Introduction

Weblogs are not just a one-way medium for publishing. With the use of a singular, often conversational voice, enhanced by the loosely coupled nature of the Internet and lightweight syndication formats, weblogs are akin to conversations, regardless of the size and makeup of the audience. "A" writes about something on their mind -- an experience, the news, or a project's status. "B" reads it and expresses their take. "C" finds both posts interesting and notes something A and B has not mentioned and so on.

Not everyone has a weblog (sadly) and not everyone wants to make...

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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 modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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Google's caching system offers several cool features; one of most useful is that the words you searched for are highlighted in the page. Most web users don't read pages carefully - they scan text for what they're looking for. This is why Google's cached-page highlighting is so useful. When the page is rendered, users don't need to read the entire page to find what they came for, the page shows them where it is. As a quick example, the words highlighted above most likely caught your eye before you actually got to reading them.

Usability heuristics state that users should not have to remember information from one...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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Sliding Doors of CSS (Part I) introduced a new technique for creating visually stunning interface elements with simple, text-based, semantic markup. In Part II, we'll push the technique even further. If you haven't read Part I yet, you should read it now.

Here, we'll cover a new scenario where no tab is highlighted, combine Sliding Doors with a single-image rollover, provide a fix for the clickable region in IE/Win, and suggest an alternate method of targeting tabs. We'll skip a basic recap of the technique (see Part I for this) in favor of jumping right back in where we left off.

No Current Tab

In Part I, we didn't account for cases where...

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Introduction

While entries make up the content of a weblog and templates control how these entries are displayed, it is the process of publishing that makes a weblog go. Movable Type refers to the process of publishing as rebuilding -- a reference to its static page generation roots. When a rebuild is performed, templates and your content are merged to publish a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

Choosing Between a Static or Dynamic Publishing Model

Movable Type provides the flexibility to choose between either static page generation or dynamic pages to optimize...

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A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects. CSS2's current state requires a separate HTML element for each background image. In many cases, typical markup for common interface components has already provided several elements for our use.

One of those cases is tabbed navigation. It's time to take back control over the tabs which are continually growing in popularity as a primary means of site navigation. Now that CSS is widely supported, we can crank up the quality and appearance of the tabs on our sites. You're most likely aware that CSS can be used to tame a plain unordered list. Maybe you've even seen lists styled as tabs, looking something like this:...

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A year ago this week, trying to keep track of everything I was learning regarding using Movable Type, I wrote my first MT tutorial and launched Learning Movable Type. Stung by comments in the forums to RTFM (read the f%$#ng manual), exasperated that the manual - while thorough - seemed to be written in some foreign geek language understandable only to those who could probably write code in their sleep, and determined that other newbies and non-techies would not suffer the tens and hundreds of hours of lost productivity pulling their collective hairs out over trying to get some dang thing on their MT blog to work, I got to writing.

It must be clear to most technically savvy people who...

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There are several situations in which you might want to combine two or more blogs into one. You might want to create a "Portal" blog which displays the most recent entries or headlines of entries from various blogs. You might want to create a Sideblog or Linkblog (see tutorial). Or you might want to have what looks to be just one blog (such as Learning Movable Type) but is actually a combination of several.

The tools you have at your disposal are David Raynes' MultiBlog plugin, PHP Includes, SSI - Server Side Includes, and RSS, among others. This tutorial will focus on the easiest of these alternatives - how to use the MultiBlog plugin to combine blogs from a single installation of...

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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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MTCalendar

A container tag representing a calendar month that lists a single calendar "cell" in the calendar display.

Attributes: • month - An optional attribute that specifies the calendar month and year the tagset is to generate. The value must be in YYYYMM format.

The month attribute also recognizes two special values. Given a value of "last," the calendar will be generated for the previous month from the current date. Using a value of "this" will generate a calendar for the current month.

The default behavior is to generate a monthly calendar based on the archive in context....

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Sometimes you may want to keep an entry, or all entries within a certain category, at the top of your weblog, above all of your other entries. For example, you may want to highlight announcements at the top of your site, or you might have a site explanation or introduction that you wish to maintain at the top. There are several ways to accomplish this.

1. Changing the date of the entry.

If all you want to do is to put one particular entry at the top of your blog, perhaps only for a limited time, the easiest way to accomplish this is to give it a date that is posted at a later date than all of the other entries. To do this, in the edit entry window, scroll to the bottom of the page....

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1.3 (2001.12.11)

• Fixed bug where days="N" would override category="Foo" in <MTEntries> tag. (cwodtke) • Added DBM file locking (shared lock when reading, exclusive when writing). • Export process now exports excerpts, and import now imports them. • When you upload a file, if a file by that name (at that location) already exists, you now get a confirmation screen to overwrite the file, or not. (Requires that File::Temp is installed.) • Added search and replace functionality. • You can now upload files into specific directories...

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Question

I've just installed Movable Type. How do I integrate my current site design into the system, so that the pages will now be updated with my Movable Type data whenever I publish a new entry?

Answer

Because each person's site is unique, there's not really a "one size fits all" way of integration with Movable Type; it's a process that differs according to your own preferences and needs. Overall, the best way to familiarize yourself with how the system works is to set up a test blog in a separate area of your site, and then make...

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2.6 (2003.02.13)

• Added Text Formatting options. Instead of a simple Convert Line Breaks checkbox, you can now set a different formatting option for each entry. Plugins can add new options to the Text Formatting menu, which allows for greater integration with the formatting within the system (for example, Text Formatting will be applied on the preview screen). • Added PostgreSQL and SQLite database drivers. • Incorporated Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin, adding an mt.cfg setting for a global default and a per-blog setting to override it. Sanitize is turned on...

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Movable Type provides a powerful API that allows developers to extend its functionality. Plugins can add tags to MT's templating system, or create full-fledged applications that interact with the MT database.

One missing piece of the API, however, has been the ability for plugins to modify MT's own interface—the screens you see when using Movable Type to manage your content.

BigPAPI is intended to fill this gap. It provides hooks so that other plugins can access and alter any page of the MT interface before it's displayed to the user. In effect, it enlarges the Plugin API—hence the name BigPAPI.

Unless you're a developer, that's probably all you need to know. The best way to...

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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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From the crown of its cranium to the tips of its Ruby-slippered toes, A List Apart 4.0 is both old and new. Old in its mission to help people who make websites see farther and jump higher. New in its design, structure, publishing system, and brand extensions.

The magazine has long advocated accessibility and web standards, providing deep and sometimes controversial insights into these areas and not infrequently presenting ideas and methods that change the way you think and work. We will never abandon this subject area, but we are once more widening our gaze to encompass disciplines and themes beyond those that have obsessed us for the past five years.

I say "once more"...

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The following topics have not bee sufficiently covered in the user manual but will be included at a future date. • Save & Rebuild button on New/Edit Entry Screen. • Creative Commons Licensing. • IP Banning. • Throttling. • Author Listing Screen. • Deleting a Weblog. • Plugins Listing Screen. • Atom ID in author profile. • General discussion of Listing Screens in Getting Started Introduction. • Expiration of sessions if Remember Me option not used. Include configuration directive and purpose of feature. • Background Tasks. Testing, purpose/explanation and configuration. • Defining Default Templates for All Weblogs. • Main Menu Welcome Message....

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Note: This essay by Jeffrey Veen originally appeared on the Adaptive Path website. We're able to reprint it here by kind permission of Jeff and Adaptive Path, who've published the essay under a Creative Commons license.

Jeff strongly advocates that content management projects fail not because of technology but because organizations don't accommodate the human factors that make a project successful. Though we make tools like Movable Type, we definitely agree that addressing human needs is the biggest challenge, so we wanted to share this piece with our audience.

So many of the companies I've spoken to lately have complained about the content on their Web sites. They say...

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