Movable Tips: Plugins Archives

Automatically Posting Movable Type Updates on Twitter and Facebook

By Maarten Schenk on September 2, 2010 3:29 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

Mark Carey, the accomplished Movable Type plugin writer, has recently released two new ones: Twitter Tools and Facebook Tools. Both allow you to post your latest Movable Type entries to respectively Twitter and Facebook, all fully automatic. The Twitter version even comes with support for optional URL shortening and automatically using MT tags as Twitter hashtags. Neat!

Setting Display Options (and Custom Field Order) for all Users of a Movable Type Blog

By Maarten Schenk on July 15, 2010 11:30 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The order and presence of various fields and elements on the Create Entry and Create Page screens of Movable Type can be easily changed, as I wrote about earlier. But you can do it only for the user that is currently logged in. What if you want to set these options for all users on a blog? With a smallish number of authors, you could contemplate doing it manually: logging in and out and rearranging things for each user separately.

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Getting all Entries Linked to an Asset in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on July 13, 2010 10:53 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

A while ago I needed to be able to display a list of images along with the blog entries in which they occurred. Movable Type has an <mt:EntryAssets> tag that makes it very easy to show a list of entries with the images in them, but the reverse tag (<mt:AssetEntries>) didn't exist, unfortunately.

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TwitterCommenters Plugin and the "Can't call method 'permalink' on an undefined value" Error

By Maarten Schenk on June 29, 2010 3:18 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

I have recently installed the TwitterCommenters plugin on this site, meaning you can now leave a comment using your Twitter username and password. However, if you just install this plugin on a plain Movable Type installation you are likely to get an error message that reads "Can't call method 'permalink' on an undefined value", even if you followed the installation instructions to the letter.

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How to Disable Zemanta on Movable Type 5

By Maarten Schenk on June 18, 2010 9:22 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Zemanta is a really cool plugin that comes bundled standard with Movable Type in the most recent versions available (both for MT 4.x and 5.x). While you are writing a blogpost, it automatically scans the contents for keywords and offers you various recommendations of related content, like links, images or tags. With one click you can then add these to your post. However, Zemanta's controls can take up quite a bit of screen real estate and on slower computers with a bad internet connection it can also slow you down. This can be annoying, especially if you are not using any of its functions.

Continue reading How to Disable Zemanta on Movable Type 5.

Using Movable Type as an eCommerce Platform

By Maarten Schenk on May 13, 2010 9:04 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Big kudos to Byrne and Jay at Endevver for releasing their 'Store Front' plugin for Movable Type and Melody. With this plugin you can turn Movable Type into a shop where you can sell (among other things) physical goods and subscriptions. It supports Paypal and recurring payments out of the box. Best of all, it is free and open source. Although you can always donate if you like the plugin (or need support).

Writing Utility Scripts or Plugins for Movable Type Made Easy

By Maarten Schenk on May 3, 2010 9:35 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Even if you have dabbled in Perl scripting a bit before, writing plugins for Movable Type can seem a bit daunting at first. Even though there is a step by step guide explaining how to create a Movable Type plugin, you still need to know quite a bit about Perl to make sense of it. However, what many people don't know is that you can script quite a lot of actions in a Movable Type system without needing to write a full-blown plugin at all.

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Optimizing Movable Type's Templates... Automatically!

By Maarten Schenk on April 20, 2010 9:40 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

A few days ago Endevver announced a new plugin to the Movable Type community: Template Optimizer. I just installed and tested it, and it looks impressive. The plugin scans all templates of one or more blogs on your Movable Type installation and offers a number of suggestions to improve efficiency and speed of publication.

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Setting Publishing Options for Movable Type Templates in Batches

By Maarten Schenk on March 10, 2010 11:56 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Normally to set the publishing options of a Movable Type template, you would need to click the 'Template Options' link at the bottom of the Edit Template screen, then pick the desired publication method (static, background, dynamic...) and finally save. If you need to set the options for several templates, this involves lots of tedious clicking as you need to open every template individually.

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Rebuilding All Your Movable Type Blogs In One Go

By Maarten Schenk on March 8, 2010 9:20 PM | 3 Comments | No TrackBacks

Nothing is more tedious in Movable Type than to have to manually rebuild all the blogs in your installation one by one after you have modified some crucial system-level template module that is used everywhere. It is not fun if you have a few dozen blogs, and it gets positively annoying if you have more than a hundred, something that is not uncommon on an intranet or with an MT-powered blogging service.

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