Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

fast searches with PHP

Here's another one for the "I should have done this a long time ago" list. I had been experiencing some problems with mt-search.cgi on this installation; it was using up too much memory on the server (this is also why I switched to using Tagwire for showing my tags). Now I'm using the PHP-based Fast Search and it works great. It took me a little while to figure it out but once I got it down, setting it up for each of my blogs was a snap. You can test it out using the search form in the sidebar of the blog. The one oddity I found, which may be due to something weird on my end, is that it didn't like the "fastsearch" filename for the search template and the Dynamic Pages Error Template would claim "Page not found". This caused me a lot of confusion. However, I found that it worked fine if I used a different output filename for the template. The rest was easy from there. This is a great plugin and I especially recommend it to anyone who finds that mt-search.cgi is slow or is using up too many server resources.

Styles galore

Looking for a new design for your weblog and unsatisfied with what StyleCatcher and the current Style Library have to offer?¹ Check out The Style Contest! Sponsored by Six Apart, among others, this contest has 146 entries. Although the winner hasn't been chosen yet (it just recently closed for voting), you can download and apply the styles now. This blog's new look is Star Crash, courtesy of Mario Carboni. You might notice a few of my other blogs have new designs as well. I can't design worth a darn, so something like the Style Contest is great for me. If you can't design either but want a great-looking weblog, check it out! ¹ After the winners have been selected, all of the Style Contest entries will be fully integrated with StyleCatcher as a library. Now that's cool! Note: Thanks to Arvind in comments for clarification about StyleCatcher and the Style Library. The entry has been edited accordingly.

easier tagging

I've talked before about how to set up a tagging system for your blog using entry keywords. If you're using Movable Type 3.2, the Tagwire plugin can make this quite a bit easier. It treats your existing keywords as tags - if you've already been entering tag-like keywords for your entries, you don't have to do anything extra, just start using the template tags to display information about your tags. Tagwire also integrates with MT-XSearch to easily create individual pages for each tag. On my other set up, I was using MT's built in search script with a few hacks and an alternate search template. Tagwire with MT-XSearch is the same idea, but much easier to implement. As a note, if you have multiple blogs, you will need to create the XSearch Tagwire template module for each one, which also means that you can completely customize it for each blog. I had been using keywords on this blog for a long time to indicate related entries. In a way, they're really like a secondary set of categories. That's now reflected in the sidebar where the actual categories are listed under the heading "Tips by Type". The keyword/tags/secondary categories are now listed as "Tips by Area". It's all about making it easier for visitors to find related content, keeping them on your site longer and hopefully helping them with what they're looking to do.

using the right fields for the job

This weekend, I installed RightFields, a plugin that allows you to customize the display of standard fields like Entry Body and to add custom fields. The plugin requires MT 3.2 and the BigPAPI plugin. The plugin is very powerful with a ton of features that I am only beginning to explore. It is currently in beta and may contain bugs. To make full use of its features, you should also know how to add and modify MySQL tables in your MT database. So it's definitely not for every one. But if you're a power user, it may be just what you're looking for to greatly expand your use of MT. RightFields is particularly helpful for non-standard blogs, when you're using MT almost like a database and putting unusual data in different fields. For instance, I use MT to produce links pages on my static website where I put the URL in the Entry Body field. Using RightFields, it is very easy to change the label that appears on the Create New Entry page, so that it says URL instead of Entry Body. You can make even further customizations than that. Plus you can add custom fields if you have more data than there are standard fields. I am not yet using this for the blog that manages my link pages. The other feature that I am using is the Linked Entry. This is a special type of custom field that allows you to designate the entry as being linked to another entry, either in that blog or in another blog. I am using this here on the Tips blog. If you go to RSS feeds for tags, you'll see a section called "Related" and it says "This tip is built on the following tip(s)" and it lists another entry there. That is the linked entry. If you click through to using keywords and tags to help visitors find related content, you can see that it links back to the RSS feeds entry and to several other entries. So this is a great way to show how some of your content is related to other content and direct visitors to that related content. I am investigating a possible bug with this feature in which it appears to blank out a couple of the other entry fields (which I will be reporting to the developer once I have all the data), so you may want to hold off on implementing it if you don't have time to be a beta tester. Update: See bug report and patch to resolve it. But it's worth it, in my opinion. And there's much more that RightFields can do. Update: A release version, RightFields 1.02, is now available. Enjoy!

smilies for your entries

One of the joys of MT 3.16 and above is the BigPAPI plugin, which allows other plugins to easily modify the Movable Type interface. Now instead of hacking templates, you just upload a plugin and you're good to go. A light-hearted but much-longed-for example is the Smilies plugin which creates a "smilie bar" above your Entry Body and Extended Entry fields inside of MT. Just click on the smilie and it is inserted in your entry. I hacked this plugin to use my own favored smilies, and I also had to adjust the paths in the code because my mt-static directory is on a different domain than my blog(s), but that was pretty simple to do. Aside: This plugin seems to conflict a lot with other BigPAPI plugins. It did with NaughtyWordChars until the developer of that plugin updated it, and it does with RightFields 1.02. There is a much expanded, but shareware version of this plugin called Icon-o-matic that may work better for most people.

new way to open and close comments and trackbacks on many entries

Until the upgrade to 3.2, I used a script that allowed me to open and close comments and trackbacks for multiple entries at once. This worked great. However, because of the changes to the way comments and trackbacks are handled in 3.2, the script no longer functioned. Fortunately, there's the AcceptCommentsPings plugin to the rescue. After you install the plugin, go to your entries listing and select some entries. Then click on the "More actions" drop-down menu. You can select to accept comments, accept pings, accept comments and pings, unaccept comments, unaccept pings, or unaccept comments and pings. So if you need to open or close comments or trackbacks on a number of entries at once, just go to the entries listing, select all the entries you want to change, then choose the desired option and click Go. Very neat. I'm glad to have this functionality back. MT 3.2 has a kill switch that allows you to override blog and entry settings and shut down comments and trackbacks across the entire system at once. But if you just want to shut them off on some older entries, it doesn't work very well. AcceptCommentsPings does.

super-easy design changes

One of the best features TypePad has, in my opinion, is the Template Builder, which allows you to easily select from among a large number of pre-defined designs or to create a custom design using a GUI rather than HTML and CSS. Movable Type has now taken a big step towards that kind of ease-of-use with the StyleCatcher plugin. Now you can select from among a large number of pre-defined designs and apply it to your blog with just a couple of clicks. First, you will need to be using the new default templates for 3.2. Getting going with these is easy too, thanks to a built-in plugin called RefreshTemplates. Go into your Templates area, select the templates you want to update, and choose the Refresh Templates action from the drop-down menu. Your templates will be updated, with the old ones saved as backup templates. You can copy over any customizations that you had made (for instance, code from plugins) from the backup to the active templates. After this, go into StyleCatcher, load a library (the Six Apart library is the default choice), select the design you like, and click the button to apply it. Republish your blog and you're done. Six Apart has really taken MT to a new level with RefreshTemplates and StyleCatcher. Update: This blog has now been updated. Interesting new look, eh? I couldn't find anything that looked at all like what I was using before. Oh well.

MT 3.2 is out!

Six Apart has come out with a major upgrade of Movable Type, version 3.2. It looks like there are tons of new features to play around with. I didn't do any beta testing, since I just haven't had time, although I've had a chance to use it a bit for work. So there will be lots of fun coming up!

3.16 released

Six Apart has released Movable Type 3.16. It's got more than 100 bug fixes. It's an easy upgrade if you're running MT 3.1 or later. If you want a better-functioning MT installation, upgrading is recommended.

new digs

As you can see, the blog has a new look. I finally had the chance to migrate it to my MT 3 installation. Enjoy! And let me know if you come across any bugs or other problems.