August 2011 Archives

So I'm back from my holiday and what do I see on Twitter?  Six Apart Japan has revived the @movabletype twitter account.  Curious to see what they'll post...

Using the standard 'Display options' link in the create/edit entry or page screens in Movable Type 4 or Melody you can reorder and toggle the display of the various custom fields that you may or may not have added to entries or pages on your blog or installation.  But once you save the ordering and visibility you like, it is only valid for the user account you are currently logged in with.  Changing the default order and visibility for all users on a blog used to involve either logging in as all of them one by one and changing the settings manually, or some pretty hairy database manipulation.  But now there is a better way.

Last week Endevver released a new plugin (Click Tagging) for Melody/Movable Type 4 that modifies the tag section of the edit entry/page screen, allowing you to click a list of your blog's existing tags to tag an entry or page, instead of typing them.  Of course you can still add new tags by typing them by hand (but this function can be reserved for blog administrators only if needed).  This seems like a great plugin for sites that use a limited set of tags: clicking saves a lot of typing and avoids different spellings of the same tag.  

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).