Orangescale.NET

No, no. It does not mean that I do not recommend MT users to upgrade to MT 4. It’s more about me. I will upgrade to the MT 4 for its rich features I really like.

Until now (when I write this entry), I am still using MT 3.35. I think this is the most stable version of Movable Type. There are still some bugs (of course) in Movable Type 4. But it seems that they’re only minor bugs. Movable Type 4 can do great jobs. You probably heard that Boing Boing migrated to Movable Type 4, and took advantages from MT 4 new features.

Right now, I am still make sure that I can have my blog run without problems. It seems that not all plugins I use in MT 3.35 supported by MT 4. I can wait, or finding better strategy to have expected output results.

Probably, I want to have a new look for my blog design. And port all template tags made for MT 4. There are many new template tags introduced in MT 4, and I believe that they will help designers to have a better design. We’ll see.

Right now, Six Apart is busy preparing for the great upcoming release of Movable Type 4.0. One the first beta released, I tried it. During the beta development, I found many great and improvement in every release. The latest version I tried is Movable Type version 4.0-rc1. And, I’m impressed. Really impressed. I am a Movable Type big fan, and if you want to find out what features offered in the coming release, you can read some highlights. Well, I can’t cover all features and improvements. There are too many improvements. Here are my personal thoughts:

New User Interface

Movable Type offers a completely different user interface design. When I installed it for the first time, I was a little bit confused. BUT, the new interface is much better I think. Bigger fonts, better menu management, better color contrast. I hope WeblogsActionMenu plugin will be available for MT 4.

Bundled Plugins

Now, MT comes with some new plugins in the package. So, probably-most-wanted plugins are already available. Here are some of them:

• Feeds.App Lite — Feeds.App Lite helps you republish feeds on your blogs.
• MultiBlog Version 2.0 — MultiBlog allows you to publish templated or raw content from other blogs and define rebuild dependencies and access controls between them.
• StyleCatcher Version 2.0 — StyleCatcher lets you easily browse through styles and then apply them to your blog in just a few clicks. To find out more about Movable Type styles, or for new sources for styles, visit the Movable Type styles page.
• WXR Importer Version 0.1 — Import WordPress exported RSS into MT.
• Weblog Cloner Version 1.4 — Clones a weblog and all of its contents.
• Textile Version 2.04, Markdown Version 1.0.1, SmartyPants Version 1.5.1 — These plugins are related to some entry creation mode. If you like Markdown, you can use it now.

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Few days ago, Six Apart announced that Movable Type will be released under GPL license. Great news Six Apart!

As a Movable Type user, I will not bring this decision into a debate. One thing I have in my mind is that it is a good news. Anyway, Movable Type 4.0 Beta had been released for public too! I have downloaded the beta version distribution, installed it, and my first impression… wow! Many changes on the user interface. At my first glance, I find it simpler and well-organized. Of course, for the drastic interface changes, I needed time to explore the pages.

And, it seems promising. I know that other blogging platform like WordPress or Expression Engine already have these features long time ago. But, Movable Type will also offer features that other blogging platforms have. And, personally, from the beta look, the next release of Movable Type seems so promising. And I believe that it will help (me) in working with Movable Type, as my personal blogging tool, or as a CMS platform for my projects.

Since it is in the beta development, I think I will wait for the next release. There are still many bugs, but.. hey! it’s shaping up… Thank you Six Apart!

When using Movable Type, you can easily organize your entries by categories. And, if you want to have something a little bit different, you can take advantage from MTCategoryBasename. This tag will produce the dirified basename defined for the category in context.

When you make new categoris (or subcategories), your category name (or, you can call it Category Label) will be dirified automatically. For example: Your “Me and Business” category will be dirified as me_and_business. If you enable category-base archive, your archive link will be something like this: /archives/me_and_business//.

But, if you think that it is too long, you can shorten it easily. For example: business. So, rather than having /archives/me_and_business/, you can have /archives/business.

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When dealing with Movable Type, you will find many templates to modify. You will have Main Index template, Individual Archive Template, Category Archive Template, Date-based Archive Template and many more. But, do you realize that those template has some similarities on some parts?

For example, usually you will have the a same footer area. Your header navigation, and meta tags will be similar, or exactly the same. If you only want to make changes on the footer on every pages, do you have to modify each template? Yes, you should. But, let’s save your time by using PHP include(); function.

Notes

Because we will use PHP code here, you need to treat your file as a PHP file, so that the code will be read correctly. If you publish your file using .html extension and you put PHP code there, your PHP code will not be processed. You will have the code displayed as it is written. The easiest solution for this is to change the extension to .php. Go to “Settings” » “Publishing” and change the file extension there.

Using .htaccess you can also treat .html files as PHP files. You can do it from your webhosting control panel. Most control panel can do this. Go to Mime Types editor, or Mime Types management there.

Or, if you can add this line to your .htaccess (if this file does not exist, you need to create it): AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

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Do you have some blogs to maintain? Do you want to maintain those blogs easily? If your answer is: YES, than you can take advantages using an application called w.bloggar. What is w.bloggar? According to its FAQ:

The w.bloggar is an application that acts as an interface between the user and one or more blog(s); in other words, it is a Post and Template editor, with several features and resources that the browser based blog editors do not offer.

To communicate with the weblog, w.bloggar requires that the blog system have implemented an API (Application Programming Interface.) Currently, w.bloggar is compatible with all tools that implements Blogger API, metaWeblog API, MovableType API and b2 API; all based on the XML-RPC definition.

Read more about w.bloggar »

This tutorial will explain how to use w.bloggar for your Movable Type-powered blog. First, you need to download w.bloggar, and install in your computer.

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If you enable individual archive, you can add link to previous and next entry to build interactivity. For example, you want to have those links in the following structure:

<ul>
<li>Prev: <a href="prev-entry-link">Previous entry title</a></li>
<li>Next: <a href="next-entry-link">Next entry title</a></li>
</ul>

What kind of template tags you should use in your individual archive template? You can try this:

<ul>
<MTEntryPrevious><li>Prev: <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$></a></li></MTEntryPrevious>
<MTEntryNext><li>Next: <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$></a></li></MTEntryNext>
</ul>

Previous and next link will be displayed if there are newer or older entries. You can add more template tags and HTML attributes there.

I want to display list of entries under one category. I want to take advantage of Movable Type Dynamic Publishing.

I remembered that Jay Allen gave a template tag few months ago. After searching in Pastie (pastie: hi)!, I found the code.

Okey, here is the code (I cleaned it up a little bit):

<ul>
<MTEntryCategories>
<MTEntries lastn="3">
<li><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li>
</MTEntries>
</MTEntryCategories>
</ul>

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When I published my sites powered by Movable Type statically, I can easily include a PHP syntax in the body or extended entry field. Using this kind of method, I can easily put a certain file to be displayed in a certain post (pages or regular posts).

For example, in my contact page. I just create a single post and in the body field, I just put something like <?php include("/path/to/contact-form.php"); ?>. So, when I need to modify the contact form, I only need to edit the contact-form.php file.

But, when I tried to switch to dynamic publishing, it does not work. Luckily, Brad Choate gave a solution. Thanks Brad! He helped me few months ago.

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Few days ago, I combined entries from my journal and bookmark section in front page. It works nice, just like what I expected. And, if you notice, there is a new RSS feed now: Orangescale.NET Bookmark RSS. Thank you subscribers!

I was thinking: why not making a combined RSS feed so that people only need to subscribe to one feed? I think the mechanism (in making the RSS feed) will not be difficult. Okey, I will try in my local MT installation first.

I know it might flood the Planet Terasi later (if I use the main RSS feed as the combined RSS). So, sorry Planet Terasi reader for the inconvinience. And sorry for those who subscribe to my RSS feed.

I am working on it right now. Be back in few minutes.

Added later: Okey, the combined feed is ready. If you subscribe to my journal feed, you will find entries from my Bookmark section as well.

Okey, let’s make it fast. “How to combined two weblog entries in Movable Type?” The answer is: easy. I just tried it last night. These are some general information about my Movable Type installation:

• Main weblog – the archives (individual, date-based, and category) are published dynamically. The other pages are built statically.
• Bookmark section (this is new) – published statically. But, I am thinking of publish it dynamically. Not that hard I suppose.
• Using Movable Type 3.31

There are some tutorials you can follow to produce combined entries listing. Here are two famous methods:

• Using Movable Type GlobalListings and MTCompare plugins
• Using Movable Type MTSQL and MTCompare plugins

I use the first method. Why? I find that MTSQL plugin does not work with 3.31. Correct me if I am wrong. Just download the plugins, and upload to your Movable Type plugins directory.

Added later: Enda told me that MTSQL works without problem You can see how he combines main weblog and quicklinks in his blog.

The ideas. Hint! Hint!

• Producing a file having a list of combined entries (order by date of post).
• The file should be rebuilt when each blog posts a new entry.
• Generate different entry outputs for each weblog. In the list, the bookmark (link) wlll only display the MTEntryBody field; the main weblog has most elements (MTEntryTitle, MTEntryBody, MTEntryMore, etc).
• include(); is power.

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