The default entry URL file name structure for Movable Type 2.6 looks something like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/archives/000123.html

This structure puts all of the files into one archive directory and assigns each of them a number corresponding to the number of entries you have entered so far in your weblog.

What if you would prefer to have the URLs for your entries include the actual name of the entry and maybe even the category they are in? Something like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/archives/name_of_category/title_of_entry.html

Easy.

1. Using the entry title instead of the entry number. On the left hand side of your weblog edit window, click on "weblog config" navigation...

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Updated. Originally posted April 3, 2005.

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require...

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Ever since CSS hit the big time, the table has become increasingly rare. Semantic markup and CSS have replaced tables as layout tools. Tables are now relegated to their original role: displaying data stored in records (rows) and fields (columns).

However, their new status doesn't mean that they still can't be the targets of a designer's styles and a developer's hacks. A table typically presents more information than the rest of the page in a much smaller area, and much effort has been spent in attempting to make tables and other data visualizations as easy to interpret as possible.

The web designer's and developer's toolbox of the DOM, CSS...

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

With Movable Type 3.2, Six Apart launched a new markup and stylesheet structure that has also unified their three platforms. These new templates and stylesheets (from now on referred to as themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them, however Six Apart created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on...

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The default Movable Type layouts don't give you a lot of choice in terms of navigation. Clicking on the top bar with the title of the weblog will take you back to the main page of the weblog. Every other nav element is in the sidebar. You can however, pretty easily add a horizontal nav bar, with links to important-to-first-timers, or frequently used areas of your site, such as archives, about, or contact links.

Adding horizontal nav bar requires adding a few lines of code right underneath the banner section in your index and archive templates and adding a few new elements to your style sheet. Once you've created your navigation code, the most efficient way to add the code to the...

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UpdateAuthoredOn is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, you can click a button to set an entry's Authored On timestamp to the current date and time.

Requirements

UpdateAuthoredOn requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the UpdateAuthoredOn distribution.

UpdateAuthoredOn is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher.

Installation

To install the UpdateAuthoredOn plugin, upload the file UpdateAuthoredOn.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

UpdateAuthoredOn is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license....

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Do you like seeing those little smiley emoticons in other people's blog? Then this is the plugin for you!

This plugin will add 13 smiley faces to your Movable Type edit entry screen. With a click, you can add any of the emoticons to your entry's body and extended entry fields, as in the screenshot at the left.

Installation

Smilies requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included in the distribution. Smilies has been tested on version 3.2 of Movable Type only, but should work with MT 3.16 and higher - I'd appreciate hearing if anybody is successful with other versions. • Download Smilies.zip and extract. (A donation will support continued development...

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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 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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Enabling an Entry for Comment

Problem

You want to allow comments to be made on an entry.

Solution

Set the Allow Comments pulldown menu on the New/Edit Entry screen to Open.

Discussion

"Turning on" comments for a particular entry is easy. While creating or editing an entry, simply set the Allow Comments pulldown menu to Open. Depending on the display options you have set for the New/Edit Entry screen, this control may or may not be visible. Also depending upon the Default Settings for New Entries for the weblog, it may already be set to Open.

This control is dependent upon the...

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Pre-Dating a Post

Problem

You want to post an entry with a publishing date in the past.

Solution

Change the entry's Authored On timestamp to any earlier date.

Discussion

Pre-dating an entry simply means changing the entry's Authored On timestamp to any earlier date. The new timestamp must be entered in the same standard date/time format MT is using for the current timestamp.

Depending on the New/Edit Entry display options, an editable Authored On field may not be displayed. Use the "Customize the display of this page" link to make this control visible. (See "Customizing the Edit Entry Screen".)...

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Enabling an Entry for TrackBack Pings

Problem

You want to receive TrackBack pings for an entry.

Solution

Check the Accept TrackBacks checkbox on the New/Edit Entry screen.

Discussion

Setting up an entry to receive TrackBack pings is quite easy. Merely check Accept TrackBacks on the New/Edit Entry screen and save the entry. Assuming the entry has a status of "Publish," your entry can be pinged.

Depending on the display options you have set for the New/Edit Entry screen, this control may not be visible.

While TrackBack clients will now be able to ping the entry, they will not...

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Viewing the Pings Sent From an Entry

Problem

You want to know which TrackBack resources have been pinged with an entry.

Solution

Click the "View Previously Sent Pings" link on the Edit Entry screen.

Discussion

Movable Type records all outbound TrackBack pings for each entry. To see this list, click "View Previously Sent Pings" on any Edit Entry screen. This will open a pop-up window with a list of resources that have already been pinged.

Depending on the display options you have set for the New/Edit Entry screen, this link may not be visible. It is tied to the "URLs to...

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Question

I was deleting a comment from an entry, and when I saved the entry, its text was replaced with the comment I just deleted.

Answer

This is a documented bug with Safari.

If that's the browser you're using, here's what you need to do in order to delete a comment (until Safari fixes this bug):

When you delete a comment, you will be returned to the Edit Entry page for the entry the comment was posted on.

Do NOT save the entry at this point.

Instead, note which entry you're on, then leave the page by clicking on List & Edit Entries. Then find that entry in the list, click on its title, and you will be returned to the...

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Pinging a Resource from an Entry

Problem

You want to ping a resource, such as a weblog post, from an entry.

Solution

Enter the TrackBack URL into the Outbound TrackBack URL's textbox on any New/Edit Entry Screen.

Discussion

Most users will ping resources using the Trackback Auto-discovery option, but there are times when this won't suffice. Some examples of this: highly relevant posts elsewhere that you didn't link to; an entry that was made after yours.

There should be a facility on the New/Edit Entry to auto-discover TrackBack information on a URL the author enters.

Take the TrackBack URL of the...

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Earlier today, I discovered a workaround of sorts for one of the main functions of Workflow: the publish permissions. Basically, an author could set an entry to Publish through Movable Type's power-editing mode and the AppPostEntrySave callback would not be called, therefore the entry status would not be changed back to Draft.

The new release of Workflow fixes that problem. If you do not currently have the AltTemplatePath configration option set, the fix will be transparent to you. If you do have it set however, you will need to include the list_entry.tmpl template that can be found in plugins/Workflow/alt-tmpl/list_entry.tmpl. All the fix does is remove the option to change...

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The idea of "tags" and "tagging" has become very popular in the recent past. The idea behind tags is really that of organization and cross-referencing, though specific implementation and implementation with Movable Type varies. TechnoratiTags and ishbadiddle's subject index are examples of two different tag uses. This article is not about implementations; to find this useful you'll want to be using tags already.

I think tagging is great way of thinking. The problem, however, is that it's easy to create near-duplicate tags: "photo" or "photos," "MovableType" or "Movable Type," for example....

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Importing Weblog Content

Problem

You want to import a collection of entries from another system.

Solution

Click the Import/Export button on the Weblog Toolbar and fill out the form on the Import Entries tab.

Discussion

Movable Type allows you to import entries from another MT system or another weblogging system or service such as Blogger or WordPress.

This can be useful when you wish to start using Movable Type but already have much of your content in another system. To do this, you will need to export your content from the other system. Consult the Import Format specification and the...

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2.0 (2002.03.20)

• Fixes for typos, broken links, etc. • Fixed truncated Delete and Cancel buttons on edit comment screen. • Fixed Mac IE problem in multiple category selection screen--when selecting all of the options in the left box, the right box would jump around on the screen. Fixed by adding a dummy category when the source box is going to be empty. • Preferred Archive Type option will now only show archive types that you have selected in Archiving. • Added a changes saved method after saving in power edit. • Made <MTComments...

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0.06 (2001.10.01)

• Fixed the built-in RSS template so that it validates with RSS version 0.91. • Fixed bug with previewing entry introduced by convert paragraph breaks option and code. (Adam Gerstein, Sara Flemming, Matt Haughey, Jeremy W) • Check that version of installed HTML::Template is greater than 2, because we need certain features that were only added later on. (TW Walsh) • Actually include mt-import.cgi in the distribution this time. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer) • Fixed a bug where the conditional settings for MTEntryIfAllowComments...

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