Updated. Originally published Jan 2, 2004

Error messages are the messages that are displayed when a visitor to your site encounters a server error. The most common error messages are 404: File Not Found and 403: Access Forbidden. The 404 error message is displayed when a visitor to your site tries to access a page that does not exist on your server. The 403 message is displayed when a visitor tries to enter an area on your site that is off limits to the public.

You can customize your error messages so that instead of seeing an ugly server message, your visitor sees instead a personalized note from you. The methods are different depending on if you are doing static (the default) or dynamic...

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This setting determined the default setting for the Text formatting option for new entries. It can be overridden on a per-entry basis on the entry editing screen.

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Blog update pings

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02.17.2003

Text Formatting Plugins Available

As we mentioned in our original post on Text Formatting, we hoped that Text Formatting plugins would make it easier for non-technical users to author and format weblog content. We released 2.6 just last week, and already plugin developers have implemented some exciting new Text Formatting options: • Timothy Appnel released a beta of his TikiText text formatting. • Brad Choate released version 1.1 of his Textile plugin. • Gregor Purdy released a POD text formatting text formatting plugin. • And, since we forgot to mention it previously, Adam Kalsey released MovableJive, a "port of some classic text filters".

Posted by Benjamin Trott at...

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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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In MT versions 2.661 and earlier, there is an icon and link for "Set Up Bookmarklets" on the main menu weblog edit page. In MT3.x, the name "Bookmarklets" has been changed to "QuickPost". In this tutorial everything that describes how to use bookmarklets can be used to describe how to use quickposts.

What is a bookmarklet and how do you use it in Movable Type?

A bookmarklet is a small bit of Javascript code that you can place in your browser favorites or bookmarks. Whenever you want to use the functionality of that code you can click on your browser bookmark for it. There are lots of bookmarklets available for all sorts of uses. In Movable Type, there is a bookmarklet available...

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Creating a Search Template

Problem

You want to customize the look of your search engine results.

Solution

Edit the default.tmpl file in the search_templates directory.

Discussion

MT provides a handful of search tags which are only recognized in these special templates. Let's take a look at those tags and their usage: • MTSearchResults

Similar to MTGoogleSearch, MTSearchResults is a container tag that creates the search results context and loops through each of the returned items. This tag creates an entry context so that any of the MTEntry tags will be valid. The search also...

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2.0b2 (2002.02.20)

• Sort categories and authors in power-edit screen. • Changed input box styles back to 20px so that they are not too small in Windows. • Added caching of templates when rebuilding archives; this means that for each archive type, each archive template need only be loaded once. Hopefully this will improve performance. • Fixed bug where Convert Line Breaks setting was not applied to preview page. • Shortened manual split page names so that they don't get truncated. • Export now exports in ascending chronological order....

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2.0b6 (2002.03.12)

• Added docs for entry screen customization. • If editable authored-on date is not to be displayed on customized entry screen, display an uneditable version instead (because this is useful information). • Fixed bug with creating thumbnails on Windows (binmode issue). • Fixed bug where <$MTArchiveTitle$> on category archive would display incorrect category label (because it was retrieving the label from the first entry's primary category). • Fixed bug where convert line breaks and allow comments values would not be set to...

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I've updated the Alternate Template Collection with Movable Type version 3.2 compatibility.

To summarize, edit_entry.tmpl and preview_entry.tmpl have been updated. upload.tmpl and upload_complete.tmpl work with 3.2 as-is. list_blog.tmpl is no longer needed because 3.2 incorporates the change I made.

Complete information - including how to use these alternate templates - on the templates can be found on the Alternate Template Collection page.

If you found this article useful, please consider supporting this site through a donation.

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When running Movable Type out-of-the-box, a primary category isn't picked when you start a new entry. Having a default category can help ensure that entries are categorized correctly and - if one category is most popular - eliminate a little work, too.

It's a quick and simple hack to the edit_entry.tmpl file to make this happen. It's also another good opportunity to use alternate templates ( instructions are available).

Choose a Default Category

First, you'll need to pick a category to be the default, and select the HTML that goes with it. I decided to setup the "Elsewhere in Our Life" category as the default, and will use this as...

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Creating a Category or Subcategory

Problem

You want to create a category or subcategory to assign entries to.

Solution

Use the Create action on the Category Listings screen.

Discussion

Creating a category is a quick and easy affair. Before you can begin, you must check that you have Edit Categories permission for the weblog.

Begin with the Category Listing and click the "Create new top level category" link. To create a subcategory, click the "Create" link next to the parent category.

If you are making a new entry and need to create a new category, Movable Type provides a...

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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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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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I would categorize a BLOG content into mainly two groups. One for Broadcasting my opinion, which can be one about a social, political, technical, or entertainmental stuffs, to the world. I want as many people as possible to listen my voice. And the other is wholly for LOGging my personal affairs. I don't care who would see it or not.

Then, what means do I have in order to broadcate my post? How can I provide more opportunity for the world to take something from my posts? It can be possible by using meta blog sites, various syndication feeds, trackback pings or so. Are you satisfied?

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Similar to the weighted category list, the weighted keyword list builds a list of keywords used on your site and uses varying font sizes to show how popular they are. This list might be more representative of what your site is about than the weighted category list is. Here's the list for this site:

adobe backup book camera camporee car cars cat category cd christmas collection collector color com computer cow danandsherree detail digital dpi dvd elsewhere file files film fire florida image life light links monitor movable movie news nikon page paper park photo photos photoshop php pinball print profile radio raw river scan scanner...

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Question

I created a new author name for myself and deleted Melody. Now I have no permissions.

Answer

Note: The information in this article applies only to versions below 3.2.

One of the reasons the installation instructions tell you to change Melody's information to your own (rather than deleting her) is that her author name is granted full permissions upon creation. By changing her information to yours, you will have all of those same permissions by default.

Newly created authors do not have all the available permissions upon creation, so if...

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05.31.2005

Movable Type Cheat Sheet

One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet...

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Using includes, you can modularize your template code making it easier to edit and rebuild your Movable Type templates. For example, instead of having all of your side bar and center content on the same Index template, you can set up a separate file to hold your side bar content and use an include to "include" it on your index template. This is especially handy if you use the same sidebar content on multiple index and archive templates.

There are two basic ways to use includes in Movable Type - the MTInclude tag and PHP includes. MTInclude is easy and anyone using MT can use it. The downside (slight) is that if you make a change to an include file, your sidebar for example, you have...

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07.27.2005

Dynamic Publishing support for PostgreSQL and SQLite

It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and...

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0.03 (2001.09.26)

• Added Bookmarklet posting functionality, with a link to setup on the main project administration menu. • In List Entries, if a post does not have a title display [No title] instead as a link. • Changed login cookie path from / to /path/to/mt/. For example, if you installed MT at /my/mt/mt.cgi, the path for the cookie would now be /my/mt/. • MT::Util::send_mt_mail now checks for more default locations of sendmail, instead of giving up, until it finds one that works. It now checks /usr/lib/sendmail, /usr/sbin/sendmail, and /usr/ucblib/sendmail...

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