RouseWorld | Main -- Adventures in Movable Type

Adventures in Movable Type

I apologize for the lack of entries lately. I've been busy trying to being to life a new website design for the newspaper I work for — using Movable Type, the same software that is the back-end of this website.

One thing I'm learning is that I did a horrible job of customizing MT for RouseWorld. There are tons of things you can do with the tools, and as soon as I'm done with the company site, I intend to re-visit the RouseWorld site design.

Here is some advice for designing with MT (the advice doesn't cover installing and administering the site!):

Run the plain MT templates for a while on a spare box and see what is provided by default and how MT likes to behave.

Next, copy the default MT templates from the spare box's MT administrative pages to a good text editor and start picking them apart. Look up each MT specific tag and see what it does and what options it takes.

After looking at the tags that are used, also look through the documentation at what tags and templates the default install doesn't use. There are some neat options and a lot of flexibility there.

Then — without referencing the default templates — make a static version of your site. Build examples of each type of page you will be using, main index, main archive, date archives, individual entries and the site's external CSS page. Start from scratch, but remember what you saw.

While building the static pages, think structure first and styling second. Make sure you place styling commands in a separate CSS page. If you do this it is much easier to tweak the look of the site, as all you have to do is edit one document.

Creating a structured document with an external stylesheet is difficult to do in a WYSIWYG editor. For this kind of work I recommend using Mozilla and a good plain text editor (yes, like BBEdit). Mozilla is a good viewer as it will recognize changes to a style sheet better than most browsers when you are editing local files.

There are lots of sites that cover CSS and structural website design. Some of my favorites resources include Eric Meyer, Salia.com's Suggestions for Web Design, Zen Garden, A List Apart, and (on the political side) the Web Standards Project.

While creating the static pages, start thinking about making the pages modular when you move them to MT. There are a lot of MT supplied variables (the blog's name, discription, site path, archive path, etc.) that can be used instead of hard-coded information. Using these variables means more flexibility — and flexibility is good, even if you think you don't need it.

When you have a set of static pages that look good to you, start changing them over to MT templates.

For each template open up both the default MT template (the one you copied from the MT admin web page) and your static page. Then you can often just copy across the MT tags to replace the static elements on your pages.

When you are all done, just replace the template text in the MT admin section with your own and rebuild the site.

You may see things that don't work exactly the way you expected. In that case, go back to the MT documentation and make sure you are using the right tags and options to get the effects you want. Also make sure that you didn't misplace a CSS tag or two when copying from the defaults.

If you did everything right and you still can't get MT to display the way your want, it is time to go to the MT Plugin Directory and find an MT plugin that gives you the tags or tag options you need.

Hopefully following these steps will give you a site that is yours, instead of a re-hash of one of the default MT styles.

Comments