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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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...

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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...

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Atom is a standardized format for describing weblog content. With a standard format, you can exchange weblog content not only between web services but between command line tools--that's the idea behind some Java programs called "atomflow." To the same end as the atomflow project, I'm delighted to present a Perl module for creating command line Atom tools. I'm using it to post Flickr photos to a TypePad sidebar, but I'm sure you'll have many more ideas for it.

XML::Atom::Filter

The Atom format is being designed as a lingua franca of weblog content. Recognizing that a standard format makes meaningful integration between software programs easier, Diego Doval, Matt Webb, and Ben Hammersley invented...

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Updated. Originally posted April 3, 2005.

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require...

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One of the great things about RSS is that you can display, or "feed" in, headlines and content from other people's websites directly onto your own website. In another article, we've already covered what "syndication" is, and RSS, and how you can use a newsfeed reader to efficiently read and browse through the latest content from your favorite weblogs and news sites. The focus of this article will be on the other main use of RSS - feeding external content into your site. An example of this can be found here on my recipe website. Clicking on a sidebar link opens a new page with several feeds from various food and cooking websites. Check the page at a later time, and if there...

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{Ed. Note: The version of Omniweb reviewed in this old article predates the current Omniweb browser, rebuilt from the ground up using the KHTML/Webcore rendering engine to deliver excellent standards compliance.}

Alongside the slew of existing browsers available for Mac OS X {see Mac Browser Roundup – Ed.} is a relative newcomer, developed from the ground up to take advantage of the new Operating System. Its name? Omniweb.

But how does Omniweb fare when it comes to web standards? Earlier versions, while highly praised for an elegant user interface and strong support of international character sets, fell drastically short in CSS and W3C DOM support.

According to...

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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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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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Looking around the web, you've run across plenty of URLs that look like: /content.cgi?date=2000-02-21/article.cgi?» id=46&page=1

Server side scripts generate the content of those pages. The content of a particular page is uniquely determined by the URL, just as if you requested a page with the URL /content/2000-02-01.html or /article/46.1.html. These pages are different than server-generated pages created in response to a form like a shopping cart, or enrollment. However, search engines will not index these content pages, because search engines ignore pages generated by CGI scripts as potential blind alleys.

A search engine would follow a URL like

/content/2000/02/2...

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With the most difficult part of running Movable Type -- the installation -- behind you, it is time to get started using MT.

It all begins with The Movable Type Content Management System (CMS). This script is the heart and soul of what makes powerful weblog publishing possible.

The CMS contains the majority of the intelligence and work flow that makes Movable Type what it is. Whether it involves posting an entry, adding a colleague as an author, or publishing your content with a whole new style, it is the CMS that is doing the heavy lifting.

By default the CMS script is named mt.cgi, although this...

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• Once an entry or category has been set to receive TrackBack pings, disabling pings for it through the UI will not actually refuse pings to that item but will suppress display of those pings. • Rebuilds will fail silently after saving an entry if a problem exists in your templates (for example, mismatched tags or a missing include module). An error will be shown, however, upon manual rebuild using the "Rebuild Site" functionality. • The nofollow plugin will cause a spurious warning for users with older versions of Perl upon running mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

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Updated April 30, 2005

Once in a while you might just want to show actual code - HTML, PHP, or Javascript - in an entry you make in Movable Type. For example, say I want to show the A HREF tag and code to get to elise.com. It looks like this:

<a href="http://www.elise.com">elise.com</a>

However, if I simply type that code in while I'm writing the entry, the resulting page will not show the tags and code, but the actual link: elise.com.

So how do you display code in entries? There are several methods:

1. Manually write out the symbol equivalents of your code. If all you want to do is write a short tag, the easiest way may be to write out the < and...

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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...

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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'sql.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins'...

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<MTOnThisDay> Movable Type Plugin

The plugin support for Movable Type 2.2 is fantastic! And now we can develop the stuff that Ben just hasn't gotten around to yet. Here's one-- I've created a container tag that lets you pull entries that match the current system/entry month and day.

If you want to read more about it, visit the MT Plugin support forum page I've set up for this plugin.

To download the plugin, click here.

Updated on July 5. See included readme.txt file for details.

...

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2.0b1 (2002.02.18)

• Lots of changes to the UI: leftnav, topnav, edit-entry screen, new-entry screen, etc. • Blog Editing Menu has now changed greatly to provide space for a welcome message (editable in blog config), blog stats, and links to 5 most recent posts and comments. • Added the ability to do NFS-safe database locking using .lock files and link(). This is not something most people should worry about; if it affects you, it's likely that you will know it. :) Thanks to Kelsey Cummings for ideas and code. • Hold and Release are now Draft and Publish...

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When I started out as a web designer, accessibility seemed quite a simple and achievable goal: provide alternative descriptions for all your graphics, and make sure the background colour and text color have good contrast. Accessibility was easy, took little extra work, and the resulting page didn't look different from millions of other first-generation web pages out there, i.e., dull, grey and unattractive.

Time has moved on and accessibility on the web is no longer simple. From being a largely text-based medium that was easily accessible via a variety of high- and low-tech devices, the web has now become a rich multimedia environment.

As a result, much of it is now...

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An unauthorized companion to the Online Style Guide of the Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library

XHTML is the standard markup language for web documents and the successor to HTML 4. A mixture of classic (HTML) and cutting–edge (XML), this hybrid language looks and works much like HTML but is based on XML, the web's "super" markup language, and brings web pages many of XML's benefits, as enumerated by the Online Style Guide of the Branch Libraries of The New York Public Library.

If you want your site to work well in today's browsers and non–traditional devices, and to continue to work well in tomorrow's, it's a good...

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There is a bug in the 3 column version of Panes so I'm taking it down until I get it sorted out. The links in the left sidebar show up as links in Firefox but aren't active for some reason. It works perfectly in IE, which is a first for me. The 2 column versions are not affected.

UPDATE : Fixed it, and the corrected files have been uploaded.

Posted by The Style Monkey at January 11, 2005 02:42 PM

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Looking for a way to incorporate a Photo Gallery into your MT blog? Check out Photo Gallery Templates from StopDesign.com.

There are many ways to create a web-based photo album or photoblog in Movable Type. This tutorial addresses just one method for creating a photo album, and is based on the steps I took to create my MT-based photo album. This tutorial is for experienced MT users and assumes familiarity with plugins, CSS, creating a new weblog, category archiving, and uploading images. Although long, the tutorial is easier than it looks, especially if you want a photo album that works just like mine. It's always the customizations that take time. In this tutorial I will give...

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