This setting controls who may comment on your site. There are three choices: • Anyone • Authenticated commenters only • No one.

Anyone and No one are self-explanatory except that the latter effectively disables commenting on the blog. If you are using the new template structure introduced in Movable Type 3.2, a rebuild of the Index templates will also remove the comment form from all of your individual entries. If not, you must rebuild all Individual archives to remove the comment form.

Autheticated commenters allows only commenters authenticated through the TypeKey service (or another...

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Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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You can have full control over Movable Type creating the HTML for your website. For making this happen, Movable Type can be configured by a couple of templates.

The templates define the style and the contents of the created pages. In the beginning you should best leave those templates untouched. After you have mastered the Movable Type basics, you can change any template for styling the website according to your wishes.

In the Beginning there is a Mess

If you study the templates, you will very soon realize that the templates are not perfectly organized. Rather often identical parts can be found in different templates. Regarding good structure and easy maintenance the templates will...

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I am going to describe the basics of Movable Type in a short introduction. You do not have to know anything about Movable Type for understanding it. However, when following this three-part introduction, you will learn to know the most important components and gain a good overview. • Movable Type Basics / 1 • Movable Type Basics / 2 • Movable Type Basics / 3

Templates

In the previous part we explained that entries are stored in a database. However, you will not find the website's HTML in the database. Instead, just the attributes of an entry are stored as columns in a database table. But how does Movable Type create HTML out of this?

In Movable Type there are a number of...

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In Movable Type, we use tags for defining the flow within a template and for accessing the database. You can influence a tag's behavior with the help of attributes. These attributes define a value for some parameter.

Unfortunately, the value for an attribute may only be a constant. However, you will sometimes have the need for setting the value to the result of another tag. Movable Type will not support such a situation, but a plugin will help.

An Example

Suppose you have a template module that you want to include from many different places. For example, you want to call this module from both an individual entry archive and the main index. Inside the template, you then want to...

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In Comparison needed for conditional Generation I showed how to use the Compare Plugin for managing variations of a page type. The plugin allows comparing values and optionally inserting one or the other code segment into the output stream. However, the simple condition "if one value equals another value" is just the beginning. We are also able to create complex conditions. It is not even that difficult.

Basics

The Compare Plugin offers a number of tags, as for example MTIfEqual, MTIfNotEqual, MTIfGreater, MTIfGreaterOrEqual, MTIfLess, etc. Most of them work the same way: they take at least two mandatory attributes, a and b. The plugin compares the values of those two...

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Question

When looking at my generated webpages, some of these pages contain characters that really look strange. When looking at the same text in Movable Type, anything looks fine.

Answer

The problem occurs rather often in varying situations. Most of the time it has something to do with the character set. Let us first have a look at the basics...

Character Set

Anything that is stored in electronic form is saved as a series of 0s and 1s. Usually, these are combined to form a string of numbers, ranging from 0 to 255. Even a text, as the one that you are currently reading, is stored as a sequence of numbers.

A charset defines which characters belong to which number. For...

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The name of the category of the archive in context. For use in Category archives only.

Back to top | Permalink | Comments (0)

MTArchiveCount

The number of entries in the...

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Question

My database has been corrupted. Is there any way to avoid losing my data?

Answer

This answer depends a great deal on the level of corruption, the type of backups you have, and how much information is still accessible from within your existing installation (as opposed to being in external files such as the static pages Movable Type has generated from the data).

Does your host maintain backups for your account?

If so, do they have any which would include copies of your database files prior to the time corruption appears to have occurred?...

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Question

How do I convert from one database type to another?

Answer

Convert from Berkeley to SQL

To determine whether your server supports a SQL database, and the Perl libraries required to connect to it, run mt-check.cgi and look at the status for any of the following modules: DBD::mysql, DBD::Pg, or DBD::SQLite. If any of these are installed, your server will support that version of Movable Type. If none of these are installed, you will need to contact your host to have them installed if you wish to use a SQL database.

If you are interested in...

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If Movable Type creates an archive file, it converts the entry's title into a filename. With this conversion all blanks from the title are replaced by underscores. But if you want to achieve a good ranking in Google, this is no good replacement. Fortunately the behaviour can be changed.

Factors influencing Google

There are a number of factors that have an influence on the ranking of a page in Google's result lists. Of course the page's content is analyzed with respect to the searched keywords. However, the words appearing in the domain name and the file name also have some influence on the results. Thus, for achieving the best result it is important to know, how Google splits a URL...

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Question

In Movable Type, entries or comments or other objects are often shown in lists. For example, the main index shows the most recent entries, a category archive also shows entries, or an individual entry archive shows comments. I preferred if not all items in such lists were styled the same. For example, there should be an alternating white / gray background. How can this be done?

Answer

Fortunately, the answer can be given in a generic way. The technique that I am going to show can be used with all types of objects (entries, comments, categories, etc.) and any number of different styles.

For showing the basic idea I will create a list of entries using 3 different styles....

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After having played with Movable Type and saving all data in the filesystem for a couple of days, it was time to migrate to an SQL database. As a developer for MS SQL Server or Oracle I do know SQL. However, I have never had any experience with MySQL. Although I am not the best man for this job, the installation succeeded.

Installing MySQL

MySQL is a true SQL Server. It is under an Open Source Development and has won rising acceptance in the previous years. It is offered in the so-called "Dual Licensing Model". Suppose you develop an application but you do not want to publish the source code. If you then want to distribute MySQL as part of your own application, you have to...

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A specialized version of MTEntries that is aware of subcategories.

Attributes: • category - The value of this attribute is a category label. This will include any entries to that category and any of its subcategories.

Since it is possible for two categories to have the same label, you can specify one particular category by including its ancestors, separated by slashes. For instance if you have a category "Flies" and within it a subcategory labeled "Fruit", you can ask for that category with category="Flies/Fruit". This would distinguish it from a category labeled "Fruit" within another called "Food...

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When starting the Movable Type Weblog, I disabled the search function. There just weren't that many entries and a search dialog was not necessary.

Today, searching the Movable Type Weblog would be a good improvement. So I tried with the default Movable Type Search Engine. However, each search resulted in a CPU-intensive action. I tried to read the Perl code and saw that each search was done by selecting all entries from the database, then looping over all entries and finding the matching entries with string operations.

This is not the best way to do a fulltext search. Especially with large weblogs, this will probably lead to bad performance. The architecture does not scale very...

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Question

Can I pay Six Apart to install Movable Type for me, or upgrade my existing installation to the latest version?

Answer

Yes, we offer these services to those who have purchased a supported version of Movable Type.

Requirements Before We Begin

Please make sure to confirm that your host/server meets the requirements before requesting an installation, as the fee is non-refundable once we begin.

You can view the system requirements and get helpful information on choosing a web host in the Introduction to Installation and Upgrade in the Users Manual....

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I am going to describe the basics of Movable Type in a short introduction. You do not have to know anything about Movable Type for understanding it. However, when following this three-part introduction, you will learn to know the most important components and gain a good overview. • Movable Type Basics / 1 • Movable Type Basics / 2 • Movable Type Basics / 3

Movable Type is a CMS

Movable Type is a tool for creating websites. However, it is completely different from for example Macromedia Dreamweaver or a Microsoft Frontpage. Both are tools with a major emphasis is designing a website. You will understand the special features of Movable Type better if you regard it as a Content Management System....

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Chad Everett has released a plugin called MT-Approval that presents an effective way to combat the comment spam brought on by spam bots that make up 99% of the comment spam most Movable Type users experience.

MT-Approval requires MT version 3.1 or higher.

MT Approval works by requiring that a comment contain an "approval hash" - a list of data that is generated in the comment form by a new template tag called <$MTApprovalHash$> on the comment preview template. Spam bots don't use the form on the preview template; therefore they are missing the hash when they try to post the comment directly to the comment.cgi and thus their comments never post.

MT Approval requires that you force a preview...

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Setting Up Google Enabled Entries

Problem

You want to integrate Google search results into your entry.

Solution

Provide Movable Type with your Google API Key and use the MTGoogleSearchResult template tag.

Discussion

Movable Type is capable of making Google search queries and inserting the results into site layouts. This built-in functionality is geared toward inserting related links into an entry or a specific topic such as an author's name rather than providing unfettered access to the full power of the Google search engine. This is more a limitation of the Google API...

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Displaying Entries

Problem

You need to display entry data in your published pages.

Solutions

Use the template tags that are prefixed with MTEntry.

Discussion

Entry tags can be used to display the contents of an entry and its related information. These tags can be used in MTArchiveList or MTEntries tag contexts. Entry tags may also be used anywhere in a Individual Archive template.

Here are some of the more common Entry tags used in templates: • MTEntries

MTEntries is the most powerful and adaptive template tag in Movable Type. It is a container tag representing a list of...

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