytime I upgrade Movable Type. This plugin now adds "Increase Size" and...

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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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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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Strange adding a category called categories... but I digress.

Two Roads Diverged...

I've been working on a new blog in which I want to sort the categories in order other than alphabetical. Now, there is an quick and ugly solution, and there is a time-consuming and beautiful solution. First, we'll look at the ugly way of sorting your categories of the U.S. Presidents:

The Easy, Ugly Way

Create first category for Washington, only call it 01:Washington. Create second category for Adams... name it 02:Adams. So and so on through the U.S. Presidents. When Movable Type builds your page, it catches those initial numbers and puts them in order by number. A...

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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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2.0b3 (2002.02.23)

• New New Entry and Upload File icons for left nav. • Added troubleshooting section for mt-load.cgi and DataSource errors. • Added Post Status pulldown to import so that "Status" default in blog config can be overriden. Added help links to import options. • Added Javascript validation for every DELETE button that deletes items from a list; if nothing is checked, now gives a JS alert. • HTML-formatting buttons (bold, italic, URL, etc.) will now only show up when using a browser that supports them. • mt-upgrade.cgi now detects if MT databases are already upgraded; if so, it stops, and doesn't try to upgrade again....

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Over time a lot of content will be generated by a site, especially a weblog or news-oriented site. Finding that content in a reverse chronological archive can be difficult and frustrating. Local search can make a site more accessible by providing readers with the means to dynamically zero in on the content they are looking for.

Built-In Search

Movable Type's public search interface originally began as an add-on to MT developed by Jay Allen before formal plug-ins existed. The code was later integrated into MT version 2.5.

The search engine provides a rudimentary means of querying an MT system for...

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2.1 (2002.05.02)

• Added webMaster, language, lastBuildDate, and pubDate to both RSS templates. • Added encode_html="1" to all RSS fields that didn't have it already. • Added Norwegian dates. • Added test for mt-check.cgi to determine whether we are running under cgiwrap or suexec. • Added a new global tag attribute encode_url (thanks to Scott Andrew LePera and others for the idea). • Changed the behavior of the publish flag in blogger.newPost; previously, if set to false the new entry would be saved as a draft. This was a bad idea, for...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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Email. Can't live with it. Can't live without it -- although many of us wish we could.

Despite the introduction of new tools such as weblogs, wikis, aggregators and instant messaging, and the growing notion that email is "broken," it still remains the de-facto, baseline, catch-all choice for online communications and collaboration.

In this chapter we'll delve into various ways that email is utilized with Movable Type.

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