Recently in Dynamic Publishing Category

Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless enthusiasm. Let's see if he can convince Elise...

This tutorial is written by LMT contributor Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.
Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

If you move from static publishing to dynamic publishing in Movable Type, you may encounter a variety of confusing error messages in Smarty, the system MT uses to create its dynamic pages. This tutorial will explore several of the errors you may experience, explain what they mean, and show you how to solve them. This is by no means a complete guide to every error you may experience; I will continue to add to this tutorial as I come by more of them.

Co-authored by Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer
Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

With the release of Movable Type 3.1 comes a new and powerful feature - Dynamic Publishing. To take advantage of Dynamic Publishing, you need to edit or create a file on your Apache server called .htaccess as explained in the Movable Type Manual. htaccess files can give you extra control over your server, allowing you to password protect directories, enable server side includes, generate custom error messages, and block users by IP address among other things. (See this Guide to .htaccess for more information.)

Note: You should really know what you are doing before attempting to work on an htaccess file. It is a powerful and potentially dangerous file. In some extreme cases you could lock yourself out of your domain completely, including the use of back-end tools such as cPanel and FTP. (Elise once took her site offline for several hours unintentionally after changing the code on a .htaccess file. Fortunately her web host tech support came up with the proper code that got the file and the site working again.) If you are unsure, check your .htaccess code with your web host before uploading. You might want to experiment with a .htaccess file in a subdirectory first, to avoid causing site-wide problems. We take no responsibility for what may result on your server by following these instructions.