Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with 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.

Why are dates disappearing from Movable Type calendar

Ignatius J. Reilly — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:52:42 -0800

Movable Type calendar issues: Why are certain dates just disappearing? I am overseeing the development of a website for a client who requires Movable Type as their CMS. It is proving to be rather annoying compared to comparable products like Drupal. But we're mostly getting where we need to be.

We are having on inexplicable problem with the calendar widget, though. We have it set up properly, and it appears to function (e.g., it properly displays/links to entries for the specified date; the whole thing basically looks right; clicking takes you to the correct entry, etc.).

There is one disturbing problem, though: periodically, certain days just disappear from the calendar. The "box" for that date stays there, but the number is just gone. If I create an entry for that specific day, I can make the number appear again (this is obviously not an acceptable solution, but an interesting phenomenon nonetheless), but it appears to only be willing to to display "nonlinked" dates for some of the days.

I believe (but am not 100% sure) that this corresponds to the creation of unrelated entries in categories OTHER than the one being displayed in the calendar (e.g., the date is there, then I create an unrelated entry, then the date disappears).

I can't find any info on this error in Movable Type's documentation of forums (though, to be fair, their forums don't really appear to be entirely functional, possibly because they are built in Movable Type.

Has anyone seen this before? Is there some known solution?

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.

How do I trigger a specific template rebuild in MT 4.2?

2oh1 — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:43:53 -0800

MovableTypeFilter: How do I initiate an automatic rebuild of a specific template at a given time under MT 4.2? The upgrade from 4.1 to 4.2 has broken my cron jobs, which have worked for years. Grrrr!!!! I have two templates that I want rebuilt every night at midnight. I used to run a cron job like this:

[path to file]/mt-rebuild.pl -mode="index" -blog_id="1" -template="Template Name"

I don't even see the mt-rebuild.pl file as existing anymore, and the MT "documentation" is really poor. At one point it mentions that the old system has been replaced by TheSchwatz, Job and Worker, but never addresses how to set any of these up beyond the vague basics suggestion that they CAN be set up.

I realize I need to change the setting of the template to wither Manual or Via Publish Que, but how do I trigger the automatic rebuild at midnight?

Help! I'm at wits end here...

Is it possible to export all drafts in MovableType?

2oh1 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:27:12 -0800

MovableTypeFilter: Is there a way to export all unpublished entries (drafts)? It would be a million times easier for me to go through them all offline rather than one at a time with MT's cumbersome interface. I'm running MT 4.21. Even challenging solutions are helpful. Over the years, my MovableType database has become littered with tons of unpublished drafts. So many, in fact, that they've become a lost cause. Many of these are crap ideas to be tossed, but there are a few unfinished gems scattered among them. What I'm hoping to do is export all drafts, and then delete them all. Then, offline, I'd scan through them to find the 5% that's worth salvaging. The offline part is easy... but exporting those drafts seems to be impossible.

I'm open to creative solutions here. Any ideas? How do you deal with all of your unpublished drafts?

What's the best way to geotag blog posts?

ascullion — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:06:10 -0800

What's the easiest way to geotag a blog post in MT4? Are there any decicated plugins, or any map-based technologies, that could make it easier for people who want to do it?

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.?

Pasting Crappy Microsoft World Code Into Movable Type

kirkaracha — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:00:26 -0800

How can I clean up crappy Microsoft Word code in Movable Type 4? Microsoft Word includes crap code like this when pasted into Movable Type:

[p class="MsoNormal"][font face="Arial" size="2"][span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;"]
(I replaced angled brackets with square ones for display purposes.)

Is there a plugin or something I can use to remove all the gunk?

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?

How can I make both the headline, and not just an entry, wrap around an image in a WordPress post?

Unsomnambulist — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:14:22 -0800

How can I make both the headline, and not just an entry, wrap around an image in a WordPress post? Using align="right" or similar in Moveable Type, Blogger, WordPress, and other blogs, anyone can format a post so that text wraps around an image. However, this always comes after the post title.

Is there a plugin or another way to force the image to wrap around a post title along with the entry? This would have be doable from within a post page, and only available as an option.

Why is Quickpost in Movable Type 3.2 returning a 406 error for text selected on some websites and not others?

cg2 — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:43:34 -0800

When I select text from certain websites, an example would be any article in http://www.nytimes.com, and I click on the Quickpost link in Safari, I recently started receiving the message below:

406 Not Acceptable Not Acceptable An appropriate representation of the requested resource /scgi-bin/mt.cgi could not be found on this server.

Until yesterday, December 11, 2007 this Quickpost link was working properly. Now it returns the 406 error above when I try and select text for a Quickpost from some sites. The Quickpost link works normally when I select text from the http://www.nytimes.com homepage (but not a direct article) or on Google and a few other blogs. What could be causing this error on some websites and not others when I select text and click on the Quickpost link in Safari? I am using Movable Type 3.2 with Safari 3.0.4. I would appreciate any advice anyone could provide. Thanks!

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? :)

Minimum hosting features, maximum blogging features?

betafilter — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 12:58:58 -0800

Very limited webhost features, very fond of content management. Help a student update things easily? My university offers about 50MB of free webspace to students and not much else. No cgi scripts, no databases, no htaccess password-protected pages. I’d love to generate some easily updatable content using Wordpress or MT, but both seem to require more features than I can access.

My webdesign/coding skillset plateaued in about 2002.

I’m comfortable with HTML and CSS but would rather not re-upload my files with every update. What are some solutions?

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

How can I prevent highlighted text with quotes from a browser from turning quotes into %u201C when using Movable Type Quickpost?

cg2 — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:47:24 -0800

When I highlight text on a webpage in Safari that contains quotes (") and then click on my Movable Type Quickpost link to include the text in the Quickpost body, the quotes in the highlighted text in the browser are turned into %u201C once the text is included in the body of the Quickpost in the pop up window. If I manually input the quotes directly into the body of the Quickpost window, the quotes do not turn into %u201C, it is only when I highlight text in a browser with quotes and then click on the Quickpost link do the quotes turn into %u201C. Does anyone know how I prevent highlighted text with quotes from a browser from turning quotes into %u201C when using Quickpost? I would appreciate any help or advice. Thanks.

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.

Movable Type moving incorrectly

mic stand — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 09:59:04 -0800

I am trying to help someone at my work with Movable Type, but I am at a loss. When we click on "comments" below a blog post it takes us to the most recent post, no matter what blog post comment link we click on. Further, if you take the #comment off the url and just try to go to the individual post page, it does the same thing. Email me in my profile and I will give you the blog link (as I don't want to link it here for etiquette purposes).

How do I change the URI of my XML feed in Wordpress?

missed — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:59:20 -0800

How do I change the URI of my XML feed in Wordpress? I'm moving an existing podcasting blog from Movable Type to Wordpress and need to keep the URI for the XML file (http://blah.com/index.xml) the same. Unlike MT, WP doesn't appear to be overtly obvious in how this can be accomplished? Please advise.