Malarkey is Andy Clarke, a creative designer with a passion for accessibility and web standards. This is his personal website.

And all that (MT) Malarkey

Whereas many have already publicly switched from MovableType to other brands of blogging software, some for technical and others for economic reasons, I am sticking to MT. As a designer, without the faintest interest in learning any form of programming (asp or php) or scripting (JavaScript), MT is the perfect solution for me as it allows me to work with an (almost) familiar set of tags. The new site is built on a new installation of MT3 with all new XHTML and CSS.

Excluding the editorials

Needing to exclude editorials from lists of general columns, Scott Andrew’s MT Exclude Categories plug-in came in especially handy. The plug-in creates a new container tag called MTEntriesExCat and allows for a very simple filter which is precisely what I needed here.

<MTEntriesExCat category="Editorial ">
…
</MTEntriesExCat>

Scott’s plug-in is a bit long in the tooth, but worked straight out of the box.

Comment formatting

This time I have dispensed with MT flip-flop to output alternating comment styles but I’ve kept a subtle difference in styling between mine, BritPack and other comments. This is made possible through MT Switch which adds an additional class to each comment.

<dl class="<MTSwitch value="[MTCommentAuthor]">
<MTSwCase value="Malarkey">malarkey</MTSwCase>
<MTSwCase value="Andy Budd">britpack</MTSwCase>
<MTSwCase value="Jon Hicks">britpack</MTSwCase>
etc.
</MTSwitch/>

Currently the set-up of a new BritPacker involves editing the individual entry archive template and a rebuild of all entry pages. Hardly ideal but not a deal breaker. I am still searching for a way to store the BritPack list in an external file (probably something very simple with WordPress and PHP, but as I’ve said before, I’m a designer, not a coder. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

More plug-ins

A raft of extra plug-ins make the site do what I want it to, they now include;

MTInclude server-side includes

To enable easy updating and reduce the need for me to edit multiple MovableType templates, I have made extensive use of MTInclude server-side includes or Template Modules.

<$MTInclude module="link-rel"$>

As well as commonly included items such as navigation lists and copyright statements, I created a complete set of Template Modules to contain code such as my DocType declaration. Should I want to switch from a Transitional to a Strict DocType, this should now be all the easier. Even linked files such as scripts and CSS files are included so that (for example) updates to IOTBS will be easier too.

Not everyone’s cup of tea

I know that MT is not to everyone’s liking for all sorts of reasons. I also understand that using MT doesn’t help build huge muscles or grow chest hair like WordPress or TextPattern. Well MT, I still love you. I hope this helps someone.

Replies

  1. #1 On May 11, 2005 08:57 PM Dave said:

    Hey, M.
    I must say I really like what you’ve done with the site (had to say that. I was like **gasp** when I saw the new layout on CSS Beauty)

    I really get where you’re comming from with the Mt thing. If I had heard about it before I began to pick up PHP and some other scripting languages I probably would’ve gotten meself some hosting and started with it right fom the beginning. But like with loads of other things, I always get there a bit late, but hey. PHP is a really easy language and so, instead of being tricky, I find learning it and experimenting with it easy and it gets my mind of the pressures of life.

    But anyway, sounds like you got the whole MT thing sussed, keep up the non programming work. **thumbs up**

  2. #2 On May 12, 2005 12:55 PM pixeldiva said:

    Marvellous. I’m glad there’s someone else out there who appreciates MT and doesn’t want to start having to fiddle with all manner of programming malarkey and other nonsense just to put a site together.

    Oh, and nice job on the redesign :)

  3. #3 On May 12, 2005 07:55 PM Michele said:

    First of all, I’d like to tell you I really like your new design. Great work!

    Then, talking about MT, I never really got it: I tried it once for a couple of minutes, but wasn’t impressed. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time.
    But I can see why you like it. From what you wrote, it seems like it’s very easy to write templates for MT because of the friendly looking tags. But TextPattern uses a very similar way of handling templates design, plus it’s fast, clean and easy to use.
    Wordpress - which is the one I use - instead requires you to have at least a little knowledge of PHP, so I understand some might feel discouraged by it.

    But in the end, there’s no good nor bad CMS and everybody chooses the one he/she prefers…

  4. #4 On May 13, 2005 10:36 PM Andrea said:

    Darn it! That’s where all that chest hair keeps coming from!

    … stupid TextPattern.