Recently in Tutorials for Old Versions of MT Category

This tutorial needs to be updated for MT4. ~Elise

Providing printer-friendly versions of your weblog entries can be useful to your weblog readers. Learning Movable Type links to printer-friendly versions at the end of each entry.

There are several ways to create printer-friendly versions. I've outlined two methods in this tutorial. The first method is a simple header tag for your templates and some some CSS that automatically generates printer-friendly pages whenever someone goes to print a page from your blog. The second method is a bit more involved, creating a printer-friendly archive template with associated stylesheet. The first method will be sufficient for most situations. The second method is useful if you are trying to create a few different print options, like different sized recipe-cards.

The default Movable Type MT3 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

The first thing you might want to do when customizing your Movable Type blog style is to change the color of the background, banner, headlines, or text. This is pretty easy to do; the adjustments are made in your weblog's stylesheet template.

Before you start, you should have a basic understanding of how colors are coded into a web page. Open up your stylesheet from the templates menu in your MT edit screen. If you scroll down you will see several instances of the word "color" followed by a # sign and six characters comprised of letters and or numbers. These six characters represent a color; the first 2 characters affect the RED tones of RGB, the third and fourth characters represent the green, and the fifth and sixth characters the blue. Much like the red, green, blue color adjustments of your TV, these three colors in combination create the millions of colors that you can see on computer screens. #FFFFFF will produce white, #000000 will produce black, #FF0000 - red, #00FF00 - green, and #0000FF - blue. You can use a tool like CSS Color Values to experiment with different color combinations and see the color values that result.

This tutorial needs to be updated. ~Elise

One area where plugins have greatly enhanced MT functionality is in categories. Here's a list of some of the things you can do:

How to exclude entries of certain categories from lists of entries.

Say you want to list out your 20 most recent entries in your sidebar, except for the entries in the Special Announcements category. This is easy enough to do with the Exclude Categories plugin. The code would look like this:


<MTEntriesExCat category="Special Announcements" lastn="20">
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />
</MTEntriesExCat>


How to list entries only from certain categories.

This trick doesn't require a plugin at all. Just add the category attribute after the MTEntries tag like so:


<MTEntries category="Special Announcements" lastn="20">
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />
</MTEntries>


Or

<MTEntries category="Special Announcements AND Music" lastn="20">
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />
</MTEntries>


In MT versions 3.1x and earlier, you may have noticed in your Movable Type blog archive directory on your web server, a bunch of .xml files beginning with numbers. What are these files and do you need them?

By default, Movable Type generates an individual RSS feed for each entry that lists the TrackBack pings for that entry. This is useful is someone wants to subscribe to your Trackbacks via RSS. How often does that happen? Usually, never. You can safely delete those files from your archive directory on your web server. To unclutter your archive directory and keep from generating the TrackBack .xml files in the future, find the line on your mt.cfg file that says:

Uncomment that line by removing the # from the beginning of that line. Save the file and reload it to your server, remembering to reset the permissions to whatever permissions you had originally set for that file.

OBSOLETE as of MT4

A bookmarklet is a small bit of Javascript code that you can place in your browser favorites or bookmarks. Whenever you want to use the functionality of that code you can click on your browser bookmark for it. There are lots of bookmarklets available for all sorts of uses. In Movable Type, there is a bookmarklet available to make it really easy to post a new entry to your weblog.

OBSOLETE with MT4

If you have installed the basic MT package and are including the default search function on your blog, you may have noticed a check box for "Regex Search" that appears underneath the search box on your search results page. There is also a check box for "Match Case", but that is more self-explanatory. What is a "Regex" search? And how can you get rid of that check box so you don't confuse your visitors?

What is a Regex search?

Regex stands for "Regular Expression". It is a programming term. Doing a Google search reveals several definitions: