Designer's Guide to Movable Type
Overviews and Introductions
- What's new for templates in MT4
- Templating Language Overview
- Template Tag Overview
- About Template Types
Creating Themes and Template Sets
- About Template Sets
- Registering Template Sets
- Creating Themes for Movable Type
- Developer Guide to Creating Style Catcher Repositories
Upgrading Templates
Editing and Managing Templates
- Using Shared Templates
- Managing the templates for your blog
- Template Loop Meta Variables
- Variable Interpolation
- Archive Template Variables
Refreshing Templates
- How to Refresh a Single Template
- Refreshing your blog's templates from the system defaults
- Switching to a New Template Sets
timfel
August 21, 2007 3:58 AM | Reply
The default templates are no use to me as I need to create more bespoke designs but I don't want to discard them and start from scratch as there is some very clever stuff in the way that they are modularised so that one template serves several different purposes and they modify themselves depending upon how they are being used. I'd like to retain some of these features so I'm having to take them apart bit by bit and find out what does what, which is OK but it's slow. Is there a guide to how they work?
Alberto Simoes
August 27, 2007 5:33 AM | Reply
As timfel asked above, it would be great to have some more detail on how to change a basic MT4 default template. Also, it would be great to have some instructions on how to copy a default template with a new name so we can bootstrap from an existing template without messing it up.
Byrne Reese
August 27, 2007 10:44 AM | Reply
@Alberto - That capability does not exist yet. It must be done manually. But I hear there is a plugin called Template Exporter and another called Template Importer that could help achieve that you are describing. Check mt-hacks.com for them.
kelly42.myopenid.com
September 5, 2007 1:26 AM | Reply
I notice there's a conspicuous lack of a link to pages on the Widgets and Widget Sets in MT4. I'm loving the attempts in 4.01 beta 2 to make the system more user-friendly, and widgets are a big part of that. Please tell me more about them!
Anil Dash
September 26, 2007 6:45 PM | Reply
We're starting to get together some good resources on the default templates. Take a look at the extensively-updated mt:Entries docs, MT4's comment templates for MT3 users, and MT4's main index default templates, which are all works in progress, but should provide a good place to start.
Brad Bell
November 16, 2007 9:36 AM | Reply
Following on from timfel: I love the new modular design as much as the next mildly obssessive compulsive designer, but it's quite a bit of work deconstructing it.
However, I did find this, which I think is exactly the kind of thing we clamour for:
http://pics.livejournal.com/chasethestars/pic/000g2exs.gif
It's not for MT4, but it looks like the same scheme was used, so it might help.
The image linked to above came from the following page, which explains a few other things, although it's really about LiveJournal, VOX and Expressive.
http://community.livejournal.com/lj_design/8831.html?thread=1192575
James Gallagher
December 18, 2007 2:43 PM | Reply
@Brad, that diagram you linked looks interesting. It would be great to have something similar for MT4 as templates/themes are quite confusing when you're coming into MT for the first time.
plasticmind.com
January 10, 2008 3:05 PM | Reply
I'm actually working on a diagram like that. Will have it up soon.
nathanrudy
March 9, 2008 7:12 AM | Reply
All I want to know is how to have a two column blog. The search produces nothing. I search on the MTSetVar info in the Main Index template and get nothing about what any of those variables mean.
The provided main index template is three column, but I don't know how to set or unset that. There's no explication anywhere of simple stuff like that, just incredible long lists of stuff to run through with the majority of it useless unless you are building a huge site.
All I want to do is have a few blogs on the site linked above. Since I have a template, that shouldn't be too hard. But apparently it is.
I loved MT up until 3.x, but this is frustrating as all get out.
nathanrudy
March 9, 2008 1:41 PM | Reply
Has anyone else noticed that the search function for this site is not accurate or complete?
I now know that the # of columns is set in the body tag, but can't figure out how to do it. Any help?
Beau Smith
August 25, 2008 7:10 PM | Reply
Nathan - If you're using default templates: go to Design > Styles, choose a style, then choose your layout.
If you're using your own custom templates then MT doesn't control or limit the number of columns that you can have.