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If you use the MultiBlog plugin by David Rayners and you upgrade to MT4, when you go to rebuild your site, you may get the following error message:

"Publish error in template 'Main Index': No handler exists for tag MultiBlogEntries"

The MultiBlog functionality is now part of MT4. All you have to do to update your templates is to change every instance of the tags MTMultiBlogEntries or MTMulitBlog to MTEntries and rebuild your templates.

So <MTMultiBlogEntries include_blogs="2,5" lastn="10"> and </MTMultiBlogEntries> become <MTEntries include_blogs="2,5" lastn="10"> and </MTEntries>.

This isn't really a tutorial since I'm just advising you to install a plugin and giving you some reference html to make it look a tiny bit nicer than it does by default. However I still think this might be useful information for at least a few people so here we go:

Social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and countless others are very popular with blogs and websites. Becoming popular on one of those sites attracts serious traffic and let's face it, most blogs and websites are always looking to boost traffic. So making it easier for people to "add to del.icio.us or "digg this" seems to be a good idea. By making it easier I mean we'll be adding links for several of the most popular social bookmarking tools to all existing and future entries for a given blog.

To accomplish this we're going to use the Promote This! plugin by Byrne Reese. Download and install the plugin per the directions. Once you've installed the plugin it's time to insert code into the Entry Detail template module. The Promote This! site gives the example of the code for adding a "digg this" link. If you follow that format you'll get a nice text link that works just fine. But if you want to jazz it up a tiny bit you can add the logos for each of the social bookmarking services you want represented.

Movable Type has a scheduled tasks system that is used to perform certain tasks on scheduled basis. Built-in tasks include expiring junk (spam) trackbacks and comments, and posting entries that were scheduled to to published at a certain date / time. Movable Type plugins can also use scheduled tasks, as some of my plugins do (including Visitor Stats Pro, Ajax Rating Pro, and Blog Janitor). One of the benefit of scheduled tasks is to improvement performance and user experience -- resource intensive functions can be run without making admins, authors, and commenters wait while they complete.

Triggering Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled task will only run when they are triggered. This is important. Even if a task is scheduled to run every hour, it scheduled tasks don't get triggered, the task will never run. By default Movable Type will trigger scheduled tasks in the following cases:

1. You receive a junk (spam) comment or trackback. Note: this will only trigger the 'Junk expiration' task - it won't trigger plugin tasks.
2. You view or download an XML "activity feed" (These feeds show up on with orange feed links on many screens of the admin MT interface, including entry and comment listings, and activity log).
3. When the run-periodic-tasks script (found in the 'tools' directory of MT) is run via the command line or via cron.

Two of my favourite Movable Type plugins from versions prior to MT4 are Favicon and Gravatar. Both these plugins work fine in MT4 and it’s only a matter of knowing where to put them in the template modules.

Favicon is a plugin for Movable Type that adds favicons to comments and trackbacks.

Download and install the plugin as per the instructions on the download page. Follow the directions there for installing into MT versions prior to 4.0. The following instructions only apply to Movable Type 4.

Go to the Movable Type dashboard in your browser, Design > Templates > and click on Template Modules. Open the Comment Detail module.

Place the following code right before the <$MTCommentAuthorLink default_name="Anonymous" show_email="0"$> tag and save the changes.

<MTFaviconCommentIfAvailable>
<$MTFaviconComment full="1"$>
</MTFaviconCommentIfAvailable>

Open the Trackbacks Module and copy the following code to the footer section, placing it just before the words “Tracked on….”. Save your changes.

<MTFaviconTrackbackIfAvailable>
<$MTFaviconTrackback full="1"$>
</MTFaviconTrackbackIfAvailable>

Rebuild your entry pages to see the favicons in action.

Last week on my personal blog I discussed how to put the MT:OtherBlog tag to use and compared that tag with using PHP includes to create the same functionality.

In the comments of that post J. Brotherlove reminded me of one serious advantage PHP includes have over using MT:OtherBlog: automatic updating. If I’m pulling content from Blog 1 with a PHP include into Blog 2 whenever Blog 1 is updated the pulled content is automatically updated on Blog 2. This isn’t the case when using MT:OtherBlog. When I update Blog 1 the pulled content on Blog 2 will not be updated until Blog 2 is rebuilt (either indexes or the entire blog depending on how you’ve got it set up). So after round 1 the score card finds MT:OtherBlog winning in the ease of use category but PHP includes winning in terms of actual useful functionality. So, a tie.

Originally published at majordojo under the title "How to increase advertising revenue with Movable Type."

Every once in a while a plugin is created for Movable Type that makes you wonder, “why hasn’t anyone created this until now?” And the most recent plugin that I have installed on majordojo is no exception. Andy Yako-Mink, inspired by a ProNet conference call, created a plugin named “Cat Calendar.” But before you start imagining a 365 Cat-a-Day desk calendar for your blog, let me dispel any preconception you might have about this plugin. Simply put, Cat Calendar paginates Category Archive pages by date.

But why do I think this is so significant?

First, one of the consequences of Movable Type’s archiving system is that over time as you accumulate more and more content (which for a product that has been around for 5+ years is not completely unlikely) rebuilding specific pages becomes a very expensive operation. Category archives in particular because over time they only get larger. Rebuilding a single Category Archive page for example requires Movable Type to load a large number of entries into memory to be published to a single file. This results in a large memory foot print for Movable Type during the rebuild process; and for others that host more popular blogs it becomes a point of instability.

MT3.3 is out (Get your version upgrade here.) But before you attempt an upgrade, make sure that your plugins are all compatible with MT3.3.

MT3.3 introduces the ability to create transformer plugins which allow you to modify the MT interface. Because of this, MT is now completely incompatible with Kevin Shay's BigPAPI plugin, and all plugins that depend on BigPAPI. In addition, there are some plugins which are not BigPAPI plugins that will have compatibility problems with MT3.3. To help all of us with the upgrade process, I'm starting a list of plugins that are known to be incompatible with MT3.3, and links to their compatible upgrades if available. Note that many of these upgrades will work with MT3.3 but not with MT3.2. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. If you have news of plugins not mentioned here that were compatible with MT3.2 but are not with MT3.3, please let us know in the comments. If you have news of plugins that have been updated for MT3.3, please let us know in the comments.

Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 I’ve dumped Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist and instead made SpamLookup handle comment/trackback spam on its own. The plugin is included by default on MT 3.2, and while it can do a good job as it is, you might like to try some tune-ups to make it more effective.

Moderation and Junking

In Movable Type 2.x, comments just had one status - published. Any spam blocking system could only accept or deny comments and trackbacks. In MT 3.0x and 3.1x, comments gained an additional status - ‘moderated’. This was where comments could be held for human approval before being published, and tools like SpamLookup and MT-Blacklist could hold comments here if they thought they might be spam but couldn’t be sure.

With 3.2x, trackbacks can also be moderated, but a new third status has been added for both: junk. Now, rather than deleting spam outright, you’ll find plugins send it sent here instead. That way, if you have a false positive - a comment that is seen as being spam but isn’t - you can retrieve it.

The junk status also has a rating system, and plugins can adjust the rating for an individual comment or trackback. The rating is between 10 and -10 - comments with a negative score are junked, otherwise they are moderated or published. You’ll find that SpamLookup can reduce the rating of comments that it thinks are spam, but also add points if, say the comment has no links or has been posted with a URL that has already been accepted before.