Everyone loves having a great looking site, but for most people who aren't well versed in the technical details of HTML and CSS, tweaking your blog's look isn't easy. Being able to easily pick a style from a rich library of choices is essential.

So, we made the move in Movable Type 3.2 to a new set of Six Apart standard styles that are shared with both our TypePad and LiveJournal services. There's an immediate benefit of being able to use any one of a number of existing styles. But in the future, with over ten million blogs sharing the same single set of styles and markup, there's going to be a new and rapidly expanding base of additional styles available that we think is...

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Question

How do I install the StyleCatcher Plugin?

Answer

• Download the StyleCatcher plugin1 and unzip the file to your local computer. The files should be organized into two folders within a StyleCatcher folder. For example, after unzipping the file for version 1.0 of the plugin, you would have the following two folders, each with other folders and files inside them:

• StyleCatcher-1.0/mt-static/ • StyleCatcher-1.0/plugins/

• Open your FTP program and log into your server.

• Navigate to your mt-static directory2, and upload3 the contents of the StyleCatcher-1.0/mt-static/...

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We're glad to announce an update to the StyleCatcher plugin announced last week. StyleCatcher 1.01 fixes a number of little bugs, offers some helpful documentation in the README file about how to get started, and introduces a cool new feature: The Greasemonkey Style Installer.

StyleCatcher is designed to be able to retrieve styles from any style repository that follows a few simple conventions we've defined, and we'll be publishing documentation for how you can host your own style repository. But to get started, you can test this new functionality with our own Movable Type style library.

Our goal was to make switching styles as automatic as possible. So, if you're using Movable Type...

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StyleCatcher is a simple but powerful plugin built for Movable Type 3.2 that lets you easily swap out any one of dozens of different styles on your Movable Type-powered site. The plugin also allows you to use other style repositories, so you can get styles that aren't provided by Six Apart.

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Question

How do I apply a new style from the Style Library?

Answer

Note: Styles from the Style Library are only compatible with the new 3.2 Default Templates.

Applying the Style Manually

• Download the zip file for the style of your choice from the Style Library and unzip it to your local computer. All of the files should be organized into a single folder named after the style and prefixed with theme-. For example, after unzipping the file for the Beckett style, the folder would be named theme-beckett.

• Open your FTP program and navigate to your mt-static...

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With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show you how to create the library javascript that allows you to browse themes, it simply shows you how to make your themes discoverable by StyleCatcher. In this tutorial, I shall use the example of Vicksburg, the default theme with 3.2.

Every style or theme should be in its own folder (with no subfolders) which should contain: • The css stylesheet. • Two thumbnails named thumbnail.gif and thumbnail-large.gif. These two files are used in StyleCatcher as previews of...

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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 themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them however Six Apart have created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on any of these three platforms and designers can...

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08.25.2005

Announcing Movable Type 3.2

We're proud to announce that Movable Type 3.2 is now available. This release improves upon what is already the most powerful blogging platform by offering a better experience at every step. This new version combines the strengths and innovations you have come to expect from Movable Type over the past four years, boosted by the addition of over 100 unique new features that will help your blogs truly shine.

Best of all, it's a free update for any licensed user of Movable Type 3.x. Personal users will be happy to find that the Free edition now offers unlimited blogs. And personal users who want a multi-user license...

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Some useful Movabletype plugins have been updated, StyleCatcher, which shipped with MT3.2 has been updated. Note that you can edit the MT templates, I have, but be careful not to change the functionality of the default classes or stylecatcher will not work for you. I changed all my templates to point at a second stylesheet, which gives my own "tweaks". This lets me change the background style with impunity... why is it that most of the styles in the MT style library are fixed width? For that matter, why is MT itself fixed width?

As regular visitors may notice, I've been playing with stylecatcher for a little bit, some things change, and some things stay the...

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08.31.2005

Simple Example Templates for Movable Type 3.2

Chris Vannoy has posted some simple Movable Type templates based on the new default templates in Movable Type, but with much of the XHTML structure stripped out so they're easier to read. As Chris explains in his following post, they're not designed to be used on an actual site, since the styling would be pretty ugly by default, but they're a useful basis for creating your own completely custom design if you just need a place to get started.

We'll be producing additional documentation about all the new abilities that templates and styles have in Movable Type 3.2, but this is a great place to start if you...

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

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 themes) have been called tag soup due to the sheer number of <div>s and indents.

What a mess - why did they do it?

The new themes can be quite intimidating the first time you come across them, however Six Apart created these new themes for several reasons: • First of all, Typepad, LiveJournal and Movable Type now share exactly the same markup. This means that a theme will work on...

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Page: 1 2 3 4 4 Pages.

Working with Style Catcher

With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show...

Continue reading "Working with Style Catcher"

Posted on 10/22/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CustomFields 1.12

UPDATE: I've just pushed out a silent update that fixes a problem with custom entry field descriptions not showing. Thanks Nilesh! A new version of CustomFields is available that fixes four bugs that people found;CustomFields...

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Movable Type's often been praised for both the elegance of its user interface and the way the system's published pages look. But the current generation of default designs have gotten a little long in the tooth, and we wanted to make sure that designers who take the time to make templates and styles get the most value out of their effort. So, we've made some significant improvements to Movable Type 3.2's templates. Here's some highlights: • An attractive new default stylesheet that works easily with 1, 2, and 3-column layouts • Dozens of great new themes available for download for your blog, and the ability to customize these or create your own using professional tools like Adobe GoLive...

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Power Tools is one central place to get lots of open source code and components that Six Apart's team has released. Power Tools help you build better sites, apps, and platforms and to connect your applications to the rest of the web.

Most Power Tools code is released under open source licenses, making it possible to build on the work here in your own applications and services. Note: Power Tools are provided as technology demonstrations for our community, but we can't offer technical support for their use, installation, or configuration.

Plugins

• StyleCatcher 1.01: StyleCatcher is a simple but powerful plugin built for Movable Type 3.2 that lets you easily swap out any one of...

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Since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, the team has moved nearly all of their efforts to processing help tickets and answering customers' questions as well as working on editing the the Movable Type User Manual. We're thrilled to have so much feedback, as the response indicates just what an overwhelming number of downloads we've had of the new version.

As many of you may know, the new manual is a complete rewrite of our documentation and because of that, we're still working to bring it up to the high standard that both you and we expect. We've been incorporating many users' suggestions left in the comments on each article but there is a lot more to do. In particular the...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

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I've assembled some templates to build a photo gallery with Movable Type. What makes mine different and special from all the others? Easy: it's compatible with MT version 3.2. That means it'll work with the StyleCatcher plugin and the Movable Type Style Generator!

The only special requirement to use these templates is PHP. PHP is used to calculate the image size. The plugin Better File Uploader - with its For Photo Gallery button - will make adding photos go much quicker.

I've created a small example gallery, if you're interested in seeing the result before trying it yourself.

Setup a New Weblog

First, you'll want to create a new...

continue reading ...

We're thrilled to announce the newest, and easiest, way to get started with Movable Type: Yahoo! Small Business web hosting now includes Movable Type. All of us on the Movable Type team have worked with the folks at Yahoo to make this the best experience possible for professionals who want to get started with blogging.

If you sign up for Yahoo! web hosting, you get a reliable, robust web hosting account with hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth and plenty of storage space. But you also get a name you know and trust offering a blogging platform that's the most popular choice for businesses.

Many companies, especially small businesses, are unfamiliar with blogging and might even...

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For those who may be wondering, I have obtained the 'Recent Comments' and 'Recent Trackbacks' stuff in the sidebar of the homepage using the following template code.

encode_xml is used to guard against quotes, ampersands and the like. encode_ampersands is a plugin that does the same job for URLs, changing & into &amp; in order that the page does not become invalid.

<MTIfPingsActive> <div class="module-trackbacks module"> <h2 class="module-header">Trackbacks</h2> <div class="module-content"> <p>Received Pings</p> <ul class="module-list"> <MTPings...

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Shaun Inman has just launched Mint, a cool new statistics application that you can install on your web server to track referrers, visitors, searches, and user agents. Mint is $30, and if you want more information, the best place to check might be Shaun's Movable Type-powered blog.

Trackbacks:

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