Templating Language Overview
Presentation is as important as content, so Movable Type’s template system allows you to produce pages that showcase your content exactly as you wish. Templates describe where you want to put your content and what that content should look like, using special markers (tags) that are typically mixed with another markup language such as HTML or XML. When you perform a site rebuild, templates are merged with content to create a page that visitors can view in their web browsers. The template engine is crucial to automating this process.
When a new blog is created, it is supplied with its own distinct set of default templates that produce the files listed in the previous section. Weblog Administrators or any user with template management privileges can view and edit these templates.
Most of the non-variable content in the templates is comprised of basic HTML tags (or XML for feeds) and surrounding text. The areas for insertion of variable content are marked by Movable Type template tags. These tags are very similar in their appearance and function to HTML tags, giving template designers a familiar set of tools to work with and eliminating the need to learn an additional programming language just to change the display of the entries on a blog.
The familiarity of the template tags combined with a model of separation of content and presentation allows for both the push-button publishing ease-of-use and ultimate control over the final published product for which Movable Type has always been known.
