Movable Type gives you an amazing amount of control over your content, but one of the things that it sorely lacks is the ability to make massive changes to all of your entries at once. Oh sure, you can edit the basics in power editing mode--categories, authors, dates and titles--but we want more. Being able to make massive changes to the extended, excerpt and keyword fields can become almost a necessity if, like me, you're using those fields for something other than their original purpose.

For instance--Customer A is using MT to store course listings. The extended entry field contains the dates offered, the excerpt field holds the price and the keywords...

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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 a drop down menu for the comment status while the other is a checkbox for Trackback status.

First of all, open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 2584 find my $row = $obj->column_values;

and add underneath it $row->{"allow_comments_" . $obj->allow_comments} = 1;

Next, around line 2688 find $entry->title(scalar $q->param('title_' . $id));

and add underneath it $entry->allow_comments($q->param('allow_comments_' . $id)); my $allow_pings = $q->param('allow_pings_' . $id) || '0'; $entry->allow_pings($allow_pings);...

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Updated. Originally posted in early 2004.

The template edit windows and the New Entry edit windows in Movable Type can easily be made larger with a simple adjustment.

MT3.2

In the folder that contains your static MT files on your server, open the file style.css in a text editor.

To change the edit-entry window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; height: 400px; }

To change the template edit window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-template textarea.wide { width: 618px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-template textarea.wide...

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Feedback during Power Edit was a popular hack that unfortunately didn't work with with v3.2. As a result, I rolled the hack into a plugin which I've appropriately dubbed "PowerEditFeedback." This plugin works exactly like the hack except its been updated for v3.2 - the plugin adds two checkboxes, one for the comment status and the other for the trackback/ping status to the power editing page. Installation is very simple, just download the plugin and unzip it in your MT folder preserving the directory structure. As a result, you will get a folder called PowerEditFeedback under your plugins folder, and that's about it, the plugin does the rest!

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Movable Type is the platform that introduced TrackBacks to the web, and now in version 3.2 we've given you the most powerful interface for managing, moderating, and editing TrackBacks that you receive.

TrackBacks are finally equal citizens in the Movable Type platform: Just like comments, they can be directed to go into moderation, and any TrackBack that's been received can be edited. These two features have long been requested by our users, and we're glad to include not just these improvements, but a full suite of TrackBack management options including the new junk folder for spam TrackBacks, and a powerful new user interface for performing bulk actions on TrackBacks including...

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A question that is raised by serious professionals considering Movable Type for their CMS needs is "What about static page?" Obviously MT was made for dynamic pages. Turning a list of entries into well organized websites is what MT does best. But it's those individual, doesn't-quite-fit-in-the-flow, static pages that can cause grief, consternation and if nothing else, confusion.

Our primary goal is to create pages that are both easy to manage and easy to update (so we're not quite talking about static pages). There are many ways to handle individual pages, I'll deal with two:

via Archive Mapping

This only works well in certain situations, and you'll see...

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On the forums, someone recently commented on how the listings in MT could be improved with greater sorting flexibility. I thought that it was a very good idea and so after a bit of hacking managed to get the entry listings to be sorted, it would be easy to adapt this for the comments and trackbacks listing.

This hack will add ascending and descending sorting capabilities to the title and date fields. The rest you can use the Filter option for.

First, you'll need CMS.pm, around line 2411 in the list_entries sub, find the following

my %arg = ( 'sort' => 'created_on', direction => $sort_direction, ($limit eq 'none' ? () : (limit =>...

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If you are creating a group weblog with multiple authors, you might want to customize the look of the Movable Type editing windows with the group's logo. MT3.1 makes this really easy to do. The styles.css file and the images folder that are in the folder you chose for your static files on your server are where you can find the files you will need to adjust.

Changing the logo

The default upper left-hand logo of the editing window looks like this in MT3.x:

The file name is topnav-logo.gif and it can be found in the images folder in your static files folder. You can use an image editing program like Photoshop to swap out the Movable Type logo for that of the group's. Save the image...

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Editing a Template

Problem

You want to create or edit a template for your weblog.

Solution

Use the template management screen.

Discussion

Movable Type automatically installs a number of default templates when a weblog is created. These templates are fine for getting started quickly; however most users will want to customize the templates to suit their own tastes and needs.

In order to edit a template, click the Templates button in the Weblog Toolbar to get to the Templates Listing Screen. The screen is divided up using tabs, one for each template type. Find the template and...

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Editing a Template using an External Editor

Problem

You would rather use a text or web page editor to edit a template.

Solution

Link an external file to your template and edit the file.

Discussion

Some users will find it easier to edit the template layouts in a text editor like BBEdit or a web page editor like Adobe Go Live instead of the Movable Type browser interface. You can optionally link a Movable Type template to an external file. This allows you to edit your templates while keeping the copy that is inside Movable Type synchronized with the external file.

In the field labeled "Link...

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Customizing the Edit Entry Screen

Problem

You want to customize your view of the New/Edit Entry screen.

Solution

Click the "Customize the display of this page" link on the New/Edit Entry screen.

Discussion

Movable Type allows you to customize the New Entry and Edit Entry screens. This customization is on a per-author, per-weblog basis. In other words, as an author, you can have different screen layouts for each weblog that you post to, and when you customize the screens, your customizations will be seen by you only; your preferences will not be seen by other authors in the...

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Question

On my search results page, an edit entry link is included for each result, and when I click that link, it takes me to the Edit Entry screen for that entry. I don't want my visitors editing my entries!

Answer

The default search template contains the tag <MTEntryEditLink>, which is generating the links you are seeing. These links will only be visible to you if you are logged into your installation of Movable Type (and have permissions to edit the entry in question).

So, the links will not be present to those visitors to the search...

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Page: 1 2 3 4 4 Pages.

Working with Style Catcher

With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show...

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Posted on 10/22/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CustomFields 1.12

UPDATE: I've just pushed out a silent update that fixes a problem with custom entry field descriptions not showing. Thanks Nilesh! A new version of CustomFields is available that fixes four bugs that people found;CustomFields...

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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 categories to which an entry is...

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Introduction

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...

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For a few months, I had deliberated adding a WYSIWYG Editor into the Movable Type entry screen and when Typepad implemented an editor into its interface I got jealous. So, here's a way to implement the very powerful HTMLArea into Movable Type (currently only Internet Explorer, Mozilla browsers and other Gecko based browsers supported)

1. Download HTMLArea 3.0 rc-1 and upzip it 2. Upload the files to a folder called htmlarea in your StaticWebPath 3. Open up tmpl/cms/header.tmpl and add the following in <head>...</head> tags

<script type="text/javascript"> _editor_url = "<TMPL_VAR NAME=STATIC_URI>htmlarea/"; _editor_lang = "en"; </script>...

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Movable Type uses a template system to generate the pages of your weblog. To change which content elements and how they are displayed on the pages of your blog, you need to make changes to the appropriate templates.

Selecting "Manage Templates" from the sidebar navigation in your weblog edit screen will show you the list of templates, but what do they all do? And, if you are trying to conserve storage space on your server, are there any you can delete?

Index Templates

Index templates have individual output files, specific to the template. Let's go down the list.

Click on image to enlarge

• Atom Index - The Atom Index produces an Atom syndication feed, atom.xml for those...

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

The installation instructions in the Movable Type Install Guide contain a section in the Configuration area called Enable Security Features. These instructions tell you to uncomment the Umask lines in your mt.cfg if your server is running cgiwrap or suexec. If you don't know what CGIwrap or suEXEC are, you may be tempted to skip this step. Don't. This step gives your MT installation extra security, which we will explain. (Note that this tutorial is only appropriate for MT installations on Linux/Apache web servers.)

What is CGIWrap or suEXEC?

CGIWrap and suEXEC are features...

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2.0b1 (2002.02.18)

• Lots of changes to the UI: leftnav, topnav, edit-entry screen, new-entry screen, etc. • Blog Editing Menu has now changed greatly to provide space for a welcome message (editable in blog config), blog stats, and links to 5 most recent posts and comments. • Added the ability to do NFS-safe database locking using .lock files and link(). This is not something most people should worry about; if it affects you, it's likely that you will know it. :) Thanks to Kelsey Cummings for ideas and code. • Hold and Release are now Draft and Publish...

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Movable Type provides a powerful API that allows developers to extend its functionality. Plugins can add tags to MT's templating system, or create full-fledged applications that interact with the MT database.

One missing piece of the API, however, has been the ability for plugins to modify MT's own interface—the screens you see when using Movable Type to manage your content.

BigPAPI is intended to fill this gap. It provides hooks so that other plugins can access and alter any page of the MT interface before it's displayed to the user. In effect, it enlarges the Plugin API—hence the name BigPAPI.

Unless you're a developer, that's probably all you need to know. The best way to...

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