Archive Types in Movable Type
Blogs are well known for their fast-flowing, reverse-chronological listing of recent entries as well as RSS and Atom feeds of that same content which is delivered to interested readers automatically through their feed readers. The files that are published by Movable Type which control these are called indexes.
Indexes change constantly and the presence of a single piece of content on them usually lasts a few weeks at most. These types of pages exist almost solely for keeping visitors apprised of what’s new.
However, in addition to these quickly changing indexes, Movable Type publishes a set of pages upon which the content lives permanently. These files in aggregate are called the blog’s archives.
Archive Types
Movable Type currently supports seven archive types: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Category, Author, Entry and Page.
A number of files are produced and updated automatically by the system for each archive type that is enabled. Together the category-, author- and date-based archives serve as historical repositories of entries grouped by topic or period of time in which they were posted. Note that author-based archives are new in Movable Type 4.
The Entry and Page archives, on the other hand, are literally just a smaller grouping: one published file per Entry or per Page, respectively. By default this archive file also contains all feedback functionality and previously posted fedback for the entry or page.
The Default Published Blog
When a new weblog is created in Movable Type, it is immediately ready for use and requires no further configuration. By default, the system publishes the following for each weblog:
- A main index (the home page of the blog)
- A master archive index
- RSS and Atom feeds
- Monthly archives
- Category archives
- Author archives
- Individual entries
- Individual pages
In addition several auxiliary files (e.g. cascading style sheets, a site JavaScript file, etc.) are created which provide both style and functionality to the published blog.
