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 a post to their weblog for everything...

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Publishing Content When a Conditional is False

Problem

You want to publish some content when a conditional is false.

Solution

Use the MTElse tag inside of the container tag.

Discussion

As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, conditionals are a special form of container tags that will display their contents only if a certain condition is true. Movable Type includes MTElse, a very useful tag that can be used with conditional tags. Inside of any conditional, this tag will display its contents if the conditional is false. This template markup demonstrates its use. <MTEntryIfExtended> <p>TRUE</p> <MTElse> <p>FALSE</p> </MTElse> </MTEntryIfExtended>...

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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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Apologies to Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra for the paraphrase of the caption of his famous letter.

Current browsers are very forgiving; they quietly correct or gloss over many common HTML errors. This makes it easy for people to experience the joy of creating their own web pages with a minimum of frustration – if a page displays correctly, then it's "right."

Unfortunately, by hiding the need for structure that the web will require as it moves towards XHTML and XML, these forgiving browsers have helped create a world of structural HTML illiterates. As long as browsers continue to parse and display HTML that isn't well-formed or valid, we...

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On semantic markup, conveying its usage to those who generally don't need to care, and a reusable markup guide for your enjoyment.

This is how I like to define the term ‘semantic markup':

Semantic Markup is the result of using (X)HTML elements for their proper, intended usage.

This is a pretty limited definition, better examples exist, and it's by no means the only viewpoint out there. The terseness is partially the result of HTML being semantically limited to begin with. We don't exactly have a rich vocabulary of element types capable of capturing the meaning and nuance behind every piece of text: We have code, but we don't have caption; We have...

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Yes, I realize Movable Type is not a general-purpose content management system, but if you're in a pinch it can do wonders. Especially with this plugin, which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates. (Click the more link for more information.)

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtkeyvalues-1_53.zip

Installation

To install, place the...

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Less Is More

One key principle of interface design is not to overload your users by dumping every choice available on your site right there on the front page. Users don't mind drilling for information that needs to be drilled for. Important stuff should be readily and easily accesible, and category archives falls into the category of important stuff, especially since they're one of the primary ways someone navigates your site. But for anyone who posts on a regular basis, your category section can become rather large and unweildy, very quickly falling under the category of "choice dumping". Fifty-one categories and seventy-two months listed on your sidebar...

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Creating a Comment Submission Form

Problem

You want to create a form that accepts comment submissions.

Solution

Create an HTML form that submits its input to the Movable Type comment script or instead use the MTCommentFields tag.

Discussion

"Displaying Comments" discusses how to lay out comments. If there isn't a way for readers to make comments, then there won't be any to display. Here is a simple, example form layout that could be used in an individual entry archive template. <form method="post"...

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Question

When I include blockquote tags in my entries, the page formatting is being broken by <p> tags, and renders incorrectly.

Answer

A blockquote can contain paragraph tags, but a paragraph should not contain blockquote tags. Having invalid HTML code results in display issues, so you need to adjust how you are entering your text in the Entry Body field. • The Convert Breaks Formatting option will insert <p> and <br /> tags automatically depending on where you have line breaks in your entry text. When using this option, you...

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This section of the appendix details all configuration directives that can be defined in mt-config.cgi. Through use of these directives, you can control numerous aspects of the system.

Except for those which define things specific to your system (e.g. CGIPath and your database settings), all of them have defaults set by Movable Type. This means that not every directive will appear in mt-config.cgi. If you wish to override the default for a setting which does not appear in the file, simply add it and the desired value to your mt-config.cgi.

...

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1.2 (2001.11.04)

• Fixed bug when system's crypt implementation uses MD5 passwords (MT was not picking up the proper salt). (Monica Reyes) • Added form-validity checking to mt-comments.cgi for checking email address and URL. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Set $CGI::POST_MAX to 1MB, which means that uploads must be 1MB or less, to prevent denial of service attacks. (Aaron Straup Cope) • Added mt-export.cgi, which will export all of your MT entries into a format that can be suitably re-imported through the import mechanism. It is also useful for keeping backups...

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Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for looping through a list of values, repeating a portion of a template for each value in the list.

Installation

To install the Loop plugin, upload the file Loop.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you do not already have a plugins directory, create one before uploading the file. For more information about Movable Type plugins, see the documentation.

Contact

Please address questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, interesting usage examples, etc., to mtplugins [AT] staggernation [DOT] com, or post them in the Plugin Development area of the Movable Type Support Forum.

MTLoo...

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Question

I get an error message that says Can't call method "[something]" on an undefined value.

Answer

Can't call method "maketext"

Make sure you uploaded the following files and folders, all in ASCII mode: • extlib/I18N/ (and everything inside) • extlib/Locale/ (and everything inside) • lib/MT/L10N.pm • lib/MT/L10N/en_us.pm

Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 770

Please upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type - there was a bug in previous versions where a Tag error in a Template would cause this error to appear, instead...

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The absolute URL to your weblog archives.

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

MTBlogCCLicenseURL

The absolute URL corresponding to information about the Creative...

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Question

After making some changes to my template, I rebuilt my site, and Movable Type gave me an error saying I used a tag out of context. What does that mean?

Answer

Most Movable Type tags are context-dependent, meaning that they should only be used in the appropriate context. Context is generally determined by either the surrounding template or the surrounding container tags.

For example, since <MTEntryTitle> depends on reading a particular entry in order to return results, it must be placed inside either an MTEntries container, or used...

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• Initial beta release

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer)...

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Question

When first trying to view the Movable Type application using the mt.cgi program, I receive a long error that starts Can't load error template, got error 'Loading template 'error.tmpl' failed and continues from there.

Answer

This indicates that Movable Type can't find the files in your tmpl directory.

First check to ensure that the directory tmpl is in the same directory as mt.cgi; that inside tmpl there is a directory called cms; and that inside cms there are a number of files with the extension .tmpl.

In addition, make sure that the...

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Editing a Template

Problem

You want to create or edit a template for your weblog.

Solution

Use the template management screen.

Discussion

Movable Type automatically installs a number of default templates when a weblog is created. These templates are fine for getting started quickly; however most users will want to customize the templates to suit their own tastes and needs.

In order to edit a template, click the Templates button in the Weblog Toolbar to get to the Templates Listing Screen. The screen is divided up using tabs, one for each template type. Find the template and...

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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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