Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with blog and movabletype

How can I rename the default 'Blog' in a fresh Movable Type installation?

jaffacakerhubarb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:47:01 -0800

Just set up a Movable Type blog/site/whatjamacallit for the first time for someone else, and though I'm pretty tech-savvy I can't for the life of me figure out how to rename the path to the blog part of things. Help! The main parts of the site are made up of several pages, and all of that's fine, but I want to repurpose the 'blog' part as a news thingy instead. I'd have thought this would be easy, but adding a new blog brings with it a sort of nesting arrangement. As I said, I've never used Movable Type before as a admin, and while this may be embarassingly easy, I can't figure it out. I hate to waste my AskMe question on something that seems so trivial, but there's a bit of time pressure involved so I don't have time to trial and error the answer like I normally would. Thanks!

P.S. I'm using the latest version off the website (4.31) if that helps.

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events?

gleuschk — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:49:49 -0800

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events, as well as blog-like news postings? I maintain a website for specialists in my field of mathematics, and one section consists of announcements for upcoming and recent conferences. Another is for news announcements: a basic blog-style list of entries. Both are currently run by our 7-year-old Movable Type installation, in combination with a good bit of chewing gum and baling twine. I'd like to redesign the whole schmear, including the back end. Is wordpress (plus more gum and twine) the right solution? Is there some other system that makes more sense? Link.

Here's the current setup, which hasn't changed since launch in 2002: Movable Type runs two blogs: "News" and "Conferences". The former is your basic blog, except that we only show one entry on the front page, and generally have only an entry a month or so.

Each entry in "Conferences" is added when we learn about it, and post-dated to the first day of the conference. This system works ok, since most conferences are just a day or two, but there are some that are a week, month, or even a semester long, and this causes problems. When first posted, they're in an "upcoming" category that displays in one place, then changed by hand to a "past" category that shows up in another place when they're past. Drawback: I often forget to change the category, which makes me look stupid. We average about 3 conferences a month, though they tend to cluster in March, June, and October. Lead time is up to a year.

I'd like to redesign and bring it up to web-2.whateverwe'reuptonow snuff, both in front and behind. Wordpress seems to be the default these days. I could do the same acrobatics to get the conferences into wordpress, I guess, but it sure seems like there should be a better way. Do you know of one?

I run this out of my pocket and in my free time, so free and drop-in solutions are best, but if you've got good ideas, lay 'em on me.

Importing data (and hard returns), Movable Type to Wordpress

avoision — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:34:04 -0800

How do I get WordPress to recognize hard returns when importing Movable Type data? I'm in the process of setting up my blog using WordPress 2.7.1 (migrating from Movable Type 4.2.3). I was able to import all of my entries no problem, but I'm noticing that many of the hard returns don't seem to have carried over.

Specifically, when I view posts via WordPress... I can tell where paragraphs end/begin, but there's no space between paragraphs. It's as though a single hard return registered, but the second hard return did not.

In cracking open the MT export file (just a .txt file), I see that the hard returns are present in the exported file. No paragraph tags or break tags, just hard returns.

In the MT exported .txt file, the entry text looks like this:

Text in paragraph 1.

Text in paragraph 2.

But when viewed via WordPress, the entry text looks like this:

Text in paragraph 1.
Text in paragraph 2.

At this point, my options are:

1) Revisit MT and try to export data out with paragraph and break tags.

I've looked, and there doesn't seem to be anything other than a big "export" button. I've verified that my text formatting settings are set to "convert line breaks."

2) Run GREP patterns sweeps on my exported .txt file and insert any necessary paragraph or break tags for every entry.

3) Figure out some way for WordPress to recognize the hard returns - or at least, the second hard return. In looking a bit closer at the exported MT text file, I see this:

--------
AUTHOR: avoision
TITLE: This Week's Assignment is...
BASENAME: this_weeks_assignment_is
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 07/04/2002 12:00:01 AM
-----

Is it possible that there's some other value I can change the CONVERT BREAKS line to, so that WordPress will pick up both hard returns in my entry bodies? Again, WP seems to be picking up a singular hard return... but not in cases where I have more than one.

I can create some text factories in BBEdit, but man... I really, really don't want to. I've been keeping a daily blog for about 6 years now, and have about 6,000 entries all in all. It's not that I'm unwilling to roll up my sleeves and do the dirty work - I just am hoping there's another approach that I may not know of.

I'm dusting off my regular expression chops as we speak, but would love to hear any other ideas/options regarding importing this info.

Forget Web 3.0...I'm jumping straight to Web 5.0.

phaded — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:40:10 -0800

I'm looking for a way to have my Movable Type blog updated when I update my status on Twitter or post a link/image/other to my Tumblr page. I can't figure out what to do, though. Currently, I'm working on relaunching my blog using Movable Type 4 as my CMS. In addition to my blog, I also regularly update my Twitter account, as well as posting links on a Tumblr page. I was thinking it would be neat to have Twitter updates or Tumblr posts appear alongside the MT posts. If I can manage to do this, I'd use each of the three tools as follows:

* MT blog posts: longer, more fleshed-out posts (similar to the "fireballs" on Daring Fireballs) about any number of subjects.
* Tumblr posts: used for posting links to interesting things I find or perhaps shorter, more off-the-cuff posting, about two or three sentences in length.
* Twitter updates: used when I have a particularly striking thought that I feel the need to share. I like Twitter for doing this because I can update it via SMS if I'm away from the computer.

My desire, as I mentioned, is to have the updates from these three different sources all appear as part of one source of content. I imagine this is the sort of thing that could be done with some combination of RSS feeds and a Movable Type plugin or two, but that's where I'm stuck--I have no idea what would make this possible. I spent about an hour earlier today playing with reBlog, which ultimately proved to be a colossal waste of time. I'm sure this is something that CAN be done; I just have no idea how to do it, and I'm hoping maybe someone here does.

Bonus question: is it possible to give each type of post a different CSS styling...a different font, background color, border, etc.?

Is there an easy ranking system for Movable Type?

Mark — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:46:19 -0800

I'm using Movable Type and would like to begin rating 800+ things on a scale of 1 to 100. I'm hoping to rate 3 a day. My question: Is there any easy way (through a plug-in, etc) to have these rankings automatically go in some type of database that someone can sort by ranking, year, genre, or any other field I wish to fill in?

Immovable Type?

Asparagirl — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:39:08 -0800

Movable Type question involving the counting and sequential numbering of entries within one specific blog on a multi-blog system. Let's say I have six Movable Type blogs on the same system/install, each containing 100 entries.* I create a new seventh blog, with only 5 entries in that one. Within the individual entry archive template for the seventh blog, how do I structure my tags to output "this is entry #N of 5 in this blog" on the resulting pages? (N would be replaced by the actual sequential order of that entry in the blog, such as "3 of 5", "4 of 5", etc., as determined by either the entry's published date or just the sequence in which the entry was added to the blog, it doesn't matter.)

It sounds simple (and maybe I'm missing something here), but the only likely tag I've found for this, MTEntryID, exports the system ID of the entry in question (which could be #703 or something, or 000703 if you use leading zeroes). That is, it's being counted sequentially relative to the overall install/system, and not to the one blog in which I'm interested.

I can get a total count of entries within just the seventh blog -- the "...of 5..." part -- using MTBlogEntryCount, so that's no problem. But isn't there something similarly blog-specific with regards to entry numbering?

*In actuality, the largest MT install I manage has 95 blogs on it and over 400,000 comments.

Find me a content management system that can hide posts!

aprivateperson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:30:06 -0800

Find me a content management system that can hide posts! I'm looking to install a simple Blog/Content Management System to create a blog which will hide certain posts or categories from unregistered users, and ideally allow some users to view all posts, and other registered users to view some posts. A lot like LiveJournal's friends-post system.

I've installed Movable Type and Wordpress, but neither of them seem to do the job. So any suggestions? :)

How to get MT to see my stylesheet?

mdiskin — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:47:33 -0800

Movable Type stylesheet issue: MT3.2 won't link to my stylesheet. And I can't find my problem covered anywhere (in forums or in MT's documentation. Nothing had been changed or fiddled with, except that I added a URL to my index page and rebuilt it, something I've done a million times.

My blog functions as my writing portfolio -- it's where I post my work and a huge reason I get work.

Help moving broken Movable Type database to WordPress?

jdroth — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:25:05 -0800

I have a personal blog running under Movable Type. I want to move to WordPress. I've exported the existing entries to a text file, so that's good. However, a couple years ago my previous MT install tanked (similar to this). I cannot access it. I have several years worth of posts that are stuck in a database that I can't get to. I've been gradually moving these by hand to my existing MT install, but that's a pain in the ass. Is there some automated way to crawl/scrape the existing HTML files in order to retrieve these "lost" entries? Some way to break back into a corrupt MT database? Some way to repair it? (The install is BerkelyDB-based.) Important note: I have FTP access to all the "lost" entries, too. If I were ambitious, I'd figure out how to write a script that would parse all this information for me. I'm not ambitious, and am hoping that somebody has already done such a thing...

Next on the agenda: converting an existing custom MT template to WP!

For the record: current MT install and previous MT install

blogging / pinging / rss / publishing

reflexed — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:36:03 -0800

Can I use a desktop blogging client to upload posts but keep them 'Unpublished' in Movable Type? What exactly happens when Movable Type publishes? I'm looking for a desktop / browser blogging client to use with Movable Type 3.34 that will give me WYSIWYG editing, and I've got a couple questions about how Movable Type works.

I'd like something that will let me upload posts to the server but keep them with an 'Unpublished' status so that I can choose when to publish them later.

So far I've tried BlogJet, BlogDesk, ScribeFire, Ecto, and Windows Live Writer.

All (but Windows Live Writer) give you the option to upload post as a draft, but then within the Movable Type interface the post appears as published (however, it doesn't actually show until the site is rebuilt). If I actually publish the post in one of the clients, it appears on the front page.

So--a couple questions about how Movable Type works:

1. Is this behavior to be expected? (Someone was recently explaining to me that when you schedule a post to go up later, there's a bug in Movable Type and it won't actually appear until the site is rebuilt--this 'post as draft' behavior would seem to go along with that.)

2. As long as I post as draft and then switch to 'Unpublished', I should be fine as far as my posts not going out, right?

3. If I forget to publish as draft, and the post goes live, but then I immediately change it back to unpublished, will it still go out in my RSS feed? What's the time delay? (Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding the way RSS works--is the post only accessible if the person loads the feed that second it's live, but if they check later it won't be there?)

4. Same with the servers I'm pinging--if something goes live and I unpublish/delete it, does the ping still go out and just point back to nothing? Or does the ping die/negate itself?

5. And finally...which desktop / browser blogging client do you prefer?

Basically I don't want to pre-publish / annoy my readers when I use something other than the standard Movable Type interface to put posts on the server. I'm relatively new to Movable Type and blogging in general, so any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks hive mind!

Unusual Configuration in Worpress

fogster — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:32:15 -0800

WordPress Filter: Multiple blogs in one? I'm currently running an old release of Movable Type, and have a somewhat unusual, but perfect, setup. Basically, about a dozen people each have their own blogs in Movable Type, with their own username and blog. However, I have the front page configured as an "aggregate" of all the posts, sorted by time, regardless of author.

How do I do this in Wordpress? Is there an extension that makes this possible/easy? It's simple for me to have multiple users share a single blog, and it's easy for me to have multiple users each have their own blog, but, with the current setup, I have it both ways. I want to do it in Wordpress, too.

Movable Type hangs on rebuild. Where to look?

avoision — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:49:56 -0800

What's the best way to diagnose why Movable Type hangs when trying to rebuild my site? I've been doing (daily) blog entries since July of 2002, and rolled my own setup. Recently, I've decided to make the switch over to Movable Type and just got done importing all of my entries (about 5,000 in total).

During my tests (using about 150 entries), I was able to tweak things and rebuild without much of a problem. Now that I've imported all of my entries, I'm no longer able to rebuild.

When rebuilding "Indexes Only," it's fine. But anything else, and I see the little wheel spinning and eventually I get a "Can't Open Page" and "lost network connection" error, which I'm assuming is some kind of timeout due to how much I'm asking the server to do.

In my three-column layout, I'm using modules I created for the Left and Right columns (Alpha and Gamma, respectively). I originally set up a calendar, but have since removed it because of all the reports I've seen about it adding to rebuild times.

I'm building all templates statically. And I've got Individual, Daily and Monthly archives checked.

As a sidenote, I was able to successfully build using Dynamic Publishing. But the rebuild time was significant, and every visit to both the home page and individual pages resulted in a markedly long load time. So while it worked... I'm not certain Dynamic Publishing is the best approach.

Any tips? Suggestions? I've yet to try to go back to my default archive templates, which I guess is the next step. It's just that I feel like I've been doing a lot of random trial and error tests, and would love some advice on how to better diagnose this issue.

I've been banging my head a lot with moving my blog over to MT, and now that I've finally got all my entries up and loaded... I can't rebuild. It feels like I've trekked over this huge mountain range and arrived home, only now I'm unable to get the dang door open.

Thanks in advice for any thoughts.

How to convert Blogger to Movable Type?

MythMaker — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:04:31 -0800

What's the best way to convert an existing Blogger blog into Movable Type? Hi! I've had my blog on Blogger for 2 1/2 years or so, and it always met my needs, more or less. But, now that they've been changing it, it's really pretty much broken for me. My RSS feed is totally screwed up (and has been for months), and otherwise, I'm just not really happy with what they're doing (I have it hosted on my own site - I understand that the blogspot hosted blogs aren't having nearly the same number of problems.)

So, I'd like to change it over to Movable Type, and keep all my old posts, including all the old comments. I'd also like to keep all the old permalinks, if that's possible.

Anything I need to do special when installing Movable Type?

Any suggestions?

Easy image insertion in MT

XQUZYPHYR — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:22:20 -0800

Movable Type: is there a plugin/hack that would make it easy to insert a different line of code depending on a selection from a pull-down menu? What I'd like to do is replicate an old format on my blog posts seen in earlier posts here.

For all those posts, I was simply inserting the IMG tags in the actual title line of the post. That's obviously both cumbersome and bad coding.

What I'd like to do is have some kind of option in my edit window where I can select an item from a dropdown menu, or write in a keyword or something, and then the corresponding icon graphic appears in the post. As the page I linked to shows, I'd prefer it to be able to have "no icon" as an option, as well as possibly different sizes. (The former is a much bigger deal though)

The closest I came was CustomFields, but it didn't seem to be doable as it's not complex enough to correspond image tags to a selection field.

I guess the best comparison would be those weird "current mood" things on LiveJournal, etc. Except instead of selecting the mood and having it display the mood I'm in, a corresponding picture would be there.

I have this nagging suspicious this is a simple thing to do and the answer is right under my nose but I've tried unsuccessfully for a month now to come up with an idea.

How can move between blog software?

Sifter — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 14:44:06 -0800

(Blogfilter) I've had a BlogHarbor blog for ages and want to move all the posts to TypePad. Problem is, BlogHarbor exports an XML file that Typepad can't recognise. So I've had a BlogHarbor blog for 2 years and in that time have racked up a lot of entries, but since I've got a Typepad Pro account for running other blogs, I want to move my BH blog to Typepad. BH's export function creates an XML file, and when I try and 'import' Typepad refuses to play ball. I've had success using KBCafe's RSS to MT tool, but obvious the BH blog's RSS feed only picks up the last 20 posts or so... Anyone know of any converters that can make my XML file more TypePad/Movable Type friendly?

Pressing onward

adamrice — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:44:55 -0800

I'm working on transitioning a blog from Movable Type to Wordpress, and I'm getting hung up on one technical issue Movable Type includes a Keywords field in every post, and I use it for folksonomy-style tags as a comma-delimited list. I would like for this information to survive the transition, but it isn't easy.

Wordpress' MT importer ignores the Keywords field entirely. Wordpress does not have a Keywords field by default, but it does allow custom fields, and with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, does lots of fun taggy things.

I did find a patch for an older version of the MT importer that updates it to deal with the Keywords field, but the patch doesn't apply to the current version; I know enough PHP to do about half of it manually, but after that, I'm adrift.

thanks in advance (and no offense, Anil).

Pimp My Blogroll

jeanmari — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:10:37 -0800

Has anyone come across a Movable Type blogroll plug-in similar to this Wordpress blogroll plug-in (in that it can expand and contract)?

PHP class for externally posting to blogs?

frenetic — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:38:48 -0800

Anyone know of a decent PHP class or function library out there for externally posting to various weblog packages (Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type) via XML-RPC? I want to add "post to your blog" functionality to a website but I haven't had much success tracking something like this down. Pointers to anything helpful would be appreciated.

MT PHP API?

xmutex — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:36:34 -0800

Movable Type PHP library: is it possible to use the PHP library in the same fashion as the perl library? Maybe I am not making sense. MT comes w/ the perl library, e.g. MT.pm, Entry.pm, etc.

I've taken lately to writing shell scripts and cron jobs in PHP, but I have one perl script (and another coming) that must be in perl cos they use the MT library to write an automated entry, e.g.:

$entry = MT::Entry->new;
...
$entry->save;
$mt->rebuild_entry(Entry => $entry, BuildDependencies => true) or die $mt->errstr;

So but lately MT comes with an extensive PHP library (mt directory/php/lib). But it seems like this isn't really a library/API, but rather some basic functions. Is it possible to duplicate the above functionality using MT's php lib?

I can't access my blog's MT control panel

languagehat — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 17:45:51 -0800

This week my blog (languagehat.com) had an unprecedented flood of weird spam; as I was in the midst of deleting another chunk of it, I found myself locked out of my MT control panel (when I try accessing mt.cgi, I get "Invalid login"). Songdog, who helps me with stuff like this, posted a report at the Movable Type Community Forum, where you can find the horrid details; unfortunately, since I'm still using MT 2.63, there's not much in the way of support, and nobody's responded at the forum. If anybody here has suggestions, I'm all ears and deeply grateful.

Help me with MT filename trimming.

Marquis — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:47:21 -0800

Individual entries on my MT 2.6x installation are archived using their trimmed entry-names (i.e. blog.com/trimmed_entry_na.php). I'd like to make the filenames longer from now on (trimming to 30, probably), but I think that if I change the parameter in my Archiving prefs and rebuild, it's gonna go and change the filenames of all my preceding entries too. This I don't want. Is there a way to change the trimming for filenames, but only "from now on"?

How can I force Google Blogsearch to index my archived blog entries?

dmd — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:30:57 -0800

I'd like to be able to search my (MovableType) blog via Google Blogsearch, but they only update via RSS. Most of my entries are many years old. I want to be able to search those entries. Is there any way to force Google to pick those up? (Adding a sitemap doesn't seem to have helped.)

OutlookToBlogFilter: How can I move a folders worth of emails onto a MT blog?

softlord — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:09:48 -0800

OutlookToBlogFilter: How can I move a folders worth of emails onto a MT blog? I'm one of the founders of a Yahoo Group dedicated to sending out quotes, and have an archive of all the posts dating back to its inception in 2000. I'd like to put this online where it can be browsable by submitter (i.e. the person in the "From" line). The most straightforward way, it would seem, would be to find some way to export this folder to a format that can be imported by the MT application?

My Google-fu has failed me, and I'm hoping not to have to cut and paste each of the 3000 posts.

What's wrong with this CSS?

aaronetc — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:54:55 -0800

I have a CSS class that displays "correctly" in Safari and Mac IE, but for some reason knocks the font size down in Firefox and IE under XP. Everything looks right to me, but I'm not a CSS expert by any means. Anyone care to take a look? The site is here, the CSS here; it's the class "blogbody" that's causing problems. This is a modified Movable Type default template, so it seems like it ought to work -- the only thing I could think of to change in the HTML was to remove the second </div> and the end of each blog entry, because I couldn't tell what it was closing, but that had no effect. I tried altering the font-size in the CSS, which only changed the first entry; subsequent entries always stayed at what looks like 10px. Any ideas?

MT profile pages

edgeways — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 13:36:33 -0800

Regarding Movable Type: So, I am a member of a moderatly active local community blog that is run using Movable Type. The administrators are trying to figure a way to make easy to edit profile pages for the members. The ease of use should be along the line of beginner use. I am not an expert in any way on MT or database use but it seems there should be a way to use text boxes linked to a database to create indivdual profile pages, yes?
Is there a realitivly easy way to set up a system to do this and how would it be accomplished?