One of Movable Type's most powerful traits is its flexibility to adapt to practically any weblog design or use you can imagine. For the average user, most of this flexibility comes from Movable Type's template engine.

The template engine is crucial to automating the process of publishing and is what makes a publishing system go. When a rebuild is performed, templates are merged with content to create a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

These templates are what control the design and layout of your site and what keeps that design separate from the content. Templates describe where you want...

continue reading ...

Updated. Originally published Jan 2, 2004

Error messages are the messages that are displayed when a visitor to your site encounters a server error. The most common error messages are 404: File Not Found and 403: Access Forbidden. The 404 error message is displayed when a visitor to your site tries to access a page that does not exist on your server. The 403 message is displayed when a visitor tries to enter an area on your site that is off limits to the public.

You can customize your error messages so that instead of seeing an ugly server message, your visitor sees instead a personalized note from you. The methods are different depending on if you are doing static (the default) or dynamic...

continue reading ...

I took pretty aggressive notes during the panel that came after mine. Enjoy!

(You can tell I was paying more attention to the two people who were talking about things I hadn't heard much about before; less notes from their portions. Both were very good.)

Tantek Çelik

• Good CSS: standards • Bad CSS: abuses, misuses, amazing screwups (tables poorly mixed with css) • Ugly CSS: necessary: hacks, workarounds, wishes they never existed • CSS2.1 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation: this is big news. CSS2? forget it. 2.1 incorporates changes, errata, adds the colour orange. • CSS2.1 reflects reality of current implementations • CSS validator updates, updates for validating...

continue reading ...

Updated. Originally posted in early 2004.

The template edit windows and the New Entry edit windows in Movable Type can easily be made larger with a simple adjustment.

MT3.2

In the folder that contains your static MT files on your server, open the file style.css in a text editor.

To change the edit-entry window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-entry .full-width { width: 577px; height: 400px; }

To change the template edit window, find the following lines of code:

#edit-template textarea.wide { width: 618px; }

Add a height dimension after the width.

#edit-template textarea.wide...

continue reading ...

Question

I have a couple of categories. When using the MTCategories tag, these are sorted by name. However, I preferred if I could choose the order manually. There is a logical order of the categories, and the categories should be listed in that order. Can it be done?

Answer

Movable Type does not have a built-in function for achieving an arbitrary ordering of the category list. We have to use a plugin for that.

The idea for implementing the ordering is as follows: we will prefix all category names with some text, which is removed right before the category name is output to HTML. As an example please look at my top-level categories in the sidebar. These are... • Basics • Installation...

continue reading ...

Movable Type has a nifty feature called "alternate templates" which allows you to substitute the default MT interface with a customized one. These aren't "individual archive" or "category archive" template replacements, these are replacements for the actual entry-editing interface.

I've only made a handful of alternate templates, but more will be added here as I create and modify them. (You might want to look at set up first.) Currently available are: • Updated 2005/08/29: edit_entry.tmpl is for creating and editing entries. • Added 2005/05/30: preview_entry.tmpl is for previewing entries. (Deprecated. Superceded by the plugin Better Entry Preview.)...

continue reading ...

2.1 (2002.05.02)

• Added webMaster, language, lastBuildDate, and pubDate to both RSS templates. • Added encode_html="1" to all RSS fields that didn't have it already. • Added Norwegian dates. • Added test for mt-check.cgi to determine whether we are running under cgiwrap or suexec. • Added a new global tag attribute encode_url (thanks to Scott Andrew LePera and others for the idea). • Changed the behavior of the publish flag in blogger.newPost; previously, if set to false the new entry would be saved as a draft. This was a bad idea, for...

continue reading ...

3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

continue reading ...

What do all these folders do?

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

There are several folders in the default distribution of Movable Type. This tutorial will attempt to guide you through them all so that you feel more comfortable with what they do and contain.

extlib/

This directory contains perl libraries and files that support Movable Type. These are the modules that are needed by Movable Type to run (for example those modules listed in mt-check.cgi are normally found here) Some plugins also require some special perl modules to be installed, and normally you can install these perl modules into the extlib/ directory. For example, the BlogTimes plugin requires the GD perl module to be installed. Obviously you can get your host to install it and then that module would be available server wide. However, if you uploaded the files provided on the BlogTimes page into your extlib/ directory, you would have the GD module installed just for your installation without having to go to your host....

continue reading ...

This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

continue reading ...

This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

PHP Dynamic Publishing Architecture

The first thing we should cover is the architecture behind it all. In terms of PHP scripts, the following shows the order of invocation from request to response. • HTTP request • .htaccess rule / error document • mtview.php • MT Class (MT.php) • MTViewer Class, aka Smarty (MTViewer.php) • PHP • HTTP response with output

Let's examine each stage of...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

As mentioned previously, using Smarty for pagination isn't difficult. Of course, the simple example already given doesn't really do much - your users would still need to know about it, and manually construct the URL. That wouldn't be much fun. Using Smarty, we can do the work for them!

You'll need to start with a "total" count. I use MTCategoryCount, as I'm doing this on category archives. If you wanted to do a complete blog archive, you may want to use MTBlogEntryCount or something similar. You could also perform a similar process for comments with MTEntryCommentCount, trackbacks with MTEntryTrackbackCount, etc. {{capture...

continue reading ...

If you're building or maintaining a dynamic website, you may have considered the problem of how to get rid of unfriendly URLs. You might also have read Bill Humphries's ALA article on the topic, which presents one (very good) solution to this problem.

The main difference between Bill Humphries's article and the solution I will present here is that I decided to do the actual URL transformations with a PHP script, whereas his solution uses regular expressions in an .htaccess file.

If you prefer working with PHP instead of using regular expressions, and if you want to integrate your solution with your dynamic PHP sites, this might be the right method for you....

continue reading ...

<MTPerlScript> is tag for Movable Type templates. If you know how to write Perl code, this custom tag gives you remarkable flexibility in producing pages from Movable Type. You can literally do any kind of manipulation you can think of using your Movable Type data.

This tag was written with a 'trust-the-programmer' mentality (or in this case, the template writer). There aren't any restrictions...

continue reading ...

I'm releasing an updated version of MT-Notifier today. This adds a couple of changes: 2.4.4 - Added MTNotifierCatID template tag to display ID of context category.

This change allows you to use the MTNotifierCatID tag inside of a context category - useful for pulling out the category ID when you are in a category archive, for instance, and allowing you to dynamically create subscriptions for categories. 2.4.5 - Added ability to specify parameter "url" on subscription form.

If you create your own subscription form, add the parameter "url" to the form. You can make this hidden, and I would probably suggest doing so, but you could also allow it to be a drop-down list or something....

continue reading ...

After you have started to modify the Movable Type templates according to your own style, you will probably find out, that this "programming by tags" is a little bit restricted. Often you want to use a condition for creating the HTML output in one or the other way. But Movable Type isn't able to support this very well.

And again, a plugin will do the work.

What do you need Comparisons for?

In this weblog an entry's title area consists of two parts. On the left side there is the title describing the subject. On the right side there is the date of creation.

With some entries I do not want the date to be visible. For example the entry »help« should be...

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 ...

For those who aren't using the dynamic publishing feature of Movable Type (see below), experiencing slow rebuild times is not an infrequent complaint especially as the size or complexity of the blog and its templates grows. While there are very good reasons to rebuild, there are no good reasons for it to be painfully slow.

In this essay, we will detail a number of reasons why your rebuild times might be slow and steps you can take to drastically reduce or completely eliminate the time you spend waiting for Movable Type to finish its work.

Upgrade to Movable Type 3

Has anything significant happened to you in the 16 months? Probably so. Well, the same can be said for Movable...

continue reading ...

Blogs that have multiple authors sometimes have the need for a 'credits' page or something like that that lists everyone. This plugin allows you to do just that by providing a <MTAuthors> tag that Movable Type lacks. Continue reading for documentation and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtauthors-1_32.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'authors.pl' file in...

continue reading ...