Movable Type Template Tips & Tricks

MT Facebook Commenters Plugin Bugs & Fixes

I encountered a weird bug today while implementing profile image for Facebook users in MovableType. Username was not being pushlished properly or it was just getting eaten up by the Facebook profile image.

Quick and dirty solution to this problem: duplicate the div that contains commenter name!

<mt:If tag="CommenterAuthType" eq="Facebook">
  <div class="user-pic clearfix comment-fb-<$mt:CommenterUsername$>"> 
    <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=<$mt:CommenterUsername$>" class="auth-icon"><img 
    src="<$mt:CommenterAuthIconURL size="logo_small"$>" alt="<$mt:CommenterAuthType$>"/></a>
    
    <fb:profile-pic uid="<$mt:CommenterUsername$>" size="square" linked="true"><img 
    src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/pics/q_default.gif" /></fb:profile-pic>
  </div> 
  <div class="commenter-name"><$mt:CommentAuthorLink$></div>
  <div class="commenter-name"><$mt:CommentAuthorLink$></div> 

Checkout the Facebook Connect Commenters Plugin Readme file on Github for more information.

Creating custom template sets with MT Export TS

If you always wanted to create your own template set but never sure where to start, check out Byrne Reese's MT Export Template Set Plugin. This plugin helps you to create a new template set based on your existing templates in a specific blog. Template files will be exported as a plugin which can easily be installed on MovableType.

This plugin is the real solution where hundreds of blogs needs to be managed within one MT instance. The best way to follow is to create global templates and include them in your blog level templates. Implementing this architecture, all the blogs using this template set can be updated by modifiying only the global templates and your changes will be in place after all the blogs get republished.

The readme file is really helpful and self explanatory thanks to Beau Smith.