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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For a lot of bloggers, participating in a community online is what motivates us and keeps us blogging. Good feedback from commenters and people sending TrackBacks can keep a weblog alive and vibrant, but negative comments or, worst of all, the plague of spam, can take all the satisfaction out of maintaining a blog.

Because nothing's more frustrating than spammers or trolls ruining your community, we've tried to make sure you have strong anti-spam tools out of the box in this new version of Movable Type. But eliminating the annoyance of spam is where the new community management features start, not where they end. So, we've made a powerful new Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2....

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UPDATE 09/06: Rebuild Site

One of my favourite features in MT 3.1 is the "Rebuild This Template" button that appears when you save a template. When you click that button it doesn't popup another window for you to confirm the rebuild, no, it just rebuilds then and there. Unfortunately the button at the bottom of the page doesn't do the same. Also because my template body field is huge, that bottom button is quite far down so I have to scroll for a bit. These two annoyances led me to hack the edit_template.tmpl file found MTDIR/tmpl/cms/, this hack is only available in MT 3.1 and greater. If you feel uncomfortable with hacking files but would like to have this hack, please contact me and I will quote you a price for the installation....

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This hack is for versions of Movable Type prior to 3.2. This hack has been implemented into Movable Type 3.2

I'm a lazy person and hate having to click repetitively to do tasks and I get easily annoyed at having to keep hitting save and then rebuild whilst making changes to my site. So a hack later I have a Save & Rebuild button which will first save the template and then rebuild it with just one click!

Open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 1149 find

sub save_object{

and add underneath it

my $sr = 0;

Next on line 1340 find

$obj->text($text);

and add underneath it

if($q->param('sr')){ $sr = 1; $app->rebuild_indexes( BlogID => $obj->blog_id,...

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Many people wanted to know how I implemented these guicktags into my comments form. So here's a quick tutorial for that. In your comments form find

<p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML> (you may use HTML tags for style)</MTIfAllowCommentHTML><br/> <textarea tabindex="4" id="text" name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea></p>

and replace it with

<div class="quicktags"><p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML><script src="http://www.movalog.com/mt/js_quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();<...

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The second plugin in the pluginset known as Ajaxify, this plugin adds a search suggestion feature to the Quicksearch box at the top when you search for entries, comments or trackback. There's very little to talk about this plugin but I should note that it is a little buggy when handling search terms with spaces for example "MT Blogroll". I've been trying to find a fix but the javascript is unreadble! None-the-less, it works quite well as can be seen from this screenshot. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. Go grab your copy.

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MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

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UPDATE

I've had this idea swimming around my head ever since Planet Mozilla launched but never implemented it because until a few weeks ago I was under the impression that my host did not provide Python.

Anyways, announcing Planet Movable Type.

What is it?

Planet MT aggregates posts from the following weblogs: • 6A ProNet (feed) • Brad Choate (feed) • Chad Everett (feed) • David Raynes (feed) • Girlie's Tips & Tricks (feed) • Learning Movable Type (feed) • MT Forge Dev (feed) • MT Plugins (feed) • MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse (feed) • Mena's Corner (feed) • Movable Type News (feed) • MovableStyle (feed) • Movalog (feed) • Neil's World (feed) • Phil Ringalda (feed) • Six Apart (feed) • The Tweezer's Edge...

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UPDATE: Donors check your Paypal emails!

I'm incredibly proud to announce CustomFields 1.0. This is a plugin set consisting of two plugins, one for entries and the other for authors, that allow you to (finally) define custom fields in a powerful way rather than resorting to hacks. This plugin consists of: • Author custom fields - this allows you to define custom fields to allow you to rebuild proper author profile/bio pages. • Author Archiving - This author plugin in the set builds on Brad Choate's Authors plugin, which means you have all those tags available. These tags can be used with the powerful author archiving system I've built into this plugin that mimics Movable Type's current...

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This new version introduces inline editing for comments by the commenters. A cookie is set when the person hits the post button on the comment form. The cookie is set to expire in 5 minutes so the person must make any edits within five minutes.

Download MT-InlineEditor_1.1.zip. Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've used MT Tags in those...

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There are several ways to make your life easier whilst having fun with HTML markup and CSS design.

Learning, the fun way

When I first tinkered around with HTML and CSS, I was a bit unsure and un-inspired as to what to do, but I employed a technique that some may frown upon. Using a variety of tools, I took a peek at stylesheets that had produced something I like. I didn't steal them but rather learnt from them on how to do such and such a thing. I would recommend trying this out as it is a hands on way to learn what various bits of CSS code do - and its much nicer to see it in action done the right way.

Sidebar Panels

If you use Mozilla/Firefox as your browser, you are in luck. EditCSS and...

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Preparing the way from the dynamic system that's going to be coming in MT 3.1 lets discuss the differences between a dynamic and static way of managing content and clear up any doubts.

Static templating is how MT has been all these years. Everytime you make the smallest change or post a new entry you need to rebuild every single page it is connected to for the change to show up. Rebuilding these pages cause physical files to appear in various directories.

With dynamic templating this is all resolved. No more files, no more rebuilding. With 3.1 you can chose how you want MT to act ie: •

Fully Dynamic - every single template is taken and parsed from the database when requested •

Fully Static - there are...

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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 instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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Movable Type 3.2 features a new take on an old friend: the Junk folder. In your email program, some messages are likely to be spam, and most email applications these days offer a folder that can be set to delete junk after a set period of time.

We've brought the same convenience and power to Movable Type. Using the new feedback scoring system described earlier, comments or TrackBacks that fall below your spam threshold score can be set to be automatically deleted after a configurable period of time. (The default is 14 days.) The best part about the new junk folder? You don't have to touch it. If you just want to accept the default settings and not mess with junk comments or TrackBacks...

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This is a test with paged "more" text... implemented using a couple of PHP tricks. :)

Read on to see it in action and to see how it's done.

The implementation of paged content is pretty simple. I'll use this test entry to explain how I did it. First of all, you'll need PHP 4 installed on your server. You can use this same technique with other server-side tools like ASP, ColdFusion, etc., but this...

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UPDATED 09/10: There was a problem with the files as phps so I've zipped them UPDATED 09/04: To fix SmartyPants

So you've downloaded the very new 3.1 with all the amazing features but you've found one problem, your plugins no longer work with the dynamic templating. Well its not only plugins, text filters also no longer work.... Here are some methods by which you can combat this problem, some may not work in all cases but its better than nothing for other cases.

• Text Filters In a previous tutorial I had linked to PHP Markdown, but a few people have contacted me about Textile as well. So I have collected PHP versions of Markdown, Textile and SmartyPants Just download the following...

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This isn't really MT specific. Many people in the past few days have asked me how I managed to increase readership on my blog. Actually I'm surprised many of them stay and read but I'm happy none-the-less.

There are a few key points if you wish to increase or maintain a readership: • Content This is the most important. Regular, on-topic content will attract many readers of the same interest. If you're writing a journal/diary don't ever think that "No One cares about me." I'll come to journals soon.

Also if you blog about a variety of things you will appeal to a larger group of people. For example, on my blog I talk about everything from technology and the internet to my everyday...

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Seeing the flurry of activity around Inline Editing on Wordpress ever since Jay Allen mentioned it on his panel at SXSW, I thought it was time us MT'ers had something similar. Download the plugin. This animation better highlights what this plugin does (600kb)

Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

I'll need to talk you through installing this. For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've...

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Via PhotoMatt I found a very interesting comments thread on what is basically an argument of Movable Type vs. WordPres. Now everyone knows that I worship Movable Type, but I wish to voice some thoughts on this topic.

Movable Type and Wordpress are aimed at completely different audiences. If you upgraded to MT 3.0 you would have seen that the title was no longer "MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System" but now was "Movable Type Publishing Platform." As can be seen from this post at Mena's Corner

One final thing. You'll notice that we're no longer describing Movable Type as a "Personal Publishing System" -- we now call it a "Publishing Platform." While "personal" remains a major...

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Currently many people refer to an MT community but I feel there isn't a proper place where this community can get together. Yes there are the forums and ProNet but the first isn't for real socializing (for lack of a better word) and the latter is geared up for devs or pros. I want a place where people will be comfortable expressing their newbiness, talking about Movable type, tips tricks, tutorial request etc. A preview is available here

Also I've been thinking about adding a type of directory service for people to list their Movable type sites for added publicity. This would be a place where people could list their blogs yet find new ones to read (this is a great way to fine new blogs...

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