January 2010 Archives

One of the great advantages of Movable Type's templating system & static publishing feature is that you can add snippets of PHP or other script code to your pages very easily.  Need to show the current date and time? An RSS feed?  Some content pulled from another system?  PHP to the rescue!  But then you look at a search results page and you see all those nifty PHP snippets you added to your sidebar come out as just that: plain PHP code.  Time to panic?

Sometimes you just want to sort some items according to some ranking, but there is no convenient 'sort_by' attribute available in Movable Type's templating language.  For example, assume you want to sort a list of entries by the number of comments on them.  Or a list of authors by number of posted entries.  Or a list of categories by some value stored in a custom field.  Or...

As announced on movabletype.org this morning, Movable Type 5.01 has hit the download area.  The announcement mentions these major features: websites, themes, revision history, custom fields for all objects and a new user dashboard.

Some of your visitors may know exactly what they are looking for on your blog: that one article you wrote two years ago which had 'bacon sandwich' in the text.  So they type 'bacon sandwich' into your search form, and indeed: one result found!  But now they have to click a link, and that is so much work...