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Movable Type Powered 'Trendolizer' Ready for the U.S. Elections

By Maarten Schenk on November 6, 2012 11:57 AM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks |

In my spare time I've been working on https://www.trendolizer.com, a site that automatically finds and posts stories, videos, images etc. that are trending on Facebook. Â I recently redesigned the site using the Bootstrap framework, and today seems to be an excellent time to point out that there is also a 'politics' section at https://politics.trendolizer.com where you can follow what is trending regarding the U.S. presidential election. Â Read on if you want to know more about the technical details.

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Bootstrap theme for Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on October 30, 2012 10:59 AM | 33 Comments | No TrackBacks |

Mark Carey from MT-hacks has announced a Bootstrap-based theme for Movable Type. Â If you don't know Bootstrap yet, it is a collection of stylesheets and javascript files that you can use to quickly put together a great-looking website using pre-made elements. Â The theme can be downloaded here. Â Documentation is still incomplete at this time, but I'm sure that will change soon.

Dealing with "Error rebuilding file ... : Publish error in template '... ': Unknown tag found: ..."

By Maarten Schenk on August 29, 2012 10:29 AM | 36 Comments | No TrackBacks |

A recent forum post asked about possible solutions for a Movable Type error that looked like this:

Error rebuilding file /var/www/...: Publish error in template '...': Error in tag: error in module...: Publish error in template '...': Error in tag: Error in tag: error in module ...: Publish error in template '...': Unknown tag found: ...

The weird thing was that the error only happened when publishing the particular file via the publish queue using the 'run-periodic-tasks' script, but it didn't happen when publishing the file 'by hand'.

Continue reading Dealing with "Error rebuilding file ... : Publish error in template '... ': Unknown tag found: ...".

Displaying YouTube or Vimeo Thumbnails in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on January 5, 2012 5:57 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks |

On a recent project I had a Movable Type blog with entries containing embedded videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo, and I needed a way to get a thumbnail image for each video so they could be displayed somewhere else on the site. Here is my solution...

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Dan Wolfgang Releases Spectacular 'Patrick' Theme for Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on January 5, 2012 12:57 PM | 35 Comments | No TrackBacks |

Dan from eatdrinksleepmovabletype.com has released a new theme for Movable Type and Melody called 'Patrick'. It sports an impressive 13 settings screens that let you change everything, from colours, columns, labels, headers and footers, but also if (and how) to display Facebook comments, Twitter integration, highlighted entries, and much, much more.

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Undocumented 'to_json' Modifier in Movable Type 5 for Direct JSON-format Output

By Maarten Schenk on July 27, 2011 4:40 PM | 18 Comments | No TrackBacks |

This Japanese blog post alerted me to the existence of an undocumented 'to_json' modifier in Movable Type 5. There is a well documented list of global modifiers like encode_html, trim, capitalize... available here, but 'to_json' seems to be missing from that list or any other place in the documentation. What does it do?

Continue reading Undocumented 'to_json' Modifier in Movable Type 5 for Direct JSON-format Output.

Displaying Entries Not in a Category in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on July 20, 2011 4:40 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

It is quite simple to list all (or some) entries in one or more categories using Movable Type's MTEntries tag in combination with the 'category' or 'categories' attribute. But what if you need to display just the entries that are *not* in a category? I was recently faced with this problem, and here is the solution I came up with:

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The IncludeMap Plugin for Movable Type (with screencast)

By Maarten Schenk on June 9, 2011 2:28 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |

I recently found out about the IncludeMap plugin while browsing the Japanese Movable Type Plugin Directory (which seems way livelier than the 'official' one). This neat plugin builds a map of the relationships between your various templates, showing you a neat visualisation of which templates include which modules and widgets, but also the other way round, going multiple levels deep.

Continue reading The IncludeMap Plugin for Movable Type (with screencast).

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

By Maarten Schenk on June 6, 2011 3:42 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |

I recently had to deal with a list of entries of arbitrary length, and every second out of three had to be displayed slightly differently than the one before and after it. The idea was to create sort of a three-column effect, with each 'middle' entry sporting a left and right border. A very useful tool for this is Movable Type's built-in modulo operation.

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How to Show a List of all Possible Values in a Custom Field in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on May 31, 2011 11:27 AM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks |

User birdahonk on the Movable Type forums was looking for a way to display a list of the countries in which the pictures on his photoblog were taken. The country of each photo was stored in a custom field, and he would like to have a simple list of them, without duplicates. Some Movable Type template magic to the rescue!

Continue reading How to Show a List of all Possible Values in a Custom Field in Movable Type.

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