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Movable Type 4.01 came with these plugins pre-installed:

• Feeds.App Lite
• MultiBlog 2.0
• StyleCatcher 2.0
• Template Backup and Refresh 1.2
• Textile 2.04
• WXR Importer 1.0
• Weblog Cloner 2.0
• Widget Manager 1.0
• Markdown 1.0.1 and SmartyPants 1.5.1 (plugin set)
• SpamLookup - Lookups 2.11, SpamLookup - Link 2.11, SpamLookup - Keyword Filter 2.1 (plugin set)

I have installed these plugins:

• * ClonedBlogCleaner 1.0
• * DirifyPlus
• * My Blogs 1.0
• Snip It 1.0b1
• * Template Shelf 1.0
• * TinyTuring 1.02
• Trusted Commenters 1.2

* These plugins have proven very helpful! So far, I haven't used the others.

And, I tried these plugins but removed them due to Internal Server Error messages (500 Server Error) or 3-minute publish times for 1 entry or a comment. These plugins displayed errors in the MT 4 Activity Log.

• Bookmarks 1.0b2
• MT-Quicktags
• reCaptcha - just could not get it to work (this is the version included in the MT 4 "mt/extras/examples/plugins/reCaptcha" folder)

[Update July 3, 2008] Additional plugins I've installed for MT version 4.1 (some a while back, some today):

• AssHAT 1.0
• Blog Janitor 1.1
• Entry to Page Converter 1.0
• * Navigation Breadcrumbs 1.0
• Notify Replyee 1.0
• Plugin Network 1.1
• * PreviousNextInCategory
• GUI: HTML Link 1.0
• GUI: HTML List 1.01
• GUI: Upload Path 1.01
• GUI: Core 1.0 (goes with the other GUI plugins above)

* These plugins have proven very helpful!

Trusted Commenters 1.2 doesn't work consistently. But, TinyTuring has proven very helpful by ending spam comments on this blog.

Note: It seems that the pre-installed-with-MT-4.01 Weblog Cloner 2.0 was renamed Blog Cloner 2.0 with MT 4.1.

Last night, I created all single-page template modules and widgets as Index Templates and set them to output to files so I could then use PHP includes to put that content in other templates. In this way, I can add an item to those content modules, such anything in the sidebar, without publishing the entire site. I set to automatically publish only the index templates that need to be published with each new or modified entry.

Publishing 1 entry still takes 35-45 seconds. Adding a very short test comment the other day took 35 seconds. Publishing the entire blog takes 45-60 minutes - yes, 1 hour. There are no errors in the Activity Log and no errors in the web server log file, so none of the plugins seem to be the cause.

The slowness of Movable Type 4.01 is going to drive people away from using it.

If I can get past the frustration level that is WordPress templates, I may just move this blog (yes, another move) to WordPress.

The Calendar that comes with Movable Type 4.01 links to the last Entry made on a day, instead of to a Daily Archive page for that day - probably because MT 4 doesn't ship with Daily Archives turned on. And, it doesn't highlight the current day.

So, I added MTCalendarIfToday in the Calendar code, created a "today" class in my custom stylesheet template, added a Daily Archive template and set its filename to /yyyy/mm/dd/index.php, and changed the day links in the Calendar code. Works great! The Calendar code changes are:

<div class="widget-calendar widget">
<h3 class="widget-header"><$MTDate format="%B %Y"$></h3>
<div class="widget-content">
<table summary="Monthly calendar with links to each day's posts">

<tr>
<th abbr="Sunday">Sun</th>
<th abbr="Monday">Mon</th>
<th abbr="Tuesday">Tue</th>
<th abbr="Wednesday">Wed</th>
<th abbr="Thursday">Thu</th>
<th abbr="Friday">Fri</th>
<th abbr="Saturday">Sat</th>
</tr>
<MTCalendar>
<MTCalendarWeekHeader><tr></MTCalendarWeekHeader>
<td <MTCalendarIfToday>class="today"</MTCalendarIfToday>>
<MTCalendarIfEntries>
<MTEntries lastn="1">
<a href="<$MTEntryLink archive_type="Daily"$>"><$MTCalendarDay$></a>
</MTEntries>
</MTCalendarIfEntries>
<MTCalendarIfNoEntries>
<$MTCalendarDay$>
</MTCalendarIfNoEntries>
<MTCalendarIfBlank> </MTCalendarIfBlank></td>
<MTCalendarWeekFooter></tr></MTCalendarWeekFooter>
</MTCalendar>
</table>
</div>
</div>

Without additional CSS markup, the default style of the Calendar widget in Movable Type 4.01 is squished, so I'm using these styles for the small monthly calendar in the sidebar:

.widget-calendar {
line-height: 120%;
padding: 0px;
text-align: center;
}
.widget-calendar th {
font-weight: bold;
line-height: 140%;
padding: 2px;
}
.widget-calendar td.today {
background-color: #E1E1E1;
color: #000000;
}

Test reCaptcha plugin with Movable Type 4.01. test test2 test3 test4 test5 test6 test7 test8 test9 test10

[Update 7:30pm October 24, 2007] Two nights ago, I worked on getting Captcha (built into Movable Type 4 as an option under Blog Settings) or reCaptcha to work correctly so commenters would need to enter the letters displayed on an image in order to submit a comment.

At one point, the Captcha image displayed, but I was having trouble with TypeKey so comments weren't being posted. When I authenticate to TypeKey, the TypeKey token does display in Registration under Blog Settings. But, when I try to leave a comment, a message displays something like "the owner of the blog hasn't setup TypeKey authentication".

So, then I decided to go with reCaptcha. I signed up (free) at the reCaptcha website and got my public and private keys. I made the recommended modifications in the README file. Google searches revealed that MT 4 has a bug in reCaptcha plugin settings that won't store those keys, so as recommended, I hard-coded them into the recaptcha.pl file. No luck.

So, I decided to use the TinyTuring plugin instead - and it worked right away! With TinyTuring, the commenter is required to type a single letter in order to post a comment. The letter will vary randomly with each entry.

Ah, success!

Of course, as noted on the TinyTuring web page, it doesn't prevent actual humans from going to your weblog and manually posting spam. But is is one more strike against comment spam!

I've seen a Movable Type (version 3.3 at this time) blog with reCaptcha working so I might give it another try sooner or later.

Found at: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/. Below is a trimmed-down example of a test of formatting using Markdown with SmartyPants, which is one of the format options available on the Entry screen in Movable Type 4.01.

Download

Markdown 1.0.1 (18 KB) — 17 Dec 2004

Introduction

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the online Dingus.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

The best way to get a feel for Markdown’s formatting syntax is simply to look at a Markdown-formatted document. For example, you can view the Markdown source for the article text on this page here: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/index.text

(You can use this ‘.text’ suffix trick to view the Markdown source for the content of each of the pages in this section, e.g. the Syntax and License pages.)

Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license. If you enjoy using Markdown, please considering making a small donation to support further development. See the License page for more information.

Acknowledgements

Aaron Swartz deserves a tremendous amount of credit for helping to design Markdown’s formatting syntax. Markdown is much better thanks to Aaron’s ideas, feedback, and testing. Also, Aaron’s html2text is a very handy (and free) utility for turning HTML into Markdown-formatted plain text.

Nathaniel Irons, Dan Benjamin, Daniel Bogan, and Jason Perkins also deserve thanks for their feedback.

Michel Fortin has ported Markdown to PHP; it’s a splendid port, and highly recommended for anyone looking for a PHP implementation of Markdown.

I wanted to change "/artscrafts/" to "/blog/" in all popup image files (these are not stored in the MT database so search-and-replace inside the Movable Type 4.01 administrative interface doesn't work for those files). The file for each popup image is stored in the same directory as the popup image.

The following worked for me, but there is no guarantee that it will work for you. I am not responsible for any problems you may encounter. Backup all files first.

To change a string of characters to a different string of characters in multiple files:

1. At a Unix prompt, cd to directory where the files to be modified are located
2. Type on one line: for f in *php; do sed 's/string1/string2/g' $f > $f.new && mv $f.new $f; done

Line 2 means: For every file ending with php, replace string1 with string2 and save the result into a new file, then move the new file over the original file.

For each slash in the string, I needed to use \ in front of it, as follows:

for f in *php; do sed 's/\/artscrafts\//\/blog\//g' $f > $f.new && mv $f.new $f; done

Multiple lines can also be used at a Unix prompt as follows:

for f in *php
do
sed 's/string1/string2/g' $f > $f.new &&
mv $f.new $f
done

Based on information in a thread at dBforums. Note: That code uses the Unix find command to locate files which could be in subdirectories. Back up all files and learn about the find command before using.

for fname in $(find . -name "*" -print)
do
sed '/word/s/word/new_word/g' ${fname} > ${fname}.new &&
mv ${fname}.new ${fname}
done

After all the re-publishing and researching I did yesterday, I realized that the filenames on my old blog site used underscores - not dashes - and, because of that, some links were broken on this new blog! Ack! (I knew I wanted to use dashes so I thought I had already been using dashes on the old blog!) I was by then too tired to try to fix it.

Today, however, I was ready to tackle this new problem! A Google search for "htaccess underscores dashes" revealed just what I needed! Using .htaccess Voodoo For Underscore and Dash Woes provides the solution with the exact lines to copy and paste into the .htaccess file. Changes I made:

• There were 2 extra spaces that caused 500 errors until I removed them from the last and next-to-last lines just before \.html$
• Changed "RewriteBase /" to the subdirectory for this blog, i.e., "RewriteBase /blog/"
• Since I use .php extensions, I changed .html to .php
• Added lines for $7, $8, $9 ,$10, and $11 because full titles use more than 6 words in some cases

Works like a charm!

[Update October 28, 2007] It seems that the wildcards go to only $9. So I added this line (it's one line, not three!) above the $9 line - it catches the first nine wildcard variables then the lines below this one catch the rest.

RewriteRule ^([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)
_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_(.*)\.php$
http://www.tamemymind.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7-$8-$9.php

Whew. I spent another bunch of hours here and there throughout the day fooling around with this blog. I researched and then tried Movable Type 4.01's dynamic publishing. Errors - "/blog/ not found" - but with the correct header and footer template modules. I researched more and still couldn't get it to work - kept getting "quot;/blog/ not found"quot; errors. So, I reverted back to static publishing.

Then I discovered pages on the site were broken - well, not broken, but gone! MT had renamed all files with a .static extension (example: index.php.static). So, I removed all the *.static files, re-published all (and waited at least 45 minutes...).

Then I discovered MT had reverted to 30-character basenames instead of using full entry titles for filenames. So, I removed all entry files, re-set the Entry template's filename format, re-published all again (and waited at least 45 minutes...).

Then I discovered that all templates were set to "Enable dynamic publishing for this template" so I unchecked that box for each template and re-published all again (and waited at least 45 minutes...).

Then I discovered that filenames were using underscores when I remember them being dashes (hyphens) yesterday. So, I researched that - and find it amazing that MT doesn't just offer users two more filename choices: full titles with dashes and full titles with underscores. Ack! I found the DirifyPlus plugin, installed it, configured the template filename format, and then...yes...re-published all yet again (and waited at least 45 minutes).

Now that I've unsuccessfully tried MT's dynamic publishing, I have two options to make updating the sidebar and making changes to styles, templates and template modules:

1. Reconfigure the widgets and template modules to output to a file and then use PHP includes (which is how I did things before MT 4 - but I hoped to use more of MT's features, such as widgets and MTIncludes).
2. Try to figure out WordPress - again.

I spent most of today from about 9:15am to about 6:30pm installing and configuring Movable Type 4.01, and moving the Tame My Mind - Cheryl's Arts 'n' Crafts blog to a new directory. Please change your links to http://www.tamemymind.com/blog/. This new URL allows me to re-title this blog - which is right now just Tame My Mind - at will without the URL being inconsistent. Redirects have been placed in an .htaccess file at the old URL, but that is only a temporary fix to help prevent most broken links.

After a few hours, moving around the MT 4 administrative interface was second nature. It's slow, but the layout is good. Display of the blog itself is still quick.

I like being able to create Pages that aren't date-based entries in the blog. I like that MT 4's Search and Replace works in the Keywords field too - I put thumbnail images in the Keywords field and place that field at the top of entries before the Body. I like the auto-save feature. But, why does the Rich Text format use <b> instead of <strong>?

I miss being able to save and rebuild a template or template module after modifying it - having to rebuild, err, publish the index templates to check a change I've made to a template, template module, sidebar, or widget and publish all to have those changes show up on each entry is a pain. The MT 4 documentation on dynamic publishing doesn't explain clearly enough how it works, but I may give it a try.

Subcategories are imported as top-level categories, so subcategories with the same name were imported into the same top-level category! Ack! For example, entries assigned the subcategory of Crochet > General or Knit > General were combined into General - not what I wanted. That issue required removing all entries from the new blog, changing all categories in the old blog to top-level categories with unique names (example: Crochet General, Knit General), re-exporting, re-importing into the new blog, and re-publishing. The import procedure on the new blog then created all of those uniquely-named top-level categories. The redirects in the .htaccess file take the category/subcategory changes into account.

Then I discovered the default basename (filename) for MT 4 is 30 characters and since the assigned basename for entries is not exported, all entries imported into the new blog had truncated filenames with a maximum of 30 characters. This wouldn't have been a problem if the old blog didn't use the full entry title (longer than 30 characters in many cases) as the filename. So, I modified the archive path for the Entry archive template, removed all date-based folders, category folders, and pages folder from the server, and published all again.

There were other hiccups which caused me to have to remove folders and re-publish multiple times.

By the way, there are only 649 entries and only 388 comments as of this moment. To publish all takes about 45 minutes. Ridiculous. Oh, and to publish 1 entry takes almost 35 seconds. Also ridiculous.

In the past, I've looked into WordPress, but just haven't been able to dig into the spaghetti (and thorough) documentation and Template Tags enough to really understand WP. Movable Type makes more sense to me. However, 45 minutes to publish all entries when the header, footer, sidebar, a template module or a widget is modified makes it worth looking into again. (Besides, understanding WordPress will come in handy at work too - WP is free and free is good for colleges.)