How To Blog

WordPress 'Easter Egg' provides for even more customization

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Well, a comment promoting WordPress was left by Carthik to one of my posts - and after looking at his blog I came across a post heralding a WordPress Easter Egg that gives one access to every customizable thing one could want. As I've still not yet tried WordPress, I can't comment on how well this works. Screenshots or descriptions of what all these new options are would help, but it's nice to know they exist (whatever they are). I'll definately be checking these out when I start my first WordPress blog. Thanks Carthik!

As stated in his post, to activate the easter egg:

If you use wordpress 1.2, go to http://example.com/wp-admin/options.php?option_group_id=all
(where example.com/wp-admin is the URI of your wordpress wp-admin folder), for all the buttons and levers you’ll ever need.

Be warned, however. One commenter on Carthik's site tried the easter egg and had the following to say, "Great find, please be aware that this can have dire consequences on the functioning of your site. For wahtever reason, when I tried to save anything it deactivated my not defaultly installed plugins giving me errors everywhere. Luckily I worked it out relatively quickly, but the expletives had already come out. doh! "

Can a Google search help me figure out which blogging software is most popular?

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I've already figured out that I don't want to use TypePad or Blogger (the two easiest tools to use) for my blogs as they're not as robust and customizable as other options such as Movable Type, b2evolution, WordPress, and blosxom for example.

The problem is that all of these other tools have a decent sized learning curve, particularly if you are interested in customizing your templates, which I very much am. So if I'm going to invest all this time in creating my perfect blog, which means learning the software which powers it, I want to make sure I don't waste too much of my time on a platform that doesn't have as much community support or won't necessarily keep up with new technologies as they emerge (like the way Blogger doesn't support TrackBacks, for example)

It occurred to me to just do a google search for each of the tools in question to get an idea of how many pages reference those tools. Now, Movable Type has been around for a LONG time, so it's likely that that will be the most popular of searches - yet, as mentioned in a previous post, there is concern in the Movable Type community that it's creators might not put as much effort in keeping it up to date now that they have their new baby, TypePad.

In any case, here are the number of results that turn up when you search for the following terms in Google (the most popular search engine out there):

Movable Type = 1,610,000 results

blosxom = 13,700 results

b2evolution = 104,000 results

WordPress = 1,450,000

While I'm at it, might as well check Google PR (Page Rank) for each of the above mentioned sites to gain another sense of it's popularity (or, as Google puts it, to gain a measure of the importance of a page):

WordPress has PR 7
b2evolution has PR 6
bloxsom has PR 8
Movable Type has PR 8
TypePad has PR 8
Blogger has PR 10

Hmm. Blogger has PR 10. Man, I wish they would implement the latest technology into Blogger so one can use it, because I really suspect google gives some level of priority in ranking to blogs created using the software THEY own and hosted on their server (blogspot). Anyone else ever wondered about this?

Customizing the Category Template for Movable Type

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Finally! An article that will help me modify my category archives. Right now, the default template for your category archive in Movable Type 3.0 lists the entire entry of EACH article in that category. If you have a lot of articles (esp. long ones), you may prefer (as I do) to have your Category page list the titles of each article (which is linked to the full individual article) as well as maybe a brief excerpt from the articles. Elise's Movable Type Tutorial pages provide you with just the information on how to do this. Thanks Elise! I can't wait to implement this in my Online Travelogue blog that is made using Movable Type 3.0. As it is, I only just figured out how to add a list of categories in the sidebar on the main page. Now how could that have been missing from the default main index page? I'll post the code for that in a bit, but right now I've got to grab some dinner!!

Doing your entire site with Movable Type

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I've come across a number of amazing articles, which I've yet to fully process in my brain, on doing your entire site using Movable Type, including static pages - which means you can use Movable Type as a Content Managment System (CMS) in addition to it being a weblog. This greatly expands the power of Movable Type, and with some plugins, it's almost unbelievable how versatile and expandable Movable Type is.

Here are the links to articles that will (hopefully) help me (and you) to get MT working in a more robust capacity:

Brad Choate's Doing your whole site with MT allows you to "make use of Movable Type’s search feature to search any page of my site instead of just my weblog content. I can also enable comments, trackback or whatever for any page I’d like."

Key Values Plugin for Movable Type which allows you to associate other bits of data with your entries which can be extracted conviently in your templates

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Brad Choate has created an amazing plugin for Movable Type that allows you to create and reference additional fields, making it more easy to use Movable Type as a semi-full featured CMS System

Using Movable Type to create static pages, as well as tweaks for Movable Type Templates

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Beyond the Blog

July 14, 2003, by Matt Haughey

I've spent the past year and a half playing with the possibilities in Movable Type (MT), through my personal and client sites. Like all weblog management tools, MT is basically just a lightweight content manager, but it's power is in its flexibility. This article is aimed at people comfortable with HTML and creating their own MT templates, but if you're new to the tool there might still be some tips worth picking up.

The template system is the core feature of MT I'm tweaking in all the following examples. MT came onto the scene in Fall of 2001 and introduced a feature not many other blogging tools shared (then and still now), and that is the flexible way templates are handled. Instead of just skins for your weblog, or a predefined limit of templates for your index and archives, it not only ships with templates for every aspect of a weblog, you can have as many additional templates as you want and they can do any number of things you need.

Easy tweak: publishing the rest of your site in MT

It's pretty common for people new to weblogging to embrace the simplicity of publishing, and crave it in the rest of their tools. Once you start blogging and the pain of FTP and hand HTML coding is gone, many people start wishing their blogging tools could handle other pages on their site, but virtually none of them do out of the box.

About six months ago, I was asked to help with some updates on Stanford's Center for Internet and Society site, and I learned that the entire site was editable in MT. It was so extensive and powerful that I spent a couple days making layout, content, and site-wide navigation changes and didn't even have a server FTP login. The ever brilliant Kathryn Yu used a combination of server side includes (to hide redundant markup) and MT templates to control every single page on the site (both static and weblog). Then she gave some people rights to modify templates, in order to let them edit the text of static pages. As you'll find out, it's pretty effortless to power a site's about page, a resume, and/or a contact page with MT.

The secret is simple: create new templates that hold your static content. Although templates were designed to feature output by the MT weblog content engine, there's no requirement for that, and this is a easy tweak of the system.

Example: adding an About page to an existing MT-powered blog.

Log into Movable Type and select "Templates" on in the left hand menu.

To make things easier, you'll want to copy the design of your Main Index template so the HTML is identical on your About page. Click on "Main Index" to get the template edit screen, then copy all of the template code. Hit your back button to return to the list of templates.

Follow the link to create a new Index Template. Give it a name like "About page" and an appropriate filename. Paste the Main Index template code into the textarea. Remove everything between the MTEntries tags, including the tags themselves. In the place of the weblog code you just deleted, enter your About page content, with appropriate markup as necessary. Figure 1 shows a conceptual diagram of how this works.

Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of how a normal weblog page works in MT and how a static page works.

If you want to make things easy on your server, check off the option that says rebuild this template automatically, since it won't have any weblog data that will be changing constantly (otherwise it'd just be wasting server resources every time you posted a new blog entry). Whenever you do want to update the page, edit the About page template HTML and make sure you rebuild just that template by clicking the Rebuild Template button below (note: not the rebuild link that will shown above your template information, the form button at the bottom).

While it's a slight bit tedious to setup each static page in this way, you will gain the convenience of being able to update any page on your site directly within MT. You can continue creating as many pages as you need, such as a page for your resume, a page linking to your photo galleries, a contact page, a search page, and/or a links page. I've converted all the static pages on my site using this technique and find I only have to update a static page once a month or so, but having them all accessible from a web browser makes updates easier and I find I make changes more often.

More Advanced tweak: using MT as a simple database application

While movable type was designed to handle all the data associated with weblogs, you'll soon see that MT can also be used to create a photo gallery, power a design portfolio, keep a recipe catalog, or anything else you can imagine.

I've been building database-backed websites for the past four years and there's one simple reason I love building them: once you've done the extra work and created the code to output a single page, you can then output ten thousand pages. After building site after site like this, I've found one of the problems is that coding the database layer and scripting layer is time consuming and requires a lot of work. Then I realized that I could use MT for simple database needs.

It all began when I starting thinking of how I could convert this featured essay section from a system I built myself to movable type. My custom application used these fields to describe each essay: title, subtitle, image, the essay itself, and the date. I realized there were at least that many pieces of data in a movable type blog and went about converting things over.

Basic database concepts

I tend to think of databases a lot like simple spreadsheets. If you imagine every piece of data a Movable Type blog can have, it looks something like the table below.

MT field name	Data type	Sample data
Entry ID	number automatically generated by MT	624
Entry Title	text	Catching a ball game
Entry Date	timestamp	September 12, 2003
Entry Body	text	I scored two tickets to the World Series game between the...
Extended Entry Body	text	When I got to the ballpark, I realized I forgot the...
Entry Keywords	text	baseball, stories, World Series
Category	numeric pointer to another table of category names	Sports

Note: You might not be able to see all these data fields in your Movable Type installation, make sure you have the latest release (2.64 or later) and be sure to click the "Customize this Page" link on the new entry page, then enable everything you can in the "Custom" view.

In the table above, the title, body, extended body, and keyword fields are totally open-ended text containers. For this section of my site devoted to featured essays, I re-used the data in the following way.

Essay section names	MT fields used	sample data
Essay Title	Entry Title	Beyond the Blog
Essay Subtitle	Extended Entry Body	Powering an entire site with Movable Type
Essay Image	Entry Keywords	beyond.jpg
Essay body	Entry Body	I've spent the past year and a half playing with...
Essay date	Entry Date	July 14, 2003

As you can imagine, Movable Type's weblog engine can be re-used for all sorts of pages. I am currently using MT to power my press list at MetaFilter and the press at Ticketstubs, it powers my mobile phone photo gallery (Additionally, I'm using a piece of email-to-MT software that saves the images and puts the image names into MT fields), and it also powers my list of photo galleries (I designed a separate app to host the images -- eventually I'll move that to exported iPhoto galleries).

Example: Creating an online portfolio with MT

I use a database application whenever I have content that repeats and follows a distinct pattern. For this example I'll create a portfolio of web sites I've designed. A portfolio generally follows a pretty set pattern where you have a screenshot, description of the site, and associated data (name, date, etc). I'll start by listing the bits of info needed for each entry in my website portfolio.

Portfolio entry name	sample data
Name of Site	Creative Commons
Screenshot image of Site	creativecommons.gif
Description of the Site	For the non-profit Creative Commons, I set out to...
Date Site launched	December 16, 2003
Type of work	Employee

Looking at the available fields in MT, I'll map them as follows:

Portfolio entry name	MT field name
Name of Site	Entry Title
Screenshot image of Site	Entry keywords
Description of the Site	Entry Body
Date site launched	Entry Date
Type of job	Entry Category (category types include Employee, Contractor, and Volunteer)

Keep in mind that for media files like images, audio, or video, I typically put simply the filename in a MT field, then build a link in the template like so:

<img src="/portfolio/screenshots/<$MTEntryKeywords$>">

and I upload the images separately into the folder. To be honest, I'm still working on my portfolio pages and can't show you the output with a link, but Ryan Schroeder recently emailed me to show how he'd done his portfolio in MT here.

You can see that he's using categories to split his type of work into Web Sites, Print, Presentations, and Identity, and each entry features screenshots and text (probably all within a single entry field I'm guessing).

Caveats and limitations

Now obviously MT can only go so far with this, and you'll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a lot of websites it's all the complexity you need. Anything you want to keep track of online that is limited to several properties can be handled by MT.

The other major downside to repurposing MT is that you're still stuck with the MT posting interface that clearly asks for all the pieces of a weblog, even when you're using it for posting recipes (which, by the way, could be done using category as the meal type, the name of the dish would go in the title field, the instructions in entry field, and the ingredients in extended entry). I know the Movable Type folks have talked about creating a developer program and after doing things like this with MT, I would suggest that MT someday become flexible enough to where a developer could customize the interface to posting for client sites. I'd love to deploy a site intended for an aspiring author to track all his articles written, books reviewed, and favorite sites, but give them a custom backend that clearly labels each thing appropriately. Sort of like a template system for MT itself. Just the other day I noticed that Jay Allen has done just this for one of his clients.

So what have we learned?

I learned these techniques slowly, and as the lightbulbs went off I thought it might help to share it and hopefully spark ideas in others. I didn't realize what a flexible and powerful system I had right under my nose and now that I've started playing with the possibilities, I can't wait to see what others come up with.

Updates

This article has sparked some great additional hacks. Brad Choate, grand master of MT hacking, tells of a smoother way to add static pages to your site. Scott mentions how to tweak output paths. Doug Bowman explains exactly how he uses MT to control his portfolio, using a bit of PHP to go beyond just a handful of existing data fields. Some example sites I forgot to include, and from people that emailed me are below.

Some examples of innovative MT uses

Boxes and Arrows
An online magazine with over a year of archives and dozens of articles (with comments) that span multiple pages (how that was done). Looking at this site, it's not much of a stretch to imagine Wired News being powered by Movable Type someday.

The Morning News
Another magazine-like publication that uses MT for both articles and their front page's blog-like headlines. Features nice use of categories for stories and a robust page for every author, with pointers to all their previous contributions.

Adaptive Path
A business organization's site that features both static and dynamic content, AP's newest site went through a recent redesign and is now entirely powered by MT (see comment #80 in that thread for pointers to how it was done).

About.com
I don't know how they did it, but every sub-sub-sub category at About is running its own MT blog (with RSS!). Examples: index of a category, single entry

Redland Baptist Church
MT being use as a whole site CMS for a church's small site.

Touch of Hope
Charity site built entirely with MT (info on the setup)

 

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION using Creative Commons License from http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007162

b2evolution?

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Just came across this free open source blogging tool called b2evolution

I haven't given it a whirl yet, but it claims to be similar to Movable Type except that it's PHP instead of perl. It also claims to be much more feature packed than Blogger - and while it's clear that they are referring to an older version of Blogger, b2evolution does support categories, subcategories, trackbacks, pings, and even the ability to have templates that display multiple blogs in different panes -- pretty cool.

My biggest concern regarding using it is whether or not it is still actively supported (since the website itself is clearly referring to a very old version of Blogger). It also doesn't appear to have the WYSIWYG editor that Blogger has. And obviously, you need to host it on your own server (not a problem for me), but that also means you need to know how to install it - after I've tried that, I'll let you know how it goes.

Can I copy the html from a Blogger post into TypePad

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UPDATE: As of early Nov '04, TypePad has it's own WYSIWYG, rendering the rest of this post unnecessary as TypePad can do all of this on its own now with their built in Rich Text Editor which is even better than Blogger's (PLUS you can edit the HTML directly from w/in TypePad's edit post interface, as well -- something I've yet to see in ANY other blogging software..

This is a test to see whether I can copy code from Blogger over to TypePad

• This should be a bulleted list item

This should be switched to Times New Roman a size larger and colored RED.

This line should be centered

1. now for a numbered list
2. item two...

Switching fonts to Verdana and

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Hmmm. It would appear that perhaps the best method is to use TWO tools. Blogger has a better WYSIWYG design interface w/in which to create a better looking post. You can then click on Edit HTML, and copy and paste everything into your TypePad post - and now you have the functionality you want with TypePad, such as Categories and TrackBacks, w/the ease of individual post design of Blogger. This could work..

UPDATE: As of early Nov '04, TypePad has it's own WYSIWYG

indenting

Will TypePad let me enter straight HTML?

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UPDATE: This post is a tad obsolete now that TypePad allows you to edit HTML directly.  Simply click the 'Edit HTML' tab from the compose post screen and modify or create your html to your hearts content.  Click back on the "Compose Post" tab and your changes will be implemented immediately :)

• Here's some code I created in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and then pasted the source straight into TypePad
• this should be a bulleted list
• Changing fonts to ARIAL

How to Customize TypePad's Post Page Display to show the TrackBack fields, etc

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From TypePad's Help, when you are creating a new post if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a small link underneath the Preview and Save buttons entitled, "Customize the display of this page".

Go ahead and click it. You're now given a choice of basic, advanced, or custom. Go ahead and choose advanced, and you will now see the following extras when you create your posts:

displays the Title, Category, Post Introduction, Post Continuation, Comments, Accept TrackBacks, Posting Status, Excerpt, TrackBack URLs to Ping, Text Formatting