Automatically Posting Movable Type Updates on Twitter and Facebook

By Maarten Schenk on September 2, 2010 3:29 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Mark Carey, the accomplished Movable Type plugin writer, has recently released two new ones: Twitter Tools and Facebook Tools.  Both allow you to post your latest Movable Type entries to respectively Twitter and Facebook, all fully automatic.  The Twitter version even comes with support for optional URL shortening and automatically using MT tags as Twitter hashtags.  Neat!

The Movable Type 5.1 Presentation... in English

By Maarten Schenk on August 3, 2010 9:13 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Jun put up the English version of his MT 5.1 presentation.  Looks like most of the things I spotted in the images will indeed be in MT 5.1.  Nifty...
Continue reading The Movable Type 5.1 Presentation... in English.

First Sneak Peek at Movable Type 5.1

By Maarten Schenk on August 2, 2010 11:07 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
Last weekend there was a Movable Type Development and Design conference in Tokyo, organised by Six Apart Japan.  Jun Kaneko, community manager for Movable Type, gave a presentation (in Japanese unfortunately) with slides.  I hope he puts up a translation soon... However, some words and pictures from the slideshow offer an intriguing glimpse of some new features expected in Movable Type 5.1.
Continue reading First Sneak Peek at Movable Type 5.1.

Setting Display Options (and Custom Field Order) for all Users of a Movable Type Blog

By Maarten Schenk on July 15, 2010 11:30 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The order and presence of various fields and elements on the Create Entry and Create Page screens of Movable Type can be easily changed, as I wrote about earlier.  But you can do it only for the user that is currently logged in.  What if you want to set these options for all users on a blog?  With a smallish number of authors, you could contemplate doing it manually: logging in and out and rearranging things for each user separately.
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New Documentation for Movable Type 5

By Maarten Schenk on July 15, 2010 11:03 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Japanese MT hacker Hajime Fujimoto wrote the PDF book "Designer's Guide to Movable Type 5" (part 1, part 2) some time ago but unfortunately he wrote it in Japanese.  The good news is Six Apart agreed with him to have it translated and edited so it could be published on-line... for free!  They asked me for help with the editing and the first result of these efforts is online here.  More is to follow...
Continue reading New Documentation for Movable Type 5.

Getting all Entries Linked to an Asset in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on July 13, 2010 10:53 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
A while ago I needed to be able to display a list of images along with the blog entries in which they occurred.  Movable Type has an <mt:EntryAssets> tag that makes it very easy to show a list of entries with the images in them, but the reverse tag (<mt:AssetEntries>) didn't exist, unfortunately.
Continue reading Getting all Entries Linked to an Asset in Movable Type.

Discovering Preview Context in Movable Type Entry Templates

By Maarten Schenk on July 13, 2010 10:10 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Recently someone on the Movable Type Open Source mailing list asked if there was an easy way to determine if an entry was being looked at in Movable Type's "preview" mode as opposed to being published "for real".  This might be useful to hide (for example) statistics tracking code, popups, automatic redirection scripts etc.
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Downloading Older Versions of Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on July 8, 2010 2:31 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
If you ever need an older version of Movable Type (for example to resurrect an old database or to test an old plugin), bookmark this link: http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/archives/

TwitterCommenters Plugin and the "Can't call method 'permalink' on an undefined value" Error

By Maarten Schenk on June 29, 2010 3:18 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
I have recently installed the TwitterCommenters plugin on this site, meaning you can now leave a comment using your Twitter username and password.  However, if you just install this plugin on a plain Movable Type installation you are likely to get an error message that reads "Can't call method 'permalink' on an undefined value", even if you followed the installation instructions to the letter.
Continue reading TwitterCommenters Plugin and the "Can't call method 'permalink' on an undefined value" Error.

Combining Tag Attributes, AND, OR and Variables in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on June 28, 2010 3:05 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
This forum posting asks the question if it is possible to do something like 
<mt:entries tag="@sometag AND $somethingelse">...<mt:entries>
to get all entries tagged with "@sometag" and some other tag (which is stored in the $somethingelse variable).
Continue reading Combining Tag Attributes, AND, OR and Variables in Movable Type.
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