Treating Every n'th out of x Entries as Special in Movable Type

As you can see, this loops over the twenty most recent entries, displaying the title of each entry inside a pair of left-floating <div> tags with a fixed width and height, and all of this is enclosed in another <div> block with a fixed width.  Without any Movable Type template magic, this would result in a grid-like listing of the twenty most recent headlines.

The 'special sauce' is in the third and fifth lines.  On the third line, we take the value of the built-in __counter__ variable, which holds our current position in the <mt:entries> loop.  We apply the "%" (modulo) function to it, with a value of "3".  Modulo, for those of you who forgot this from maths class, is used to calculate the remainder if you divide by the second number and aren't using fractions or decimals.  Basically, modulo x of a number results in zero if the number can be divided by x, and in a number greater or equal than 1 and smaller than the number otherwise.

In this concrete example, the value of the modulo variable goes through this cycle as we go through the <mt:entries> loop: 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0...

As you can see, each time modulo = 2, we are in the 'middle' of a set of three.  So on line 5 we check for this condition and if true, we add some extra styling to add the borders.  And that is basically it.  The resulting output looks like this:

You could use this technique for many other purposes: changing background colour after every x items in a list, start a new column after x items, highlight every x'th item in a list...