Over the weekend I updated my installation of movabletype to the latest release, 2.63. It went without a hitch, and all seems to be working well.
Once I was working on the site I turned my attention to cleaning up my templates. My main template was in reasonable shape, but my individual, monthly and category index pages reflected the scant time I’ve spent on them; each of them had some elements of the other pages and the main page, but there was little consistency between them. Also, there was a permalink page for each entry, but not for each day. (That is needed so the calendar can be used to select/view all the entries for a given day.)
I also modified the calendar logic. Now, unless you are at the main page, or at a category index, the cal on the left reflects the month corresponding to the entry or date index you are viewing.
For all views, I rationalized the attributions line; in some cases there wasn’t even a link to view comments!
The only area I’m still not entirely happy with is the category and monthly archive index listings which display on the right for those 2 types of pages. They’re a bit long, and I’m thinking of moving to a dropdown solution, though I want to keep the site usable for non-javascript enabled browsers. Well, there’s also the issue of needing a better image/logo for the site, plus only the main page uses php, and I’ll probably change that (they mostly all do use server-side includes).
Many of template files I use are used to be available available, if you’re interested. They are a bit crufty, w/lots of commented out code experiments still lingering, as is was the stylesheet I’m using, so coder beware. I am using MT modules to some good effect, though there’s more to do there, I’m sure.
So, check out the site, including the category listings on the right and the date-based archives on the left, and be sure to leave comments and link back if you find something you like!
I’ll just keep my todo’s here in the comments.
figure out how to highlight the calendar day when viewing a permalink for that day. (is the necessary info(variable) available to me in the permalink template I’m using, or would a date one be required?)
Change the Category/Date entry in the main title to be italicized, like the permalink already does. Consider otherwise decorating the first and/or last elements.