FAQ

Please ask questions via the comment form and I’ll update the page with the answers. Note that comments will most-likely be deleted after being incorporated into the body of this page.

  • How can I contribute to the Sandbox project?

    Yes, Sandbox is an open source project. You can contribute to the html of the templates, the plugin code, or create a theme.

  • Is there a list of known issues?

    Please see the release notes.

  • I have installed the Sandbox template set and republished my site, but the directory index pages don’t seem to be published… know why?

    The Sandbox Template set uses php extensions for the files it publishes in order to create the classes for hour, day, month, and year that are placed on the <body> tag.

    If you have republished over an existing site that used index files with html extensions and your server is configured to display html indexes before php indexes this is the most-likely cause. You can test by requesting the index directly.

    If your server loads http://domain.com/index.html by default, try accessing http://domain.com/index.php to see if the Sandbox-styled page exists there.

    If this is the problem, here are some options:

    1. delete the indexes with the html extension
    2. update your web server config to display indexes with php extensions before those with html
    3. update your web server config to process files with html extensions as php

  • I have comments on blog entries; how to I enable comments on pages?

    Super simple!

    1. Navigate to Design > Templates
    2. Edit the Page archive template

    3. Find these lines:

      <mt:Ignore>
<!-- Remove the mt:Ignore tags and this comment to have comments on pages -->
<$mt:Include module="Comments"$>
</mt:Ignore>

    4. Remove the <mt:Ignore> block and html comment, leaving just this:

      <$mt:Include module="Comments"$>

    5. Republish all pages

  • How do I order the pages in the navigation by publish date?

    By default navigation is sorted by title and ordered ascending order. This site is modified to order pages by publish date since there is no other great way to manually sort pages.

    To make this change:

    1. Navigate to Design > Templates
    2. Edit the Header template module

    3. Find this line:

      <mt:Pages no_folder="1" sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">

    4. Change to:

      <mt:Pages no_folder="1" sort_order="ascend">

      If you want to only return pages tagged with a private tag “@nav”, then use this:

      <mt:Pages no_folder="1" sort_order="ascend" tags="@nav">

    5. Go to Manage > Pages

    6. Using your browsers “open link in new tab” option, open each page in the order you want them to appear in the navigation.
    7. Go through each tab and update the published date for each to be sequential, I usually use sequential days: 2008-07-01, 2008-07-02, 2008-07-03
    8. Republish

  • Sandbox for MT doesn’t have an RSS feed template; how do I create one?

    The Atom feed template should handle your feed publishing needs, but if you want to have an RSS feed, read the Creating an RSS template article on movabletype.org.

  • How do I create the WLW Manifest that WP creates?

    See the Windows Live Writer Support document on movabletype.org.

  • How do I switch layouts?

    Not all of the Sandbox themes support multiple layouts. The default Sandbox theme (same name as the template set) contains different layouts. To change layouts:

    1. Navigate to Design > Styles
    2. Under Categories select Sandbox Themes
    3. Select Sandbox in the middle column of theme thumbnails
    4. In the Selected Design column, choose the layout you want
    5. Click Apply Design button
    6. Republish your blog

    What this does is change the value of the blog page_layout variable, a text string which is output as a class on the html body tag. The style hooks into this class for layout. You could change the layout variable manually in the header code by replacing the code <$mt:Var name="page_layout"$> with one of the six layout variables for the Sandbox theme:

    • layout-1c-b - One-column fluid layout with two sidebars in columns below content
    • layout-2c-l - Two-Column (Left), fluid layout with one sidebar left of content
    • layout-2c-r - Two-Column (Right), fluid layout with one sidebar right of content
    • layout-3c-b - Three-Column, fluid layout with two sidebars surrounding content
    • layout-3c-l - Three-Column (Left), fluid layout with two sidebars left of content
    • layout-3c-r - Three-Column (Right), fluid layout with two sidebars right of content

  • How can I add a link to my homepage in the navigation at the top of the page?

    Simple!

    1. Open the Header template module
    2. Find the <ul> in the <div id="menu">

    3. As the first list item, add:

      <li><a href="<$mt:BlogURL$>">blog</a></li>