Movable Type provides administrators with the means of quickly and easily installing a set of templates that together work to create entire web sites and applications, such as blogs and forums.
When you create a "blog" within Movable Type, the application will prompt you to select the "Template Set" you want to use when creating the blog.
You can also apply a template set to an existing blog by navigating to "Templates" found under the Design menu. From there, click the "Refresh Templates" link under Actions. A dialog will pop up and allow you to refresh your current template set, or apply a new template set to a blog.
An option is also presented to create backups of your existing templates if you wish. If that box is checked, Movable Type will create a copy of each of your templates and time stamp them so that you can always revert changes to individual templates if you wish. Your backed up templates can be found by clicking the "Backup Templates" filter found under Quick Links on the main template listing screen.
Note: When only one template set is available within the system, the pull down menu is suppressed. By default the free versions of Movable Type only come with a single template set called the "Classic Blog" template set - which is the official default templates for Movable Type.
Other Resources
- Registering Template Sets - learn how to package up a template set as a plugin to easily distribute it to customers.
- Template Exporter Plugin - Mark Carey produced a great plugin that automates the process of creating a template set from an existing blog. Perfect for beginners and non-technical folks.
3 User Contributed Notes
The imported stylesheet for the template I like is "/mt/mt-static/support/themes/unity-green/unity-green.css" but I cannot figure out how to access it to tweak the green and the gray so that they match the colors I use elswhere in my site. Can you help?
This page doesn't actually tell me how to install a template set that I've downloaded.... what directory it goes into etc...
There is no standard way to install a template set from one that you've downloaded. That process depends greatly upon how the person who wrote the template set has packaged it.
Generally speaking though, people are always encourage to package plugins such that one just needs to unpack the plugin archive and then to copy the archives contents into the same directory as mt.cgi - making sure to preserve the directory and file structure during the copy.
Out of curiosity, what template set have you downloaded?