Movable Tips: Templates Archives

Displaying YouTube or Vimeo Thumbnails in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on January 5, 2012 5:57 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |

On a recent project I had a Movable Type blog with entries containing embedded videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo, and I needed a way to get a thumbnail image for each video so they could be displayed somewhere else on the site. Here is my solution...

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Dan Wolfgang Releases Spectacular 'Patrick' Theme for Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on January 5, 2012 12:57 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

Dan from eatdrinksleepmovabletype.com has released a new theme for Movable Type and Melody called 'Patrick'. It sports an impressive 13 settings screens that let you change everything, from colours, columns, labels, headers and footers, but also if (and how) to display Facebook comments, Twitter integration, highlighted entries, and much, much more.

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Undocumented 'to_json' Modifier in Movable Type 5 for Direct JSON-format Output

By Maarten Schenk on July 27, 2011 4:40 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

This Japanese blog post alerted me to the existence of an undocumented 'to_json' modifier in Movable Type 5. There is a well documented list of global modifiers like encode_html, trim, capitalize... available here, but 'to_json' seems to be missing from that list or any other place in the documentation. What does it do?

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Displaying Entries Not in a Category in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on July 20, 2011 4:40 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

It is quite simple to list all (or some) entries in one or more categories using Movable Type's MTEntries tag in combination with the 'category' or 'categories' attribute. But what if you need to display just the entries that are *not* in a category? I was recently faced with this problem, and here is the solution I came up with:

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The IncludeMap Plugin for Movable Type (with screencast)

By Maarten Schenk on June 9, 2011 2:28 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

I recently found out about the IncludeMap plugin while browsing the Japanese Movable Type Plugin Directory (which seems way livelier than the 'official' one). This neat plugin builds a map of the relationships between your various templates, showing you a neat visualisation of which templates include which modules and widgets, but also the other way round, going multiple levels deep.

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Treating Every n'th out of x Entries as Special in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on June 6, 2011 3:42 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

I recently had to deal with a list of entries of arbitrary length, and every second out of three had to be displayed slightly differently than the one before and after it. The idea was to create sort of a three-column effect, with each 'middle' entry sporting a left and right border. A very useful tool for this is Movable Type's built-in modulo operation.

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How to Show a List of all Possible Values in a Custom Field in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on May 31, 2011 11:27 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |

User birdahonk on the Movable Type forums was looking for a way to display a list of the countries in which the pictures on his photoblog were taken. The country of each photo was stored in a custom field, and he would like to have a simple list of them, without duplicates. Some Movable Type template magic to the rescue!

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Displaying the Latest from the Blogs that Most Recently Published an Entry with Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on May 30, 2011 9:37 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

Using Movable Type's Multiblog feature it is relatively easy to aggregate the most recent blog posts accross your entire Movable Type installation. For example, <mt:entries include_blogs="all">...</mt:entries> will get you the ten most recent entries. But sometimes this is not what you need. What if you want to make sure there is at least one entry from each blog being displayed?

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Displaying the Date and Time of the Latest Activity on a Movable Type Blog

By Maarten Schenk on May 27, 2011 9:38 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |

I recently needed to show the date and time of the last activity on a blog: in other words, when was the last entry or comment posted? For this to work, you need to know when the last entry was posted, when the last comment was posted and which happened last. Here is the template code I came up with:

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Comparing Movable Type and TypePad Template Tags

By Maarten Schenk on April 19, 2011 11:36 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

Way back in the mists of time, Six Apart launched TypePad, something many described as an on-line version of their self-hosted software Movable Type meant for less technical users (or simply for those who didn't want to bother with technical stuff and just blog). Compare it to Wordpress.com vs. Wordpress.org, if you will. TypePad expanded rapidly and became a very large and succesfull premium blogging service, which it still is today. Even though it evolved over the years, you can still see some Movable Type heritage in it here and there.

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