July 2010 Archives

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.

Japanese MT hacker Hajime Fujimoto wrote the PDF book "Designer's Guide to Movable Type 5" (part 1, part 2) some time ago but unfortunately he wrote it in Japanese.  The good news is Six Apart agreed with him to have it translated and edited so it could be published on-line... for free!  They asked me for help with the editing and the first result of these efforts is online here.  More is to follow...

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.

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.

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/