Quick Fixes for Common Itches

Every once in a while, if you use Movable Type long enough, you can run into little glitches or things that are confusing. We thought we’d round up a couple of random ones that have seemed common lately, with the hopes that it makes things a little more fun and a little less frustrating.

Filtering entries by category name gets weird if my category name has spaces!

This one cropped up in Movable Type 4.25 (the release where Motion was introduced). If you have a category name like “Diamonds & Pearls” and you set <mt:entries category="Diamonds & Pearls">, you get an error instead of your entries! No good. So, we made a quick little patch (link outdated) to fix it. Just follow the outlined steps there and you should be set.

Sometimes I can’t click into the text editor when writing an entry or page!

Oooh, tricky. What’s probably happened here is your mt-config.cgi file lists the full path for your site’s MT install, something like StaticWebPath http://www.example.com/mt/mt-static/ but you’ve visited your MT install at http://example.com/mt/, without the “www” part. Because of the web browser security works, MT can’t load the editor part of the Create Entry screen, and that makes everybody sad. You can get around it immediately by making sure to visit the address you have set up in your configuration file, or solve it more permanently by using a relative path instead of an absolute one. In this example, you’d replace something like  StaticWebPath http://www.example.com/mt/mt-static/with StaticWebPath /mt/mt-static/ so that MT won’t be so picky about what address you’re using.

Bonus Tip: The mt-config.cgi configuration options are listed here. Handy to bookmark for future reference!

Halp! My scheduled entries aren’t publishing as scheduled!

You usually have to do one additional step to get scheduled tasks going on your Movable Type install. Movable Type uses a scheduling system to trigger these events. If you’re simply doing scheduled entries, you can actually get Movable Type to run scheduled tasks by subscribing to your System Activity Log’s feed. This is a cool little under-promoted feature that gives you an RSS feed of everything that goes on in your Movable Type install, and as a side benefit, every time your RSS reader or browser requests the feed, scheduled tasks are run.

I want to set up a queue to do my publishing for me!

Got a bigger site, or just want a more robust scheduling system that can handle things like a Movable Type Publish Queue? Then you’ll want to set up MT’s Run Periodic Tasks system. Don’t worry — if you know your way around your web server, it’s not too complicated. Once you’ve got all that running, grab Byrne Reese’s Publish Queue Manager plugin and you’ll be able to see exactly what’s going on with the system.

We’ll try to share more tips and tricks as they pop up, but in the meantime here’s one last gem to bookmark: A great page on the Movable Type wiki offering up template tag recipes to do all kinds of cool things on your site. No plugins needed, and the sky’s really the limit for the ideas people have shared.