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Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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3.17 (2005.06.02)

• 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...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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Introduction

All roads in weblogging lead to posting entries, for without posted entries there is no weblog. It should come as no surprise that the Entries Listing and New/Edit Entry screens are where most users will find themselves when working with Movable Type.

In these screens a user can view what entries are in a weblog, filter them based on certain criteria, make new posts and edit existing ones.

Entries Listing

The Entries Listing screen displays either all the entries for the weblog or just the entries made by you. What gets displayed depends on whether or not you have...

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Setting Up Scheduled Post Services

Problem

You want to enable Scheduled Post services on your Movable Type System.

Solution

Install the run-periodic-tasks to run under cron or other similar system utility.

Discussion

To set up scheduled posting you need to be able to set up a "cron" job on the server. There a number of ways these services can be implemented and will vary depending on your server environment. Some hosting providers will allow one and not the other.

After you've set up post scheduling, when you save an entry with a post status of "Scheduled," it will be...

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Question

My webserver doesn't have sendmail; how do I use SMTP instead?

Answer

If you have tried to get sendmail working, or if you know that your webserver doesn't have sendmail (for example, if you're on a Windows server), Movable Type allows you to send email messages through SMTP. To do this, you will need to install the Mail::Sendmail Perl module; if you are on a Windows server, you can do this using Activestate's ppm tool. Launch ppm, then at the prompt, type install Mail::Sendmail

and ppm will do all of the work to install the module. If...

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Email. Can't live with it. Can't live without it -- although many of us wish we could.

Despite the introduction of new tools such as weblogs, wikis, aggregators and instant messaging, and the growing notion that email is "broken," it still remains the de-facto, baseline, catch-all choice for online communications and collaboration.

In this chapter we'll delve into various ways that email is utilized with Movable Type.

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Question

I'm having trouble getting a full export of my entries using the default export function. Are there other ways I can perform an export?

Answer

Movable Type contains a function to export all of the entries in your blog, but that doesn't mean your options stop there. You can easily export a single entry, all entries from one or more categories, or break your exports down by month (helpful for those with large blogs whose server times out on the export).

The secret is in this export format file. By downloading this file and pasting it into...

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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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Creating a new entry

After you have uploaded a file, you have the choice of either creating a new entry using that uploaded file, or just displaying the HTML used to link to the file. For example, if you have uploaded an image, and would like to create a new entry with a link to that image in a popup window, select Create a new entry using this uploaded file, and press POPUP IMAGE. If you are already editing an entry, then you won't want to create another new entry (and perhaps lose the one that you are working on); so in that case, click the Show me the HTML button and click POPUP...

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Question

When I create a new entry, sometimes I see buttons for bold, italic, underline, and links. I logged in today in a different browser and they are missing! What happened?

Answer

Formatting buttons appear only in browsers which are able to use them. The browser you are using may not support the functions at this time.

Currently, the browsers in which the buttons are available are: • Firefox • Mozilla 1.3+ • Netscape 7.1+ • Internet Explorer 5.5+ on Windows • Opera 8 on Windows • Camino for Mac

Safari does not properly support the Javascript for rich text...

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Creating thumbnails

If you uploaded an image, and if your server has the Image::Magick Perl module installed, you have the additional option of creating a thumbnail of the image that you uploaded. To create a thumbnail, check the "Create a thumbnail for this image" option, then adjust the Width and Height boxes to scale the image to the size or percentage that you want. You can scale either by pixel size (Pixels in the pull-down menu), or by percentage (Percent in the pull-down menu).

In addition, you can scale width and height either in proportion to their original sizes, or out...

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Question

I'm on a Windows server, so I need to use .pl instead of .cgi extensions on the script file names. How do I configure Movable Type for this?

Answer

We highly recommend that, rather than using .pl extensions, you configure Windows to use .cgi for Perl scripts instead.

Some plugins have configuration URLs which use .cgi extensions, so these links will not work if the server is not configured to recognize the file extension as a valid Perl script. Changing these plugin scripts to use .pl isn't a good idea, as they are typically stored in...

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Question

I get a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to run the Movable Type CGI files.

Answer

This is a very generic error which occurs when a Perl script fails to execute. The standard things to check are: • Is the path to Perl correct in the first line of each script?

• Were all of the script files uploaded to your server, and in ASCII mode? (Check for missing files and do not rely on an Auto-Detect feature for upload mode.)

• Have you set the proper permissions (UNIX equivalent of 755; read/write/execute) on the .cgi files?

• Is the version of Perl on...

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2.0b2 (2002.02.20)

• Sort categories and authors in power-edit screen. • Changed input box styles back to 20px so that they are not too small in Windows. • Added caching of templates when rebuilding archives; this means that for each archive type, each archive template need only be loaded once. Hopefully this will improve performance. • Fixed bug where Convert Line Breaks setting was not applied to preview page. • Shortened manual split page names so that they don't get truncated. • Export now exports in ascending chronological order....

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0.07 (2001.10.02)

• Added uniqueness validation on author name; you can no longer create two authors with the same name, nor change your author name in your profile to the name of another author. • Rebuild popup now lets you rebuild just your indexes (index templates), if desired. • Added a View Site link to the ``rebuilt'' page, so you can view the site right after rebuilding. • Made all REBUILD links in status messages a link to the rebuild popup window, but only if the user has rebuild permissions. • mt-comments.cgi now rebuilds all entry...

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0.02 (2001.09.25)

• Added FTP URLs to installation instructions. (Daniel Talsky) • Fix some warnings. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer) • Fix bug with spaces at the ends of lines in mt.cfg file. (Caroline van Oosten de Boer) • Fix bug with saving new entry--author was not being set for the new post. (Matt Haughey) • Fix bug with profile link in header linking to the wrong profile on the entry-editing page for an entry by another author. • Fix bug where creating a new author would switch your login credentials to those of the new author (ie. you...

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1.1 (2001.10.22)

• Made <$MTDate$> work as a ``system date'', or the current date/time at which the page is being rebuilt. • Added Pragma: no-cache header to keep Opera from caching pages. (Jay) • Changed default templates to use iso-8859-1 (Latin 1) encoding instead of utf-8. • Added Blog Configuration option for the number of words in an auto-generated excerpt. • Added comment previewing, using the new Comment Preview template. Default templates now ship with comment previewing enabled, and the comments links on the main index...

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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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This setting defines the name of your weblog and the output of the MTBlogName template tag. This name will be used for display within the Movable Type system itself, and it will also be sent to any recently updated services you have specified on the weblog's New Entry Default settings screen.

This is a required field.

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