I have moved the source code for HashTag from my private SVN over to GitHub. If you want to contribute any changes you can find it here http://github.com/TheComposingStick/HashTag.
I have also set up an account on Lighthouse to track bugs and feature requests http://thecomposingstick.lighthouseapp.com/projects/43642/home.
Version 2.5 of my HashTag plugin has now been released. See the Hash Tag Plugin project page for more information.
The major change in 2.5 is the ability to tweet scheduled posts, currently that uses the default settings for the plugin at the time the scheduled post is published.
So what will be happening for Version 3.0? Well there are three things planned:
Support for MT5.x and Open Melody.
Using OAuth to link to your twitter account.
Store tweet options with post / page so that default options are not used for scheduled posts and you can set if the plugin should retweet when you edit a page.
I have now added support for scheduled publishing in my HashTag plugin. It is currently a beta and can be downloaded from this link HashTag Beta 2.5.
Some of the changes:
Last year I wrote a post about getting help with Movable Type. Slightly tongue in cheek, but made a few valid points. Things have moved on now, so here is the updated Tips for getting help with Movable Type.
Topic titles are your hook, be clear about your problem; Sidebar is being pushed below content is more informative than HELP!!!!!
The more details you can give at the outset the less back and forth later. Try to include
The majority of people that help on the community forums are users, just like you. They help in their spare time. If the problem is particularly complex then you may have to wait for someone to set up a similar configuration to test. It is a sad fact that people are less inclined to help people that spend the majority of their post mad mouthing the product or threatening to move to a rival.
If you found the help useful, pay it forward by helping out another user when you can. OK, maybe this isn't a real tip as such but it is valid. If you have another suggestion for tip 5 let me know by adding a comment.
A problem that comes up every so often on the Movable Type forums is the mixing of recently upgraded system, old Movable Type version 3.x templates and Movable Type version 4 stylesheets. In layman terms "The layout is buggered" or "The syles don't show".
A reason for this is that a number of the divs (html code that allows use to define parts of a page) had their names changed from a functional name such as banner to a semantic name such as header, so your site looks as if it has lost its style. At this point you have three choices:
Each option has it's pros and cons. If you start from scratch you will have to redo any additional customisation you have made. If you rename the styles in the stylesheet upgrades may overwrite them, my preferred option is to rename the divs in the template. the following is a non exhaustive list of name changes
banner -> header
banner-inner -> header-inner
banner-header -> header-name
banner-description -> header-description
pagebody -> content
pagebody-inner -> content-inner
Also the names of the various layouts have been shorten, see my previous post Changing Number of Columns on a Page
Recently I posted two solutions on how to make a clickable header in Movable Type. I have to admit both were quick and dirty methods rather than elegant solutions, a fact raised by Plasticmind on the Movable Type IRC channel. So to make amends here is part two.
What I should have done is show how to use CSS image replacement techniques to create a clickable header. There are a number of image replacement techniques out there, mezzoblue has full list of all of them, what we are going to look at is listed as the Phark Revisited method or the Plasticmind method.
To make things clear I create a blog and applied the unstyled style, leaving me with the following look.
As you can see everything is very plain text, now I want a nice font to use form my heading, so I have created an image file called header.png that is 940 x 191 pixels. I have saved this in a directory called resources off of the blog root.
I am going to add a style to the end of styles.css to include an image (header.png) in any links in the header section of the template. To do this I add the following code:
#header-name a{
display: block;
background: #fff url("<$mt:blogurl$>/resources/header.png") no-repeat left top;
width: 100%;
height: 191px;
}
The results is this
The problem, as you can see, is that the unstyled name of the blog and the description are still visible, what we are going to do is shift these off the page. Shifting is better than changing the colour as it gives us more flexibility when swapping out images. We don't have to fiddle with matching the font colour or worrying about parts of the image being blocked out. Our style changes slightly to add a negative text indent and to hide the description.
#header-name a{
display: block;
background: #fff url("<$mt:blogurl$>/resources/header.png") no-repeat left top;
text-indent: -9999px;
width: 100%;
height: 191px;
}
#header-description {
text-indent: -9999px;
}
The -9999px shifts the text far off screen so that we don't see it. The final result is
a clickable image header and no fiddling with the templates, just a few lines of css.
This weekend I have been mainly working on a new plugin for MT. It has officially reached 'Ugly Alpha' stage which means it is good enough for me to try out in my own environment but I am embarrassed about the quality of the underlying code to post a link. More next week.
No matter what the product or service, at some point in time your are going to be staring at a strange error message, a dead television screen or a punctured inflatable novelty toy. Face it, at some point in your life you are going to need to get help or support.
If you have paid support all you need to do is login at www.movabletype.com and click on the Open a New Ticket link. In my experience the support offered has been timely and accurate.
Without paid support you have two options:
There are two sites you can visit to get help from the community, forums.movabletype.org and forums.sixapart.com.
A few suggestions about posting
If your question is complicated then you may need to wait while someone may need to replicate the problem or test a solution.
Movable Type has a number of standard column layouts accessible through the styles menu. This can also be accessed through templates so that you can change layout depending on the content.
What you need to do is set the page_layout at the start of the page like so:
<MTSetVar name="page_layout" value="layout-wt">
the value can be any of the following:
layout-wtt <-- Wide, Thin, Thin layout-twt <-- Thin, Wide, Thin layout-wt <-- Wide, Thin layout-tw <-- Thin, Wide layout-wm <-- Wide, Medium layout-mw <-- Medium, Wide
By placing the code in a conditional statement and using private tags you can change the layout of pages or entries just by setting a tag.
A question that comes up every so often on the Movable Type message boards is how to create a clickable banner that links back to the blog homepage. The answer depends very much on how the banner has been added to the page. One way is an img link in the HTML, this can be wrapped in an anchor tag the same way as any other link. Below is a sample Banner Header template that does just that.
<div id="header">
<div id="header-inner">
<div id="header-content">
<mt:Ignore><!-- Use h1 and h2 html tags on the main index of the blog as the title, use divs on all other pages where there are page titles. --></mt:Ignore>
<a href="<$mt:BlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><img src="<$mt:BlogURL$>header.jpg" alt="<$mt:BlogName encode_html='1'" height="150" width="900"/></a>
<mt:If name="main_index">
<h1 id="header-name"><a href="<$mt:BlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$mt:BlogName encode_html="1"$></a></h1>
<h2 id="header-description"><$mt:BlogDescription$></h2>
<mt:Else>
<div id="header-name"><a href="<$mt:BlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$mt:BlogName encode_html="1"$></a></div>
<div id="header-description"><$mt:BlogDescription$></div>
</mt:If>
</div>
</div>
</div>
A lot of the default templates that come with Movable Type use CSS to place a header image on the page. If this is the case you will need to use a little piece of JavaScript to achive the same effect. Below is a modified Banner Header template.
<div id="header" onClick="window.location='<$mt:BlogURL$>'">
<div id="header-inner">
<div id="header-content">
<mt:Ignore><!-- Use h1 and h2 html tags on the main index of the blog as the title, use divs on all other pages where there are page titles. --></mt:Ignore>
<mt:If name="main_index">
<h1 id="header-name"><a href="<$mt:BlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$mt:BlogName encode_html="1"$></a></h1>
<h2 id="header-description"><$mt:BlogDescription$></h2>
<mt:Else>
<div id="header-name"><a href="<$mt:BlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$mt:BlogName encode_html="1"$></a></div>
<div id="header-description"><$mt:BlogDescription$></div>
</mt:If>
</div>
</div>
</div>
All we have done is add an onClick event to the header. Users that click in the header will then trigger the JavaScript which mimics clicking on a link.
HashTag Plugin