Design and Template Enhancements
Movable Type 4.2 offers a number of improvements to the system designers use to update and maintain the look and feel of their web sites.
Simple Templates
Movable Type 4.2 offers the simplest, yet most flexible templates that power your blog’s design than ever before. Here’s what we have done:
Flat, Simple Templates - we have created templates with a minimal use of included content. This makes it much easier for designers wishing to make a change to their site’s design to find the template and location within the template in which to make the change.
Modularized Content - we have taken critical content that is frequently shared across multiple pages of your site and placed them within template modules to make it easier to update multiple pages across your entire site by making a simple edit to a single template.
New Template Editing Interface
In Movable Type 4.0 and 4.1 we made a dramatic changes to how users edit their site’s templates. We also introduced tons of new features including:
- Code Highlighting - we color code your templates to make it easier for design to scan and find the HTML, CSS, or template code they are looking for.
- Template Refreshing - we made it much easier for users to install entire new template sets or themes for their blog: just select the theme you want and hit “Apply.” We also made it easy for users to select a single template in their system and to revert it back to the factory default.
In Movable Type 4.2 we have added even more features making site and design management even easier. These changes include:
Consolidated Template Listing Screen
We have consolidated all of the various template listing screens inside of Movable Type to a single screen. This screen has also been redesigned to give you a much better picture of your sites overall structure and configuration.
Widget and Sidebar Management Overhaul
Widgets and sidebars are now all managed from a centralized “Widgets” console found under your design tab. This makes it much easier for designers to create a new widget using Movable Type’s templating language, or by cut-and-pasting embed/javascript code from a third party, and then to quickly add that new widget to pages across your web site.
Cachable WIdgets and Server Side Includes
Template modules in Movable Type received a lot of enhancements to help improve performance and to help administrators fine tune performance to suit their unique needs. Widgets received all of these features as well.
» Learn more about Module Caching
» Learn more about Server Side Includes
Template Backup Listing Screens
For as long as Movable Type has supported template refreshing we have also automatically created template backups for you. Now template backups can be found on a separate listing screen under your Design > Templates area. This keeps these critical, but infrequently accessed templates from cluttering your view of your site.
