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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Movable Type comes with a default search capability that your site visitors can use to search for keywords in your weblog entries. You can add functionality to the search form that people see on your site, and make adjustments to the templates that govern how the results are displayed.

Keyword Search Templates

Suppose you want to change the way the search results look when someone uses the default MT search function to do a search on your website.

Movable Type's templates that govern the MT keyword search results pages operate differently than the other weblog templates. (You may have noticed this if you have changed the name of your default weblog stylesheet away from...

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Updated Sept 14, 2004

A sideblog is a separate weblog which appears in the sidebar of your main weblog. Sideblogs are often used as a convenient way to list out interesting links, something akin to a frequently-updated, public list of IE favorites. Rather than mixing in your "this link is cool" entries in with all of your other entries, with the accompanying overhead of code for individual entries, comments and trackbacks, you can streamline your links into a linkblog.

A great example of a linkblog can be found at MovableBLOGthe Asides section in the right sidebar.

Making a sideblog is pretty straightforward; it can be accomplished by creating a new weblog in Movable Type and using...

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Everyone loves having a great looking site, but for most people who aren't well versed in the technical details of HTML and CSS, tweaking your blog's look isn't easy. Being able to easily pick a style from a rich library of choices is essential.

So, we made the move in Movable Type 3.2 to a new set of Six Apart standard styles that are shared with both our TypePad and LiveJournal services. There's an immediate benefit of being able to use any one of a number of existing styles. But in the future, with over ten million blogs sharing the same single set of styles and markup, there's going to be a new and rapidly expanding base of additional styles available that we think is...

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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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Updated September 23, 2004 There are two basic ways to create an about page in Movable Type. The first is to just create it as any ordinary entry. Then use the permalink URL to link to it from your main page. Unless you want comments and trackbacks on your About page, disable them for that entry. The other method is to create a new index template just for your About information. The steps for this method are outlined as follows: 1. From the templates menu, select Create new index template. Name the template something recognizable as referring to an about page. Pick a name for the output file and enter it in the output file field. Use either the .html or .php extension for the...

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Web developers have various methods for creating print friendly versions of their websites. By using a server side routine or print stylesheets, the print version may strip out images and navigation that lose their meaning on the printed page, and perhaps display the page in a single column using a different font with a different size.

But what happens when there is no printable version, or the printable version includes ads or other settings that don't suit you, the user? That's where user stylesheets come in. Armed with a little CSS knowledge and some web development tools, you can easily create your own print versions formatted exactly the way you want them....

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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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Movable Type offers five default stylesheet templates to use with your MT website. If you are like me, not a web designer and only possessing a cursory knowledge of CSS, you may not want to stray too far from the defaults. But then that doesn't leave us with a lot of choice in the number of default styles from which to choose. Fortunately, Typepad (Six Apart's hosted service based on Movable Type) has several default styles that will work with the new Movable Type templates.

I've tested the following Typepad styles on the new default MT3 templates, with the sidebar on the right hand side, and they appear to work fine. If you have changed your MT3 templates layout at all, for...

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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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When you are first setting up a new weblog, Movable Type prompts you to choose a file extension in the weblog config preferences section. The default setting is HTML.

If your server allows PHP scripts, and you would like to add customization features that aren't part of the default Movable Type system, it is highly recommended that you choose PHP as your default file extension preference in place of HTML. Doing so allows you to take advantage of many freely available PHP scripts to help customize your weblog. PHP is an open source scripting language that is powerful, stable, and extremely popular for adding dynamic elements to websites. In your Movable Type weblog, PHP scripts can...

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Learning Movable Type has a tutorial on how to apply MT 3 styles to a 2.x blog but what about the other way around ?

I scanned two similar stylesheets to see what changed, basically the only thing you need to change is the definitions names mostly, the actually style definitions can stay the same. I am assuming you are using the default MT 3 templates Here is what has changed with the CSS from MT 2.x to MT 3 styles - it may not be perfect but it'll be darn close. I have listed the MT 2.x definitions and then the MT 3 definition it needs to be changed to: • .description becomes #banner h2 • #content and .blogbody becomes .content • #links becomes #right • .title becomes .content h3 • .date becomes...

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At long last I've made some updates to the Style Generator to better fit with Six Apart's standard. This means that you can finally apply the tips discussed in this tutorial to stylesheets created using the style gen. Most of the other changes are mostly on the backend code so that it's easier for me to build on it in the future. The only real change on the frontend is the addition of a splash page that allows you to select the number of columns - as cool as the on-the-fly capability was it was a major pain to support. A big thank you to Six Apart for letting me use their images, I'm a terrible graphics designer!

The biggest feature I am working on right now is the ability to load...

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Providing contact information on your weblog can be useful to your site visitors who may want to email you directly rather than submit a comment to one of your entries. You can choose to write out your email address, provide a mailto link (see MailTo Syntax for how to write out a mailto hyperlink), or you can provide a contact form. Contact forms are often preferred because they can easily hide your email address information from the spammers who regularly scour the web looking for email addresses to harvest.

I have researched and tested two free PHP-based contact form scripts - TheSiteWizard Feedback form and DodosMail - either of which you can easily implement to add a contact form...

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Movable Type weblogs require some level of maintenance, beyond just adding new content. Here are some suggestions that can help keep your blog running smoothly. If you have other suggestions not on this list, please let us know in the comments section.

Dead Links

If you link to any other websites from your blog, and or have comments or TrackBacks enabled, you need to periodically scan your site to make sure that your external links are still active. Links with URLs that are no longer valid give a "404" server error when someone clicks on them.

One of the biggest deadlink culprits can come from TrackBack links. Periodically click on the "TrackBack" button on the left side of...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Chris Vannoy of Circadian Rhythm.

Movable Type's default templates have always been intimidating things to those new to the system, and with Six Apart's decision to standardize their template structure across all three of their blogging platforms, TypePad and LiveJournal being the other two, they've become a lot more intimidating in version 3.2 of Movable Type.

This standardization is a great idea if you are a web designer already familiar with the intricacies of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The standardization means that, assuming users stick to the default templates, you could design one stylesheet that would work on sites on all three...

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Looking for a way to incorporate a Photo Gallery into your MT blog? Check out Photo Gallery Templates from StopDesign.com.

There are many ways to create a web-based photo album or photoblog in Movable Type. This tutorial addresses just one method for creating a photo album, and is based on the steps I took to create my MT-based photo album. This tutorial is for experienced MT users and assumes familiarity with plugins, CSS, creating a new weblog, category archiving, and uploading images. Although long, the tutorial is easier than it looks, especially if you want a photo album that works just like mine. It's always the customizations that take time. In this tutorial I will give...

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If you have a lot of content - entries, categories, sidebar information - sooner or later things may begin to look a little cluttered on your weblog. One way to address this is to make some of your lists expandable and collapsible, as I have done with LMT's Table of Contents. There are probably many different ways to do this. I have found one method, based on Javascript, that is simple to implement and appears to work fine, from Bleeding Ego.

1. Upload listmenu.js to your server.

Copy the following script into a new file with a texteditor. Save the script as "listmenu.js". Upload the script to a location within the public directory of your server using an FTP program. (You can...

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by Category | by Date

Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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(Cross Posted: Chinwags)

Calling Javascript Writers

I'm struggling, struggling. Let me lay out what I wish to do and you Javascript writers tell me whether it is possible. For browsers that don't support content loading in sidebars (eg Opera or Safari) I have created a frames version of MT/WP Tabs. Now I wish to take it to the next level. When someone clicks the bookmarklet for the frames version, I want the current page to appear in the main (right hand side) content with the MT/WP Tabs appearing in the left "sidebar" If you manage to figure out how to do this I will credit you with it on all files that contain your code also I will give you a GMail Invite. If you manage to figure it...

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