Thanks to comments by “Francois Jordaan(Francois Jordaan’s weblog)”:http://www.fjordaan.uklinux.net/ on a topic concerning CMS Needs over at the “Measure Twice Weblog”:http://kalsey.com/blog/, I found a couple of interesting articles related to the use of MovableType as a simple CMS system. “Stopdesign”:http://www.stopdesign.com/ covers the “use of MT”:http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/07/11/adaptive_paths_mt_setup.html as part of the “Adaptive Path”:http://www.adaptivepath.com/ redesign. Meanwhile, “A Whole Lotta Nothing”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/’s article “Beyond the Blog”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007162 gives some very clear examples for the use of MT for static-page generation. I’ll probably be following this for my About pages…
At work we are trying to move our content management in-house. Our current website is a JSP-driven affair, with well defined areas where we want our staff to upload content once a week or so. MovableType should let us do that – I’ll just have to write a custom Tag to grab the individual archive files and embed them.
This is my first post using “Zempt”:http://www.zempt.com/ as a Movable Type client. Its working pretty well so far 🙂 My main reason for getting it is that it does spell checking, and as you may of noticed, I need all the help I can get in that regard!
There’s a new version of Brad Choate’s MT-Textile plugin. Not too much that id use myself – I don’t tend to do that much formatting, although the footnote support looks handy, and would probably eliminate all those bracketed asides I keep using! I’m still waiting for a way to add a title to the @href@’s generated using the @”Page Name”:http://www.url.com/@ syntax, although I probably should of submitted it as a feature request!
Updated: Seems I missed this in the “documentation(Textile Documentation entry for link generation)”:http://www.textpattern.com/help/?item=link:
Optional: text in (parentheses) following the link text, but before the closing quotation mark, will become a Title attribute for the link, visible as a tool tip when a cursor is above it.
Related to my previous post on a plugin request for automatic acronym generation, I found a post over at “Dive Into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ concerning the use of the “MTMacro plugin”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mtmacros.php to generate them. Thank you “Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ and “Brad”:http://www.bradchoate.com/. Expect it to be working on this blog by tonight.
quickSub is an opensource Javascript popup, designed to allow people to add the ability to quickly subscribe to a feed. Its a little too in-your-face for my money – the popup triggers when you rollover an icon, and you have to click a link to close it. A better method would be to have the click trigger the popup. That said its designed to be used on the standard feed XML button – still I might look at adding it to this blog as a normal hyperlink.
Before I started working on the aforementioned template for (N)Echo 0.1, I thought I’d better check to see if anyone else has done it. Sure enough I came across a “template”:http://remy.csoft.net/archives/000376.php by “Dan Dickinson”:http://remy.csoft.net/. His template requires the use of a couple of MT(Movable Type) plugins, namely “LastModified”:http://www.staggernation.com/mtplugins/LastModifiedReadMe.html and “MTPerlScript”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mtperlscript.php. I’ll install these when I’m feeling less tired – right now I’m knackered from a rather enjoyable weekend in Whitstable. This template is based on Sam Ruby’s “snapshot”:http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1506.html of the current 0.1 specification for (N)Echo.
Update: Feed now implemented – you’ll find it on the startbar.
I think I can create an “Echo feed”:http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1506.html. Looking at how MovableType handles construction of its RDF feeds I should be able to do it – lets just hope MovableTyps tags provide enough information. If its as easy as I think I may even create a version that follows “Simon’s suggestions”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/07/02/theVerbosityOfEcho for a less verbose format as an additonal feed.
I’d like to use acronyms properly. The textile plugin makes it relatively easy for me to enter them, I simply have to specify them in the form @CSS(Cascading Style Sheets)@ to the to display properly. However I use the same acronyms time and time again – it would be nice if a new MovableType plugin (or even the current Textile plugin) could store a list of know acronyms and insert the code as required…I might post this on the “MovableType boards”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/, chances are someones already done it! Either than or I might have to dig my “Perl”:http://www.perl.org/ books out of storage again.
Thanks again to “Simon Willson”:http://simon.incutio.com/ for a “great bit of JavaScript”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/12/20/blockquoteCitations that automatically creates clickable links for @
@ @cite@ attributes, making my life a little easier once again. I really should send him a thankyou email….
Reading Simon Willson’s “blog”:http://simon.incutio.com/, I have been struck by the usefulness of his “related entries”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/04/25/relatedArticles links displayed alongside each post. Simon uses some custom PHP + MySql code to generate these links. I wanted to do something similar with Movable Type, and found the “Related Entries plugin”:http://www.kalsey.com/2002/07/related_entries_plugin/ which can automatically generate related entries based on categories, and also (as an “undocumented feature”:http://kalsey.com/2002/12/related_keywords/) keywords. Depending on my plans for the rest of the week I’ll try and get this working
magpiebrain 