Movable Type Tips

Here are some of the tricks I have figured out so far with Movable Type:

1. I needed to set the group id bit on the cgi scripts so they could write to the directories. This may or may not be a security issue.

• http://www.library.yale.edu/wsg/docs/permissions/sgid.htm

1. I had to use /mt-static (no trailing slash) to identify where the mt-static directory would be.

2. I need to figure out exactly how to lock things down with htaccess for better security.

Use as a CMS

While I want part of my site to be a blog/journal/etc for posting periodic updates and thoughts, I want a large part of it to be more of a standard website.

To mimic this functionality with Movable Type, this is what I have discovered so far:

1. Decide on whether you like foo-bar or foo_bar and set the appropriate paths in the archive templates.

2. Change archiving to Entry

3. Disable the index page for archiving by adding something extra to the path so that it doesn’t overwrite manual pages

4. Archive pages to the appropriate folder/basename/index.html so that your pages create categories

5. Ensure that your categories and Pages match

6. Now you can have a custom page, and posts can be assigned that category in order to appear in the appropriate directory

Cruft-free URLs

Good explanation for how to clean up the URLs:

• http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/15/slugs

What I did is remove the html extension, and then ensure that each page is archive mapped to folder/page_basename/index so that the page doesn’t try to overwrite the category folder. If you create a home page named index, you can soft link index.html to index/index so that you don’t have to manually copy the home page after each update.

Things to do

• Create template set to automate these changes
• Archive by date only entries without a category
• Create template for category page that lists pages in that category? Or a widget for the sidebar?
• Create widget that shows categories and links to index, but doesn’t count pages in it
• Create theme
• Need to not have home page show up in sidebar list of pages, especially if published to \index
• check out this plugin:
  • http://plugins.movabletype.org/entrycategoryen/

Links to remember

• http://mentalized.net/journal/2003/08/01/power_your_website_with_movable_type/

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