The Playground

For the last 4 days I've been trying my hand at converting a theme designed for Wordpress (a php-based blogging platform) to be used in Movable Type. It's been a really frustrating 4 days to say the least. The theme is truly beautiful and fully worth the effort, though it is limited from expansion due to the design itself. It would make a lovely theme for a personal blog. I created a test blog to view the modifications and to make sure it all went together properly, and I'm happy with the result.

I had to do some heavy modifications on some of the MT templates and minor modification on the theme, most notably, the date tag. For some unknown reason I couldn't get this to display fully, so I've made another little post-it note that I think looks better anyway. I've packaged it all up into a plugin that I hope can be made available to the wider MT community. I'm waiting on permission from the designer, Evan Eckard, and Smashing Magazine to allow me to do this. For any Wordpress users, the theme is available for free.

Creating a plugin for the template set was made very easy after looking at how Jim Ramsey did the same thing for his Mid-Century Template Set. I hope to be able to make it available once permissions are in place.

Update:Notepad Chaos has all the permissions and is now available for download. I've tested it as a new install, and also as an template upgrade on an existing blog on MT4.21 Pro. Let me know in the comments if you have any problems installing it.

Posted by Toni at 4:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Today I did some template tweaking on Toni's Corner of the World with a new favorite icon on the comment and trackback posted to lines, and added a favourite posts code to the sidebar and main and individual entry templates.

Favicon is a plugin for Movable Type that adds favicons to comments and trackbacks. Favicons are small icons shown in the browsers location bar and on shortcuts for better identification of a website. The user needs to leave a URL for favicon to work, since the favicon is being detected via the users URL either by the URL in the comment or in the trackback.

My second tweak was to add a "Favourite Posts" list on the sidebar on Toni's Corner of the World. The idea here is to allow your readers to vote for their favourite post in your blog. The top three voted for posts show up in your sidebar. The installation is pretty simple with good instructions. I tried fiddling with the PHP files in this script to get it to display 5 entries, but 3 seems to be the maximum number.

My third little tweak was to include the Acronym code in the entry body tag on the main and archive templates. The Acronym plugin adds an underline (or whatever style you like) to the letters of an acronym, eg HTML, and pops up a description, eg, Hyper Text Markup Language.

Posted by Toni at 7:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I recently installed a piece of code that I'm sure will come in handy for people who use the Extended Entry window in MT. It expands and collapses the "extended" part of the entry without opening a new window. It's a great idea and good for people with limited bandwidth who suffer from slow-loading pages. It works for comments too but I haven't worked out how to use that part of it (and I don't have enough comments to warrant it's use and so have removed the expanding comments part).

Click the "read more" link to see it in action.

Posted by Toni at 7:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I liked the look of the three-column layout but it didn't like me. The right column was cutting things off in the entry screen in the middle column so I've gone back to the two-column layout, this time with the sidebar on the left. I like the look and the entries are displayed properly now. When I find out how to make these templates fluid instead of fixed I may have another go at it. Not so daunting now that I know how it's done.

The WYSIWYG editor works so much better using Firefox, I can view my installed plugins, and have the search suggestions working.  

Posted by Toni at 6:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

This is my first entry after carefully tweaking stylesheets and templates to have the look I want.

First off, I made the edit screens in MT bigger by changing the style-sites.css file in the mt-static folder. I followed the tutorials from Elis's Learning Movable Type. Anyone interested in making some changes to their site should take a look at the tutorials. Well written and easy to follow, I would recommend them.

Next I changed entry titles to be links to the individual entry. The default for MT is to save files with just numbers, easy to follow for a database maybe, but not so easy if you're looking for a particular entry. I added the entry title to the numbers, so this gives me a chronological file listing with entry names. Changes to the stylesheet and the index template were required, which makes me wonder about using StyleCatcher when I've changed the stylesheet. ??

made the filesystem PHP, easier for random entries and using PHP includes, like a side blog or header and footer includes. The last thing was to create a 3-column blog.

Tutorials for all these changes can be viewed on Elise's site:
Enlarging the MT Edit Windows
Entry Titles Linked to Permalinks
File Names and URLs
Creating a 3-Column Layout in MT3.2

Posted by Toni at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |