Movable Tips: Tricks and Workarounds 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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FacebookCommenters Plugin Broken, but Fix will be in MT5.13/4.38

By Maarten Schenk on November 10, 2011 12:11 PM | 8 Comments | No TrackBacks |

The error "Error saving plugin settings: Could not register story template with Facebook: Unknown method" has been popping up more and more among users of the FacebookCommenters plugin for Movable Type. The cause is a change to the API at Facebook. Six Apart is aware of the issue (check the Fogbugz ticket here if you have access) and a fix has been committed but not released yet. I have been told the updated version of FacebookCommenters will be bundled with the upcoming Movable Type 5.13/4.38 release.

Publishing Related Entries Lists (That Stay Updated) with Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on September 19, 2011 11:59 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

Having a list of related, similar entries below each entry in your blog is a good way to entice your readers to stay on your site longer. But how do you generate such a list, making sure only the most relevant entries are listed? And how can such a list be kept up to date, especially on older entries?

Continue reading Publishing Related Entries Lists (That Stay Updated) with Movable Type .

Video: Copy-Pasting from Microsoft Word to Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on August 1, 2011 9:00 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |

If you ever need to copy-paste some text from Microsoft Word to Movable Type, but you don't want to bring along font sizes, colours, styles, tables and the like while still keeping your paragraphs and line breaks intact, here is a short video by Adam Tinworth explaining how to do it (from 2008 but the trick still works, and it seems only 88 people watched it since then; let's see if we can increase that number a bit).

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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?

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

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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Nice Trick to do Movable Type One-Liners in Perl

By Maarten Schenk on June 16, 2011 2:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

Thanks to Google translate (and the community feed) I found out about this nice little trick (original Japanese version) by Akira Sawada today. When doing any kind of Perl development, you can run a one-line command just by calling

perl -e 'some command'

and it will be executed. But did you know you can also (in your MT folder) do this

perl -MT -e 'some command'

and have it executed with all of Movable Type's settings and modules etc. loaded?

Continue reading Nice Trick to do Movable Type One-Liners in Perl.

Bug: Movable Type' s MTInclude Tag Caching Broken while Memcached Active

By Maarten Schenk on June 14, 2011 2:00 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |

Are you using Memcached in combination with Movable Type, and are you using the caching options on one or more of your module or widget templates? Then have a look at these bug reports (106215, 106287), as they might affect the performance of your installation quite negatively.

Continue reading Bug: Movable Type' s MTInclude Tag Caching Broken while Memcached Active.

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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10 Tips for Securing Your Movable Type Installation

By Maarten Schenk on June 2, 2011 4:17 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

After the recent hacking of PBS.org (most likely caused by a 0day exploit in an older version of Movable Type 4), it is probably a good idea to review the security of your Movable Type installation. To help you, we compiled this list of ten security tips, with help from the engineers at Six Apart Japan.

Continue reading 10 Tips for Securing Your Movable Type Installation.

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