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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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Discovering Preview Context in Movable Type Entry Templates

By Maarten Schenk on July 13, 2010 10:10 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Recently someone on the Movable Type Open Source mailing list asked if there was an easy way to determine if an entry was being looked at in Movable Type's "preview" mode as opposed to being published "for real".  This might be useful to hide (for example) statistics tracking code, popups, automatic redirection scripts etc.
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Combining Tag Attributes, AND, OR and Variables in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on June 28, 2010 3:05 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
This forum posting asks the question if it is possible to do something like 
<mt:entries tag="@sometag AND $somethingelse">...<mt:entries>
to get all entries tagged with "@sometag" and some other tag (which is stored in the $somethingelse variable).
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Displaying a Post Differently in Movable Type Depending on Asset Count

By Maarten Schenk on June 22, 2010 9:04 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
User Xtencil on the Movable Type Forum asks how he can show an entry in a different way depending on the number of assets present in the entry.  For example, if there are no images vs. if there are one or more.  He already attempted to use the EntryAssetsCount tag, which failed because this tag does not exist.  But never fear...
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Sorting Entries Numerically by Custom Field in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on June 21, 2010 9:19 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
For some time now you can sort entriesin Movable Type by the value of one of their custom fields, which is really neat and allows you to create your own arbitrary orderings.  However, the sorting always happens alphabetically, which means that '100' ends up before '11'.  How to fix this?
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Creating a 'Tag Index' on Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on June 21, 2010 9:38 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Many paper books have an index of keywords at the end, listing for each keyword on which pages in the book they occur.  Recently someone on the Six Apart ProNet mailing list wanted something similar for his blog: an alphabetical listing of all tags along with the entry ID's of the entries that were tagged with each tag. Skot Nelson stepped up with this bit of template code.
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Don't Ignore Movable Type's <mt:ignore> Tag

By Maarten Schenk on May 17, 2010 9:18 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
When faced with a Movable Type blog that is sometimes slow to publish, you could immediately break out the heavy guns and set up some performance logging to try and find out which templates are taking too long to publish.  There is an entire section of the documentation dedicated to this.  But before editing configuration files and starting to pore over logfiles, don't ignore the humble <mt:ignore> tag...
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Comparing Two Lists Using Movable Type Template Tags

By Maarten Schenk on April 28, 2010 6:21 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
A recent forum posting asked for an easy way to compare two lists in Movable Type, preferably using arrays.  I think it would be possible to do this via some arrays and/or some clever regular expression use with the 'like' attribute, but in my experience using a hash for this works much faster and doesn't depend on the values in the list behaving nicely in a regular expression context.  Here is an example I cooked up:
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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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Displaying the Latest Post for Each Author in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on April 14, 2010 1:02 PM | 3 Comments | No TrackBacks
Suppose you are running an MT installation with multiple (sub)blogs and multiple authors.  Wouldn't it be neat to be able to display a list of all your authors somewhere, along with the latest entry they published anywhere on the site?  Actually, it is not that hard to do... 
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