Movable Type

The ebook Blogging with Movable Type has a new cover. The content stays the same. It's still an introduction to Movable Type 5 with a lot of useful information for beginners with Movable Type.

Ever looked for a book about Movable Type? When I had to use Movable Type (job requirement), I've looked for some books or ebooks that would help me get startet with Movable Type. What did I found. The only available Movable Type books are more than 6 years old. So they are not helpful at all. After some time with Movable Type I've decided to write down the basics about Movable Type. What Movable Type is, installation and configuration, creating static pages and blog entries, uploading assets (images and other files), design and themes and publishing (making your content available to everyone). I've written it down as a kindle ebook in English. It's my first ebook, so it might not be perfect. But I hope it's a help to everyone who needs to get startet with Movable Type.



Get it here: ebook: Blogging with Movable Type

If you do not have a kindle, you could either buy one (Kindle eReader, Wi-Fi, 15 cm (6 Zoll)) - or you can use the free apps available for about every system (Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android).

Movable type comes included with jQuery, a free and very powerful javascript-framework. To use it in your website or blog, simply add the following line to your html-head:

<script type="text/javascript" src="<$mt:StaticWebPath$>jquery/jquery.js"></script>

or if you prefer the minimized version:

<script type="text/javascript" src="<$mt:StaticWebPath$>jquery/jquery.min.js"></script>

Minimized version means not a jQuery light with reduced functionality but the js-file size is reduced by stripping out unnecessary content (like spaced, line breaks, ...). Just in case you do not know.

Movable Type is nice. And it's really easy to create a simple plugin with a custom template tag. That tag could hold a special image url or something. Following the instructions in the developer documentation on movabletype.org works flawless - as long as you do not try to use it in a dynamic template.

Dynamic templates use PHP and are not able to access the perl-script you've created. You will see something like the following error message when loading your site: "Smarty error: syntax error: unrecognized tag ...". So you're googling and find a lot of people with the same problem. But no one seems to has a solution. So keep on reading. Here it comes.

You might have read the instructions about creating the php folder in your plugin directory. But what to put in there. Because it uses smarty tags, you must create a php function smarty can use. So there are special naming requirements for the php file and the function name.
The file must be called function.mtmyimageurl.php (if you follow the documentation on movabletype.org). Inside create a function

function smarty_function_mtmyimageurl($args, &$ctx) {

$movableType = $ctx->mt;
return $movableType->config('myimageurl');
}

Please keep to lowercase filenames and function names. Or it just might not work.