Recently in Tricks and Workarounds Category

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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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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Downloading Older Versions of Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on July 8, 2010 2:31 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
If you ever need an older version of Movable Type (for example to resurrect an old database or to test an old plugin), bookmark this link: http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/archives/

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

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).
Continue reading Combining Tag Attributes, AND, OR and Variables in Movable Type.

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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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.

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...
Continue reading Don't Ignore Movable Type's <mt:ignore> Tag.
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