Previously, I wrote about how to add Edit Links to Entry and Page templates.
This guide uses the mt_user cookie set when logging into Movable Type to condition content (links to screens in MT) on entries and pages published by Movable Type.
Also provides an option to use a non-MT cookie to do the same thing.
With large volumes of code… sometimes it’s useful to place comments in the code to document what the code does.
In html, developers often use a html comment on a closing div tag to note which tag is being closed.
<div id="main-content">
...many lines of code here...
</div><!-- end of #main-content -->
Once the page is being published in the production environment, these comments are no longer necessary and just add to the weight of the file.
There are many ways to condition these links in Movable Type:
Create a Global Config template module and then set a variable in that template. Include this template module in all your templates and use the value to condition code.
Global Config (use a value of 1 to show, 0 to hide)
<mt:Var name="display_coments" value="0">
Index Template
<$mt:Include module="Global Config"$>
<div id="main-content">
...many lines of code here...
</div>
<mt:If name="display_commnts">
<!-- end of #main-content -->
</mt:If>
Use configuration directives in your template. There are a bunch of useful Configuration Directives for Movable Type. Use the value of config directives in your templates as conditionals.
In the mt-config.cgi file add config directives:
# Config Directives
## Required
CGIPath /cgi-bin/branch-hanson/
Database mt_db
DBUser foo
DBPassword bar
DBHost localhost
## Optional
DebugMode 1 # See http://movabletype.org/config/DebugMode
FooBar 3 # Made up config directive
Use the DebugMode config directive:
<mt:If name="config.DebugMode">
<!-- comment here -->
</mt:If>
Or make up your own and use the value such as FooBar:
<mt:If name="config.FooBar" eq="1">
<!-- condition 1 comment here -->
<mt:If name="config.FooBar" eq="2">
<!-- condition 2 comment here -->
<mt:Else>
<!-- condition <$mt:Var name="config.FooBar"$> comment here -->
</mt:If>
Hope either of these may be useful.
Stumbled across another way to Add Custom Styles for a Single Entry in Movable Type from the entry Individual Style on Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction.com.
.css extensionPlace this bit of PHP in the <head> element next to your other stylesheet links:
<?php
// check to see if a css file with the same name as the permalink exists,
// if so print a link to it
if (file_exists("<$MTEntryPermalink$>.css")) {
print '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>.css" />';
}
?>
This is great if there are many rules to add and/or if there is a need to edit the css independently from the publishing of the entry.
For just a few simple rules I’d still add the rules inline. This has the benefit of keeping the styles directly associated to the content being styled.
Update: Advanced version using cookies to condition “edit” links
Add an edit links to your Movable Type entries and pages.
One feature I’d like to add is the ability to order categories via some drag-n-drop method in Movable Type and then have the ability to specify the sort order manually via a sort_by template tag modifier like this:
<mt:Categories sort_by="manual">
<!-- category code here -->
</mt:Categories>
Or just make this the default behavior!
Until then, here’s a hack to sort by a user-order specified.
Here’s a way to set some variables for your whole blog.
Create a new template module called “Blog Config” containing some code which you want set for all blog pages published by MT; for example the page layout variable:
<$mt:Var name="page_layout" value="layout-wtt"$>
Then include it at the top of every index and archive template using the following code:
<$mt:Include module="Blog Config"$>
You can now update the page_layout in one template vs having to update it in all index and archive templates.
I was installing Action Streams on Chris Alden’s r21.org and remembered that Mark Pascal showed me tip about installing Action Streams.
Instead of distributing all the files in the extlib directory in the sub-directories of the extlib directory in your MT install—as described in steps 3 of the Action Steams readme—Mark showed me that the Action Streams extlib directory can be placed in the Action Streams plugin directory.
When you download the Action Streams plugin, here are the files in the directory. Notice the location of the extlib directory:
ActionStreams-1.0/
example_templates/
extlib/
HTML/
HTTP/
Web/
XML/
mt-static/
plugins/
ActionStreams/
blog_tmpl/
config.yaml
lib/
tmpl/
Iwtst/
When you install Action Streams in your MT install, move the extlib directory under the Action Streams plugin directory:
MT_HOME/
plugins/
ActionStreams/
blog_tmpl/
config.yaml
extlib/
HTML/
HTTP/
Web/
XML/
lib/
tmpl/
Because Movable Type is not always installed on servers where customers have access to the servers apache config or an .htaccess file, MT’s tag and string search urls look like:
Tag Search and String Search (respectively)
http://chezbeau.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.fcgi?blog_id=1&tag=tomato&limit=20
http://chezbeau.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.fcgi?search=tomato&IncludeBlogs=1&limit=20
These can easily be changed to more “clean” urls
http://chezbeau.com/tag/tomato
http://chezbeau.com/search/tomato
To convert your Movable Type powered site to use clean urls, follow these steps:
Edit your .htaccess file and add the following lines
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.fcgi?blog_id=1&tag=$1&limit=20
RewriteRule ^search/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.fcgi?search=$1&IncludeBlogs=1&limit=20
The first line RewriteEngine on turns on the Rewriting Engine. The second and third lines use RewriteRule to map the desired urls to the actual urls.
Update tag links in tag clouds and on entry details by replacing <$mt:TagSearchLink encode_js="1"$> with:
<$mt:BlogURL$>tag/<$mt:TagName normalize="1"$>
Update search form.
This requires a few more invasive changes:
search-form to the <form> elementInclude a link to jquery in your header. Use a local file or remotely hosted file like this one on Google:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.search-form').submit(function() {
window.location.href = "/search/" + $('.search-form input:text').val();
return false;
});
});
</script>
Notes:
Brad created a small plugin on the fly as a temporary fix to solve an upgrade issue which I’ve documented here for your pleasure… =)
This plugin will disable/stop/cancel all upgrades to a Movable Type installation.
Because some plugins require upgrade scripts, the DoNotUpgrade plugin must be removed/disabled/etc in order to perform upgrades to MT.
Create a file:
MT_DIR/plugins/DoNotUpgrade/config.yaml
Add the following code to the file:
callbacks:
init_request: sub { MT->app->{upgrade_required} = 0 }
This plugin should work in 4.x versions of Movable Type.
Well authored urls make for good SEO. One the simplest ways to do this is to write good titles to your entries and then MT will dirify the title to create a basename from which the url to the entry is created. But if your entry title is longer than 100 characters, the rest of the url is clipped.
Good news! Basename can be increased to 250 characters. As it seems that most people would prefer unclipped urls to long urls, I added a feature request to increase the default to the max of 250 characters. Then if a user prefers to have smaller urls, they can modify this setting.
To change your default, navigate to Preferences > Entry Settings, and change Basename Length to your desired length.
