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MT Protect 1.2

UPDATE: Version 1.21 has been released that fixes the password protection bug under static publishing. Please download the new version and re-enable protection on all your blogs. MT Protect is a plugin that allows you to easily protect entries so...

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Posted on 09/03/2005 | Permalink | Comments (6)

MT Protect 1.1

Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can! Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation...

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When in doubt, reload.

I introduced my idea of MOSe, or Mozilla/Opera/Safari Enhancement about four months ago, with my Zen Garden submission mnemonic. It's time to take it further.

With a strong nod to Eric Meyer's Pure CSS Menus, the latest tweak to mezzoblue adds an opaque CSS-based menu system to the global navigation system. That is, not a line of Javascript was used to construct these. Gecko browsers and Safari love them, Opera 7 has a few issues I may leave as an exercise to Opera Software to resolve, and all browsers that can't handle them (you know I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer) have a fallback.

By logically structuring the bits and...

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I had previously written on how to add quicktags to the comment form. This tutorial, however, will show you how to add a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to the comment form. The WYSIWYG editor in question is tinyMCE, the same one used in EnhancedEntryEditing. Of the various WYSIWYG editors available, I felt that tinyMCE was the best in terms of flexibility and options and the easiest to get started with!

First things first, you will need to download the latest version of tinyMCE and extract it to a suitable location on your server (EnhancedEntryEditing plugin users, already have tinyMCE in /mt-static/plugins/Ajaxify/tinymce/).

Next, you'll have to add the tinyMCE code to...

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CustomFields has been bumped to v1.11 due to some odd bugs with the v1.1 distribution whereby I seem to have not included the up-to-date files. I recommend everyone who uses CustomFields upgrades to v1.11 to ensure that you see all the new features you should be seeing. Many thanks to JSDopefish who reported the issue on my support forums. Go grab the update.

As a sidenote, I've become aware that the donate buttons scattered across Movalog have stopped working. Paypal has thrown my account into an incredibly restricted mode which I will only be able to sort out this weekend. A big thank you to all the readers who notified me of this problem.

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This version of CustomFields implements several of the feature requests I've received since releasing 1.0: • Custom entry fields now appear directly on the edit entry screen which makes it much more simple to edit those fields. It also means that you no longer have to save an entry before being able to edit those fields! • Textareas are re-sizable. Rather than clutter up the interface (and make it more complicated) by allowing dimensions to be specified for each field, I've allowed textareas to be resizable the javascript way i.e. simply drag the textarea to the size you want. The default sizes are also more suitable. • Textareas now respect the Text Formatting selection i.e. you can format your...

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During the comment spam crisis, before 3.14 was released, my host installed something called mod_security. I have noticed that ever since it was installed, the comment spam flood I normally experienced turned into a trickle. mod_security helps with a lot of things. It's good for helping block a lot of the script vulnerability attacks like cross-site scripting, bad PHP includes, etc so there's a good chance it will be installed on your host, if not ask them.

If you do have mod_security installed, I will guide you through setting it up such that it blocks of comment spam. What is the advantage of mod_security over MT-Blacklist? mod_security scans the comment before it hits MT-Blacklist or...

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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 system. This tutorial is a simple hack that will allow you to test the blog_id value and then conditionally display.

Open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and search for

my $blog_id = $app->{query}->param('blog_id');

and add underneath it

$param->{"blog_id_$blog_id"} = 1;

Save CMS.pm and upload it to the appropriate location. That's it, now in your *.tmpl files, you can check the blog_id like so

<TMPL_IF NAME=BLOG_ID_1>...</TMPL_IF>

where the contents of the IF...

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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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This is a question I've seen a lot, through emails, bug reports and on the forums. First a little general background information.

The 'Plugin Envelope' method was something introduced with v3.0 and one of the first plugins to use it was MT-Blacklist. This is where a plugin creates its own subdirectory within the main plugins/ directory, for example MT Blacklist has plugins/Blacklist, MT Protect has plugins/Protect and so on.

The problem many people are facing are the hundreds of errors that these plugins spit out and look similar to this: Plugin error: /home/.../.../cgi-bin/plugins/Blogroll/Blogroll.pl Can't locate Blogroll/Blogroll.pm in @INC (@INC contains: plugins/Blogroll/lib...

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In MT versions 3.1x and earlier, you may have noticed in your Movable Type blog archive directory on your web server, a bunch of .xml files beginning with numbers. What are these files and do you need them?

By default, Movable Type generates an individual RSS feed for each entry that lists the TrackBack pings for that entry. This is useful is someone wants to subscribe to your Trackbacks via RSS. How often does that happen? Usually, never. You can safely delete those files from your archive directory on your web server. To unclutter your archive directory and keep from generating the TrackBack .xml files in the future, find the line on your mt.cfg file that says:

# GenerateTrackBackRSS...

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The New Themes - Making Sense of it all

Tutorial cross posted on Learning Movable Type and Movalog. 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...

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Posted on 09/04/2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Extending the Sidebar

Matthew writes I am trying to make the side bar in Movable type to extend to the bottom of the page. I have gotten it to work in IE but not firefox. You can take a look at my site...

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Kasey has a good tutorial on how to have the cursor automatically focused on the Username field of the login screen so that you can just start typing immediately. Unfortunately that tutorial talks about MT 2.x so here's the MT 3.x version.

In login.tmpl find the following code <input name="username" id="username" size="20" />

and add right after it the following <script>document.forms[0].username.focus()</script>

Upload the file to MT_DIR/tmpl/cms/ and voila, whenever you are presented with the MT login screen the cursor will be blinking in the username field.

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I further discussed my previous post with many pepole and felt I needed to clarify some doubts I and many others had about the new dynamic MT, so here's a follow up post ! Brad explained how the new MT/Smarty/PHP system will work. The template gets pulled from the database; there is a pass over it to make it smarty-compatible; then it gets executed by smarty. so if you have a real simple template like this: <MTEntries> <MTEntriesHeader><ul></MTEntriesHeader> <li><MTEntryTitle></li> <MTEntriesFooter></ul></MTEntriesFooter> </MTEntries>

it gets changed to this: {Entries} {EntriesHeader}<ul>{/EntriesHeader} <li>...

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Although the campaign hasn't been completed, I was excited about this release due to its featureset and didn't want to busy myself with its release during the peak of my exams.

So here it is, Download MT-Protect_1.0.zip and follow the installation instructions . If you are upgrading from the beta, you will need to run the upgrade script that will create a new table.

This new release includes several new features: •

Typekey groups, this is where you create groups of Typekey users from example Friends etc. To assist you in creation of these groups, a new list_commenters.tmpl has been included in the distribution so you can select Typekey commenters to add to a new group. •

Protection of entire blogs --...

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This isn't related to Movable Type but here's another SEO contest but this time it is for Indian bloggers. The contest is called The best Indian Business School Blog and I entered it yesterday on my personal blog but thought of posting it here too.

On November 25, 2004, The Poseidon team will check rankings for The best Indian Business School Blog and will award prizes depending on google's ranking on that day (and pagerank is also considered, 6/10 for Movalog)

Prizes: * First prize: INR 7,500 * Second prize: INR 5,000

If you want to help me out win this contest, then link to this entry...

<a href="http://blog.arvind-satya.com/archives/2004/11/the_best_indian.php" title="The best...

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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 weren't editable in Internet Explorer • Textareas would break the layout of the entry screen in Internet Explorer • CustomFields data would get erased during Power Editing mode. • If a field description was empty the brackets would still showThis new version also implements a new resizing control for textareas. Many users complained the previous method either didn't work or looked ugly. As a result, the new control takes up much less space, doesn't cause the layout to break...

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I had forgotten to share these little goodies that I frequently use. The little search bar in Firefox is indespensible for me and I have all sorts of search engines there including many Movable Type resources. Here are three that I use most frequent. To install just click the link and click ok on the dialog box that appears, restart Firefox and you should have a nice new search engine added to the drop down list of the search box. • MT Plugins Directory • Learning Movable Type • Movalog

Any others? Post them in the comments!

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Many people seem to want to know how to alphabetize their archives, ie instead of the newest entry at the top to the oldest entry at the bottom, they want entries starting with A at the top and Z at the bottom. This can be done quite simply from MT as well. Just use <MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

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Yesterday's post began with a soliloquy on the relative ease of theft that comes along with standards-based design. This is an issue I'm deeply concerned about, for obvious reasons. I've had to tackle some hard questions head on when it comes to CSS theft. I still don't have any answers, only opinions.

Some excellent discussion ensued on both topics yesterday, but there was some confusion between them. Let's free this topic from the specific case, and move along to the more general issue at hand.

CSS is a design language. It's the foundation of a site layout, just as much as PostScript is the foundation of a poster or brochure. Can the code...

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There is an email going around from Ben Trott to gather people to test MT 3.1. The release to the public is scheduled for August 31st. Reading the email, it seems to be sent to everyone that has either bought a license for MT or signed up to the developer's network. Again the same rules as the previous alpha/beta testing apply including "you must agree not to publicly discuss any details of the software or the beta testing experience itself."

If interested in signing up, a link has been provided to a form to sign up from. People will then be chosen at random for the beta testing ! The beta begins Monday August 9th and will run in phases so as not to introduce any beta-level bugs into a...

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