If you are creating a group weblog with multiple authors, you might want to customize the look of the Movable Type editing windows with the group's logo. MT3.1 makes this really easy to do. The styles.css file and the images folder that are in the folder you chose for your static files on your server are where you can find the files you will need to adjust.

Changing the logo

The default upper left-hand logo of the editing window looks like this in MT3.x:

The file name is topnav-logo.gif and it can be found in the images folder in your static files folder. You can use an image editing program like Photoshop to swap out the Movable Type logo for that of the group's. Save the image...

continue reading ...

Question

Whenever I click certain buttons in the interface, such as the Delete button, nothing happens, and I also see a Javascript error.

Answer

Many of the functions in 3.x are controlled by static Javascript files. Please see Images, styles, and documentation do not show up in the Knowledge Base for more information on the proper configuration for the static files.

continue reading ...

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 =>...

continue reading ...

In the default configurations for MT versions 2.661 and earlier, trackback links on your index and archive pages are set to generate a pop-up window containing the trackback information and pings. What if you would like to have the trackback pings appear on your individual entry pages, just as the comments do?

There are two straightforward methods for doing so. (Correction posted May 23, 2004) Both methods require that you rebuild your site in order for new trackback notices to appear on the individual entry pages. Method A method allows you to have trackback pop-ups as well as inline trackbacks. The second - Method B - involves a PHP include and requires that your site is in...

continue reading ...

With Ryan Holsten and Michael Krisher

The year 2000 came and went. Where did design go? As sad as it sounds, not terribly far. It was a year of trendiness, inspiration, imitation, and the imitation of inspired trendiness. What we can take away from the past year in digital design is the knowledge that the new medium is still deep in its early discovery phase.

Y2K (for lack of a shorter term) was going to change everything. Flying cars, artificial intelligence, talking toasters – this was our supposed fate. So where's our Jetsons lifestyle? Maybe Y3K would have been a more practical projection!

It's 11 p.m. Does your Mom know where you are?

The web is now recognized as...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Page: 1 1 Page.

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...

Continue reading "The New Themes - Making Sense of it all"

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...

Continue reading "Extending the Sidebar"...

continue reading ...

Creating a Sanitize Specification

Problem

You want to permit different HTML tags in your comment and TrackBack ping displays than what is allowed by default.

Solution

Create your own Sanitize specification.

Discussion

The default Sanitize specification does a good job of protecting your weblogs from malicious markup making its way into your layouts. It is generally recommended that you stick with the defaults unless you have good reason and are confident you understand the format of the sanitize specification as described here. Improper specification could result in a breach...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Introduction

With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily...

continue reading ...

Question

I'm having trouble getting a full export of my entries using the default export function. Are there other ways I can perform an export?

Answer

Movable Type contains a function to export all of the entries in your blog, but that doesn't mean your options stop there. You can easily export a single entry, all entries from one or more categories, or break your exports down by month (helpful for those with large blogs whose server times out on the export).

The secret is in this export format file. By downloading this file and pasting it into...

continue reading ...

Technorati, a leading blog search engine and index, has made it very easy for blog authors to get their "tagged" blog entries into Technorati's tag index. What is a tag? A tag is a type of category, and the process of tagging a simplified categorization method for your entries. The concept of tags has become popular with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. By creating tag classifications for your weblog entries, you make it easy for Technorati to index your blog entries by tags that you specify. With Technorati tagging, you get to choose how you want your weblog entries to be classified, in contrast to algorithm-driven search engines like Google that make their own...

continue reading ...

PNG files would make transparency effects a snap, except for one tiny little quirk: support for the format is great in every browser but one. Unless, of course, you resort to using some of the hacks and workarounds now available.

A List Apart ran Cross-Browser Variable Opacity with PNG: A Real Solution almost two years ago, and since that time other methods have come to light offering similar solutions of varying stripes to work around Windows IE's lack of Alpha transparency support. ( 1, 2)

Since I'm a fan of valid code, I generally haven't bothered messing around with the proprietary solutions, and the extra weight of an .htc behavior file is a bit more than my...

continue reading ...

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

The Basics

Many of the error messages you may see will take the format: Smarty Error: [in mt:##...

continue reading ...

UPDATE files are bundled in an archive.

I was very impressed with the WordPress Suggest plugin and wanted to port it over to MT. The porting was easy but the query was very slow and pulled some bad results from the database. Chad helped me last night and we had almost cleaned it up until v0.2 was released which seems to have fixed the problems I had. Try it using the search form on the sidebar.

This plugin is similar to LiveSearch (and the MT implementation) however the difference is it lets you keep the mt-search.cgi functionality which I liked. Also this plugin works slightly differently to LiveSearch, I prefer this!

Implementing it with MT is very easy, you need to have PHP and be...

continue reading ...

Question

When trying to run Movable Type, I get an error message that says Variable [xxx] not defined.

Answer

First, make sure that you used a plain text editor when making changes to the mt-config.cgi file1, and that you uploaded it to your server in ASCII mode.

If uploading the file in the proper mode does not resolve the issue, open mt-config.cgi in a plain text editor and make sure that the only lines which do not begin with a # are those which represent valid settings. The general format of the mt-config.cgi file is that there are several...

continue reading ...

Question

How can I control the permissions on the files and directories generated by Movable Type?

Answer

Permissions on the generated files and directories are controlled by the *Umask and *Perms settings in the mt-config.cgi1 file. # DBUmask 0022 # HTMLUmask 0022 # UploadUmask 0022 # DirUmask 0022 # # HTMLPerms 0777 # UploadPerms 0777

For more information on using these settings correctly, see My PHP Output Files Need To Be Executable.

1 In versions prior to 3.2, the configuration file is named mt.cfg.

...

continue reading ...

Question

I upgraded to 3.2 and updated my Individual Entry Archive template to use the latest default; but I'm getting Javascript errors when viewing those pages and/or there is no comment posting form or sign-in link for TypeKey commenters.

Answer

If you're seeing Javascript errors which say individualArchivesOnLoad is not defined and/or writeTypeKeyGreeting is not defined, then this means Movable Type cannot find the mt-site.js file. This is a new file introduced in version 3.2 which contains all of the Javascript used for commenting, and is...

continue reading ...

And this is where we dive right in to the pressing issues, the questions that matter by god! The burning quandry at the forefront of all of our minds is, of course, where in the world did they pull a generic font family like ‘fantasy' from for CSS?

It's been around since CSS1, but the CSS2 spec explains far better what exactly a fantasy font is:

Fantasy fonts, as used in CSS, are primarily decorative while still containing representations of characters (as opposed to Pi or Picture fonts, which do not represent characters). Examples include:

Latin fonts: Alpha Geometrique, Critter, Cottonwood, FB Reactor, Studz

Okay, sure. Let's face it, no one has ever...

continue reading ...

I'm happy to report the Zen Garden archives have (finally) undergone a major re-tooling.

The css Zen Garden has been desperate for some TLC for a while now. Submissions have been increasing steadily (sometimes 6 or 7 per day), but management and archiving has been a frustrating problem for quite some time. So I fixed some of the major problems.

Categorization

Since its launch on this domain over two years ago, the css Zen Garden archives have undergone numerous changes to cope with the growing volume of designs.

It seems hard to believe now, but at one point in time all designs I had received fit on one page. When that page grew too weighty, I chopped it into a handful of...

continue reading ...