Recently in templates Category

A Movable Type design (theme) contest has been launched with some pretty good prizes:

• Adobe Creative Suite
• iPad

Full details are available here

NB: The theme has to work with Movable Type 5, which is the most recent version

Being able to share your content easily is always a good thing. If someone can "tweet" your post or share it on Facebook, then you might get more traffic .. How can that be a bad thing?

The AddThis service offers a very nice selection of features and their plugin for Movable Type is very simple to implement

Simply download the plugin. Upload the entire "AddThis" folder into your MovableType plugin directory and you're practically done. All you need to do then is add the new template tag to your site and you can start using it.

Full details here

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SixApart have made available a release candidate of Movable Type 5

RC1's release announcement includes plenty of detail on which bugs have been fixed, which ones haven't and how to let them know about problems.

It also comes with a new theme

Full details here

Byrne has released another plugin for MovableType that allows users to easily customise their header image:

The Custom Header Plugin for Movable Type makes it easy for users to upload and customize the header for their blog. It uses javascript and Ajax to make the customization process as seamless, intuitive and painless as possible. No knowledge of HTML or CSS is required, but the theme you are using must explicitly support this plugin

Further information and download on his site

Movable Type 4's widget system may seem a little bit confusing at first, however it's not that daunting once you get your head around it.

Widgets are like snippets of code. You can have lots of widgets that do lots of different things.

For example, on several of the MT powered sites that I manage I use the widgets to handle my Google Adsense and other affiliate banners / buttons.

By using a widget to hold the code I can achieve several things:

• The widget is self-contained, so if I need to update the code I don't have to poke through lots of different templates - I just update it in one place
• You can move the widgets around ie. decide which one displays first in a widget set
• You can remove a feature by simply removing the widget from its parent set

On a another site we're using the widgets for things like "useful links" and "blog rolls".

They're handy!

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If you want to give your Movable Type powered site a bit of a facelift, then changing its theme is a good starting point.

iThemes have released three professionally designed themes for Movable Type. Although two of the themes are commercial (ie. you have to pay for them), one is free to download.

You can find out more on their site.

This might be useful for a lot of people:

Creating a Print-Friendly Template in Movable Type

Mark Carey from MT Hacks has released yet another useful plugin - the SelectiveCloner under a GPL license.

SelectiveCloner bridges a gap left by the "Cloner" plugin that ships with MT, as SelectiveCloner allows you to make a carbon copy of a blog's settings, templates and permissions WITHOUT content. If you want to rollout multiple blogs with the same look and feel Carey's latest release should save you quite a bit of time.

More information on his site.

Beau Smith has released Vanilla, which is a set of mini-templates to show functionality available to MT users / developers / designers.

One of the common problems when you look at some of the more advanced MovableType powered sites is working out how the creators were able to do certain things.

With Vanilla you can see how certain things work without having to bury yourself in a mountain of documentation.

Nice idea!

You'll find plenty of other Movable Type plugins over on the plugin directory

While I am not a designer, I do like to be able to customise certain aspects of a site's display without being forced to "jump through hoops".

MT 3.* had some level of logic in the organisation of templates, but the default set was a bit complicated to get to grips with at times.

With the arrival of MT4 the template system seemed to improve, but it was still quite complicated in some respects.

The latest iteration of MT4, MT4.2 Pro makes the templates a lot more accessible for the HTML challenged. For the first time (that I am aware of at least) you can now see all of the templates in a single view.

Since the latest version of MT is a bit of a monster, in terms of what it can do, not only do you have control over blog specific templates, but you can also access the system-wide templates (Global Templates), which are accessible from the "system" menu (if you're logged in as an admin).

In the Global Template section you can easily control and customise things like the email footers and a whole range of other options.

Now if only I could actually design .....