dummied

Making a guest appearance

At a glance

This entry was written on September 2, 2005.

The entry prior to this is entitled Commented simple template.

The entry following this is entitled Work in progress.

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This entry has been tagged as Blogs, MovableType, Thissite, Work.

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In between hours of Hurricane Katrina watching, entertaining Pam's parents and a day trip to Hyde Park, N.Y., to tour FDR's home and the Vanderbilt Mansion, I managed to write an article for Learning Movable Type, a site that was very helpful to me when I was ... you know ... learning Movable Type, about those simplified templates I talked about a few days ago.

Those that have been reading this along the way will find very little new information, but it works as another outlet for people to find these if they need them as a reference point for their own template-tweaking.

The article is available here, and I thoroughly recommend LMT to anyone trying to do get their heads wrapped around a lot of things Movable Type can do.

One of big things I realized about Movable Type along the way is that the entry fields don't have to contain the things they're labeled as. The tags associated with those fields (, , etc.) will just spit out anything you entered into those text fields. That's what makes things like Stopdesign's Photo Gallery templates possible (I also thoroughly recommend those, by the way, I had been drooling over Doug's own photo galleries since I first saw them and am amazed that he saw fit to release the templates and even the Photoshop files behind those out to the general public.).

Another thing I just realized/discovered is that you can put MT tags inside the Stylesheet template in Movable Type. I'm sure somebody else has done this, but it just never occurred to me. When you're using anything with categories, it can let you add category icons just by uploading the graphic file to your site and rebuilding your site with the new category. I'm sure there are many other uses for putting MT tags into your CSS template but I'm using the feature for category icon use in at least one future project right now.