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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As the campaign has been successfully completed, here's MT Blogroll 2.0. Thanks to all those that donated to the campaign, the donors will get priority if bugs or problems are faced. If you feel like donating, the campaign is now over, but feel free to use the donate button on the sidebar.

There are some new features including the ability to quickly add a blogroll entry by just entering the URI and having MT-Blogroll gather all the other information. I've also added the ability to define the the names of the author's of the blogs and the target of the blog.

I think all the bugs from the previous version should've been fixed, if you experience a bug, drop me a note.

If you are already using MT...

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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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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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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UPDATE: Multiblog 1.1 has been released which fixes bugs with the GlobalListings. I have updated the tags in this tutorial to correspond to MultiBlog only.

Have you got two or more blogs that you would like to 'merge.' By merge I mean show all entries on one page, chronologically and inline - for a greater understand take a look at my blog. The front page shows entries from the main blog plus the sideblog - the sideblog entries are formatted differently, the little bars !

The plugins you will need are: * MultiBlog * GlobalListings

Multiblog does have the GlobalListings plugin built into it, but at the time of writing this tutorial that section of the plugin didn't work. So I am using...

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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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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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