dummied

About those templates

At a glance

This entry was written on August 30, 2005.

The entry prior to this is entitled Simpler Movable Type templates.

The entry following this is entitled Commented simple template.

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This entry has been tagged as MovableType, Work.

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After a night's sleep, I thought I would give a few notes and pointers about the templates I created and uploaded yesterday.

First of all, these are by no means an out-of-the-box replacement for MT 3.2 default templates. They don't play very well at all with the default stylesheets that come either with MT or can be added through the Stylecatcher plugin; trust me, I've checked it out—it doesn't work.

I wouldn't really expect anyone to use these templates as their standard MT templates, either. The main reason for paring these templates down is so that it's easier to see and understand the guts of the new MT version (for the record, aside from all the divs, spans and ids, I saw very little changes aside from deleting the sidebar calendar and moving the javascript for the comments out of the individual archive template itself and into a separate template, which is why the "onload" statement has to stay in the body tag).

Looking over the tags and structure, to be honest with you, there's very little change in the actual MT tags structure from previous versions (aside from the comments ... which in addition to the javascript being moved off-page includes a couple of new tags). <$MTEntries$> is still <$MTEntries$> and all that. A very old, very poorly put together blog I threw together a long time ago, filled with the old comment structure, still works fine. Your site probably will, too.

That said, what I've essentially done is give those that are wanting to really, really customize their site and throw the MT default templates to the wind a good starting point. You can take those templates, add in your own classes and such on elements and then style it however you want. And, to be perfectly honest once again, a lot of all those new divs and spans in the 3.2 templates are not necessary even for the default stylesheet that MT includes with a fresh install on 3.2.

As far as I can figure, with a little CSS ingenuity, you could duplicate the Vicksburg theme nearly exactly using these stripped down templates. The only things I can't see an easy way to do (without adding images) are the secondary border (the darker one) around the whole thing and the different styling for the "Powered by" box.

If my in-laws weren't coming in for a visit today, I'd go ahead and whip up an example.

So again, if you're new to Movable Type, don't just copy and paste these templates on top of the default ones that came with MT. Save them to your desktop, open them up in the text editor of your choice (such as Notepad on Windows) and just get comfortable with the tags and everything else that makes MT run.

Then, when it comes time to tweak the default templates, you can get an idea of what blocks of code to look for to do certain things. Later tonight, I'll help you out more with a commented version of both the stripped down Main Page template and (if I have time) the default Main Page template so you can get an idea of what's going on in there.

As a final note, I'd like to apologize for yesterday's original art choice, which was actually a screen grab of Six Apart's home page. It took me a while to realize that people would see that, click on it and expect to be able to, you know, go get MT 3.2, instead of just going to my crappy photos page.

Sorry. You can go get Movable Type 3.2 here if you're wanting to check it out.

UPDATE: Sorry to say that I wasn't able to get to commenting up template or two thanks to Andy Roddick's first-round loss in the last match of the day at the U.S. Open tennis tournament. At work, we had to shuffle around several pages and that kept me reasonably busy most of the night.

Even with the in-laws (who, for the record, I like and enjoy the company of) in town for the next couple of days, I'll try and get one of those done soon.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear some feedback on these, good or, especially, bad. Click the e-mail link down there at the bottom or leave a comment if you've found any problems or have any questions at all (I can't guarantee I can answer all questions, but I will answer all e-mails).