Movable Type Hacks

Introduction

I have a few hacks for Movable Type:

• A plugin to create shorter titles, useful for permalinks.
• A patch to MT.pm to allow index files for archives.

Short Title Plugin

This is a plugin that provides the <$MTEntryShortTitle$> tag that returns the short title for blog entry. The short title, by default, returns the entry title. This title can be overridden in the keyword field. The title in the keyword field is surrounded by square brackets. This allows other keywords to be used. For example, if the keyword field is:

linux [red hat] apache

Then the short title is red hat. This is very useful for using the entry title as a permalink. Usually, the entry title is fine, but for entries with really long titles, it would be nicer to have a shorter permalink URL. In these cases, the title can be overridden in the keyword field. To use this for a permlink, you would set the individual entry archive file template to:

<$MTArchiveDate
format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle
dirify="1"$>.html

Download short_title.zip. Unzip it in the plugins/ directory.

This plugin is also very useful with the index patch, below.

Index Patch

This is a patch to the MT.pm file that allows archive index templates to use a directory index. A directory index is a URL that ends in a slash, like this one. The web server then automatically loads the directory index, which is index.html for Apache, but may be other files. The benefit is that the underlying index file may be changed, but the URL will always stay the same. For example, this page is currently index.shtml. But if I ever want to use PHP, I can start using index.php. In either case, the URL stays the same and is more permanent.

Use this, in conjuction with the short title plugin like:

<$MTArchiveDate
format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle
dirify="1"$>/

Download the appropriate patch file for your version of Movable Type. Save this to the same directory as MT.pm and run patch < file-name.patch to apply the patch.

• Patch for Movable Type version 2.x: mt-index.patch
• Patch for Movable Type version 3.x: mt-index-3.x.patch