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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Monitoring your web site's activity really only serves two purposes: ego stroking and visitor analysis. It's a lot of fun to watch a site's visitor base grow, but being able to see what a reader is looking for and how they visit is something that can immensely help your site grow .

Unfortunately, I haven't found a single statistics analysis package that does everything. There are lots of packages that do lots of different things, all presenting data in slightly different ways. Combine what you can glean from each of them and it'll become more clear who is visiting your site, what they want to read, and how they came in. Once you know all that, you can...

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Except when you're writing or editing entries, much of the time spent in Movable Type is in managing the listings of entries, comments, TrackBacks, authors, or other items in the system. In past versions, listings could be inconsistent, with listings offering varying degrees of control, and the arrangement of information on some pages being frustrating. Worse, when the same type of information was listed in two different places, it wasn't always the same. For example, the comment listings page and the display of comments on an individual entry worked in completely different ways.

Every listing page improved

With Movable Type 3.2, we've made some massive improvements to the way that...

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After the dutchpink was released, I had an idea to skin Movable Type such that a user could easily switch between stylesheets. So after a lot of work with javascript, here is the package:

SkinningMT.zip SkinningMT.tar.gz

1. Extract the contents of the distribution 2. Upload the tmpl files in ASCII to the appropriate places (MTDIR/tmpl/cms) 3. Upload mt-styleswitcher.php and the styles/ directory into your StaticWebPath (if none then your into your MT Directory, same location as mt.cgi)

The drop-down menu shows up on the main menu ( screenshot) The only requirement is that your server runs PHP. The styles directory, its contents and mt-styleswitcher.php goes into your StaticWebPath. In mt-styleswitcher.php, change movalog.com to your domain name...

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Chuck recently asked about adding a blogroll to MT. I pointed him to this tutorial rather than pointing him to Blogrolling.com.

Ever since Blogrolling changed ownership, I've felt that the service has been going downhill. A few months ago, when I removed the blogrolling php code off my site load times drastically decreased. One of my main peeves with blogrolling was that it was located on a remote server. During the transition period that server was often down, and caused load times on my site to shoot up - so high that my site was nearly unaccessible. Another problem with the Blogrolling involves the site Blogshares.com. Some script that were heavily relied on were deleted and caused...

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As you probably already know, Movable Type 3.2 was released and boasts a stunning featureset. I personally have plenty of plugins, tools and other announcements to make which are all related to this release. The first of which you've probably guessed by the title. I present the Movable Type Style Generator. Quite simply, click on any element on the page and a box will appear allowing you to change any of the element's properties from background color to font faces and styles. After you're done, hit the Download button to get the stylesheet, 3.2 compatible! The beauty of this style generator is since it creates 3.2 compatible stylesheets, you can use them across any of Six Apart's...

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One feature I find lacking in MT is yearly archives. A yearly archive basically is just a page of twelve calendars - one for each month of the year - see mine in action here with permalinks to the days.

Now there are two ways you can do this, one easier than the other. The first - harder - way to do it is installing Brad Choate's PerlScript Plugin and then follow the steps he has laid out here. I call this the harder method because for every year you are blogging you need to create a new index template and call the template module.

The second method, all you need to do is setup the archiving and MT will do a lot for you - including tidying up you monthly archive list ! You will need...

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Learning Movable Type has an article that guides you through the steps of creating a three blog layout. The only problem is that the #container width has ben set to 904 pixels. This means that on a 800x600 layout you're going to get the nasty horizontal scroll.

The best way around this is to create a fluid three column layout ( what are fluid/fixed layouts ?).

1.Change the width of #container to 90%

2.Delete #center and corresponding div tags in all your templates

3.Duplicate your sidebar, find the following/similar code in your stylesheet #right { float: left; width:200px; overflow: hidden; }

And replace it with the following: #right { float: right; width: 20%;...

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UPDATE: No more CSS, have MT auto indent.

The "Primary Category" drop down menu just lists the categories sorted alphabetically and doesn't obey the category heirarchies you may have setup. This is especially annoying if you have several similarly named sub categories under different parent categories. So here's a hack that will change the way that field works, the categories will now obey the category heirarchy as shown in the screenshot (click for a larger view) It's probably best to note that I'm not the most perl savvy and this code may not be the most efficient/quickest/best way to do it but it works for me.

You'll need CMS.pm, open it up. Replace everything between

## Load...

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UPDATE: EnhancedEntryEditing has been bumped up to v1.01 to fix a bug where popup windows wouldn't disappear after you were done with them. Grab the update, you only need to upload EnhancedEntryEditing.pl

Ajaxify is a series of BigPAPI plugins that adds various javascript and AJAX widgets into Movable Type's interface. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. The first of which is EnhancedEntryEditing. This plugin adds two widgets into the entry screen: • Resizable Textareas - I personally find the textareas on the entry screen too small and find it annoying to hack the stylesheet everytime I upgrade Movable Type. This plugin now adds "Increase Size" and...

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I'm happy I could provide this plugin to the MT community.

This plugin, BigTemplateWindow, is for a really big template editing window. The size of template editing box is only limited by that of your monitor. :) First I developed this just for a big template box. In the process of doing it, several useful features was added. I hope almost all MT users could be a little happy by using this.

Requirement

IE or Firefox/Mozilla.

The use of TAB key and other features was developed and tested only on IE and Firefox/Mozilla browsers. Adaptation into Opera and other browsers are...

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Lead-ins are an eye-catching mechanism usually found in print publications. Recreating that effect for the web is easy to do, but it could be easier. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a 'leadin' tag that you could use to identify the word or phrase you want to style like that? Well...

MT-Macro to the rescue! Actually, the technique described here utilizes 3 of my Movable Type plugins. All functioning...

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This is a bug fix release that fixes some major bugs with the dynamic templating tags. A big thank you to all the folks that reported this bug, sorry it took me so long to find the bug! Go grab the update.

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After talking to Brad about the new version of MT, I felt it deserves a whole blog post about it just to talk about how amazing it is and get rid of all this excitement building up in me

First of, David's Subcats being built into the application. Well I knew it ! In #mt-plugins, David told me and a few others that he would not be entering his plugin into the contest - on further questioning he said that there was another party involved. Well once he said that it wasn't too hard to guess the right answer and we were helped by the fact that when he guessed it he either changed the topic or kept quiet ! Never-the-less I am very excited about this because Sub Categories are vital for many...

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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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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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Even more ways to be updated on new posts on Movalog. I've pulled together all my feeds that I generate and have added them to one page. The feeds currently available are separate feeds for Movalog and the Sideblog and a combined set that will display posts as shown on the front page. With the impending release of the directory and forums, two more feeds will appear from each.

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You now know why there hasn't been any updates in nearly 20 days! I'm very proud to announce MT Blogroll 1.0. Basically MT Blogroll is a blogroll manager, similar to blogrolling.com. You are able to store various details about a link including its URI, Name, Description and Relationship and assign them to various categories. If you have been using another blogroll manager like blogrolling.com or blo.gs, you can use the Import OPML tool to import those links into MT Blogroll.

I would suggest reading the README first which describes the installation process and includes some example code. Other documentation includes the Tag Reference which describes the template tags that MT Blogroll...

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I have been playing around with Zoto and I'm quite impressed.

Uploading Pictures

One of the things about this service is the ease at which you can upload photos. Just download their client (called Zulu) set it up to scan folders where you put your photos and it'll do the rest for you meaning it scans the folders, makes thumbnails of the images and uploads them ! If you add photos to those folder then the client will pick them up too. I experienced a few problems with the client. It told me it had uploaded all my photos yet when I looked in my account they didn't show up, on uninstalling and reinstall the client they showed up !

Of course you could manually upload them, by selecting...

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The first question/answer from Ask Arvind...

Lea writes:

Can you provide tips on how to have cruft-free URLs (a la diveintomark.org, as well as others)? I already have this employed in my blog, but a lot of others don't.

The diveintomark tutorial in question can be found here.

First of all what is cruft ? Cruft is basically the extensions of webpages for example .php, .html etc. In the field of SEO it is meant to be very bad. Here's a - hopefully easier - method to have cruft-free urls. For this to work you will need to install the Short-Titles plugin (thanks Amit!)

•

Blank out "File Extension for Archive Files" under Weblog Config → Preferences •

Change the Archive File...

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