February 2011 Archives

By default, the most recent versions of Movable Type come with a built-in password recovery system that can email a user a password reset link.  For most cases, this is enough.  If worst comes to worst, a user with System Administrator privileges can manually reset a user's password or even change the email address the recovery link is sent to.  But what if the account in question is the (only) system administrator account, or if the server cannot send email?

I meant to write about all of this earlier but I didn't get to it due to lack of time.  But here are some interesting Movable Type-related stories that broke in the past few weeks.

One of the interesting features of Movable Type's templating language is that you can use the value of variables as the value for attributes of another tag.  The only thing you need to keep in mind is to use the $-sign notation in that case instead of the <mt:var> tag.  So don't use <mt:entries category="<mt:var name="mycategory">"> but use <mt:entries category="$mycategory">.

Exciting news from Japan.  The beta period for Movable Type 5.1 has officially started.  You can read more about it here, and download the first 'official' beta build here.  It looks like there are some serious backend improvements with the new listing framework, along with several improvements to the templating language and the relation between websites and blogs.  Anyway, go and have a test, I know I will.

Since a blog consists mostly of a series of chronologically ordered items, it would seem to be a great format to build an events calendar or upcoming events list with.  And indeed, Movable Type llows you to set the publication date of entries into the future, either publishing them right away or at some future time (through scheduled publishing).  But how to publish a list of future entries only?