May 22, 2009
Quick Fixes for Common Itches
By Anil Dash and posted in Tips & Tricks.
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 So, we made a quick little patch (link outdated) to fix it.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…
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October 31, 2008
Taking full advantage of template module caching
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Movable Type offers a number of features to help administrators increase the performance of their system. Chief among them is template module caching. As the name may imply, any template module in Movable Type can have caching enabled, which causes Movable Type to store the output and HTML from the module in Movable Type’s database for later use. That way, if a template module is used frequently, then Movable Type will minimize the number of times it goes to the database to generate its content. To help our users take complete advantage of this important feature introduced in Movable Type 4.2, we have assembled the “Ultimate Guide to Template Module Caching.” It comes complete with: insight into why this feature can have such profound performance benefits sample code tips on what to look for when decided which modules to cache a detailed explanation of how this feature can be used in conjunction with server side includes information you may not have known about, like the ability to override the global cache context and create more granular and context sensitive module caches…
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October 31, 2008
Taking full advantage of template module caching
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Movable Type offers a number of features to help administrators increase the performance of their system. Chief among them is template module caching. As the name may imply, any template module in Movable Type can have caching enabled, which causes Movable Type to store the output and HTML from the module in Movable Type’s database for later use. That way, if a template module is used frequently, then Movable Type will minimize the number of times it goes to the database to generate its content. To help our users take complete advantage of this important feature introduced in Movable Type 4.2, we have assembled the “Ultimate Guide to Template Module Caching.” It comes complete with: insight into why this feature can have such profound performance benefits sample code tips on what to look for when decided which modules to cache a detailed explanation of how this feature can be used in conjunction with server side includes information you may not have known about, like the ability to override the global cache context and create more granular and context sensitive module caches We hope to make this guide the most definitive source for information about this feature, so if you have…
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October 30, 2008
Making it easier to debug and test your templates
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Sometimes there can be nothing more frustrating than trying to troubleshoot publishing performance. Often users must resort to the brute force method of debugging, such as: embedding print STDERR statements in Movable Type’s source code - but how many people know how to do that? blocking out huge swaths of code using the <mt:ignore> tag to hone in on the root cause - a cumbersome and time consuming process. turning on performance logging - a feature whose output was intended for machines and as a result is sometimes too verbose or difficult to read by mere mortals. To help our users find a more elegant and efficient way to debug their templates and optimize their system, we have developed a simple tool that can more quickly and effectively help users hone in on those aspects of their templates that are the bottlenecks in their publishing system. The tool is a simple command line tool that outputs four very useful things: the output from the template itself - very the accuracy of the template’s output yourself. a table of all the template tags invoked by the template - this table not only shows the template tag name, but also the average…
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October 16, 2008
Google Sitemap and Template Caching Tips
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
On a recent call with the Movable Type Community we discussed and shared tips on how to best take advantage of Movable Type’s built in caching system. One of the tips I shared is something I have been doing on my personal site and on a number of customer sites with great success, and it relates to how to optimize the publication of a Google Sitemap in a sustainable way. Google Sitemaps have become an essential tool for bloggers to help optimize their content for search engines, also known as SEO or “Search Engine Optimization.” Google Sitemaps are files published by a web site that detail each and every page on the web site and give some indication as to the frequency they are updated by the system. This helps ensure that when the Google fairy visits your site to slurp up and index your site’s content that: Google indexes all of your content, and does not overlook any content that might be orphaned on your site because no other page links to it directly. Google is able to schedule additional visits of the Google Fairy when your content is likely to be updated. Anyone can publish a Google Sitemap…
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August 16, 2008
Creating Drop-Down Navigation with Movable Type
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
A common question from Movable Type users and designers is, “how do I create nice navigation for my web site?” The Professional Website template set and even Mid-Century have navigation build in. But there are Movable Type themes out there that don’t have this feature and users want to know how to add it. This brief tutorial will show you how. The Objective The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to add category driven drop-down menus to your web site that approximates the look and feel below: What does this mean? Well, there are lots of ways to build navigation for a site. The method you will choose depends largely upon your content and implementation strategy. This methods are: category driven navigation - using category and sub-category names as the menu and menu item names page driven navigation - using page names as the menu and menu item names folder driven navigation - using a hierarchy of folders (folders contain pages) This article will focus on creating menus based upon your category hierarchy….
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July 23, 2008
Movable Type 4.2 RC4 and some of our latest hacks
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
We have had some amazing feedback from the community since we started the public beta of Movable Type 4.2 - a release we consider to be one of the most important upgrades to Movable Type ever. Users of 4.2 can attest as well: Movable Type 4.2 is fast — never before have we seen performance increases of 100x for common tasks like search. Of course, improvements like that are only possible, I believe, when a team of people come together to stop using band-aids and focus intently on actually solving a problem in a fundamental way. Naturally with improvements like that in store for our users, the most common question we hear is, “when will Movable Type 4.2 be released?” With bug reports starting to wane and feedback slowing to a trickle, we think we are getting really close to a final release, and it is our belief that the latest, Release Candidate 4, will be the last release candidate prior to release. In the meantime, for those of you aching for something new, something cool, or something useful, here are some things coming out of our weekly hackathons that you might be check out: Template Set Exporter Tool Designers…
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February 7, 2008
Introducing the Movable Type Design Assistant
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
For years now, Movable Type has had a powerful “Style Catcher” built in, which lets you browse a number of different style libraries all over the Internet, and then apply a style to your blog with just a click. It’s really simple, but as a company that’s always cared a lot about design, we wanted to give you more power, more personalization, and more control over the way your site looks. So behold, the Movable Type Design Assistant, a beta of a new tool designed to help you make beautiful sites, easily. We started with a few of our most popular default styles, which cover a wide variety of visual looks, and which also offer a range of different choices for the number of columns of content you have on your site. But what if you like one of the default styles and just need to make a few tweaks to it here and there? Or what if you want to start from a clean slate, working with a completely unstyled blog and adding in your own look and feel? The Design Assistant makes that easy, too. Jim Ramsey, Movable Type’s lead designer and someone who’s done some great thinking…
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January 17, 2008
Using template tag parameters
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
From the “I didn’t know you could do that” department: So I was working with Beau on the implementation of a performance enhancement to Movable Type’s search results and he showed me this really amazing trick that I doubt anyone knows about. What we needed to do was suppress the comment and TrackBack counts from the search results page because a user in our community found that by removing them he dramatically sped up search results! However, we also wanted to use the same template module for displaying an entry’s summary that we use everywhere else on the site. I thought we were going to have to create a special module just for search results, but then Beau showed me the following. Did you know that you can pass parameters to template modules you include? I didn’t. Within an include tag you can add any attribute and have that attribute passed to the included template as a variable. For example the include tag that includes the entry summary in the search results template would look like this: <$MTInclude module=”Entry Summary” hidecounts=”1”$> The hidecounts is a parameter that will be passed to the “Entry Summary” module as a variable. Then within…
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December 31, 2007
A tour of Movable Type 4.1’s asset editing functionality
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Movable Type 4.0 provided users for the first time with the features necessary for Movable Type to serve as a light weight content management system for web sites. It also provided a framework to developers to define their own custom asset types as illustrated through the Media Manager and Podcasting plugins for Movable Type. Movable Type 4.1, currently in beta, takes asset management one step further by allowing administrators and author to more easily edit, tag and organize the assets within their Movable Type install. What follows is a brief overview of some of these new features. Filter Assets by Type As you expand upon the types of assets you manage within Movable Type, you can easily filter them to see just your Flickr photos, or your YouTube videos, or your images or your podcasts… you get the idea. One Click Previews When viewing your list of assets, not only does Movable Type now show a small thumbnail of each asset, but you can zoom in on the asset without leaving the page by clicking the small magnifying glass associated with each asset. Asset Auditing From the asset details screen you can view a list of all the pages and…
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December 26, 2007
MTOS Subversion Tips
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Developers looking to stay plugged into the bleeding edge of Movable Type without having to depend upon nightly builds may like the following tip which shows how one can always access the following builds reliably and predictably without having to worry about branches, tags or anything else about how the source code is organized: The last official release that one can download from our web site The last stable release, which includes minimally tested milestone beta builds The most recent source code in active development Pointers to each of these are maintained for your convenience by the development team. Simply execute the following command and you will check out three copies of Movable Type corresponding to each of the above states of the source code (the source code will be placed within a directory called mtos-latest): svn co http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest mtos-latest When that is complete you can navigate to the dev directory found within the mtos-latest directory that was just created for you and execute svn up to update to the most recent code in development. Executing the following command will reveal that this is made possible through a set of three svn:externals: svn propget svn:externals http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest In layman’s terms, these…
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August 13, 2007
Reports from the Upgrade-a-thon
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Last week’s Movable Type 4.0 events were a huge success. On Tuesday we hosted a day long “Upgrade-a-thon” where we invited people to join us in Movable Type’s IRC chat room and on the phone to help a number of people with migrating to Movable Type from other platforms as well upgrading older versions of Movable Type to the latest and greatest MT4. Lots of people successfully upgraded that day using the Movable Type 4.0 Upgrade Guide, and many more reported having successfully upgraded earlier on in Movable Type 4.0’s beta process. I would like to thank everyone who participated that day. Your feedback and your many questions allowed us to refine our documentation even further in order to pave the way for even more MT4 converts. Who knew that just by asking questions you would be helping others?We learned a lot about how to upgrade to MT4. So we thought we’d share it with you.What follows are some of the most frequently asked questions from that day with links to the documentation that resulted from those questions. If one of your questions was not answered, then please, attach a comment to this post and we will do our best…
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