Movable Type Monday: White Space, Logging, and Documentation

Happy Monday, folks! I don’t know about you, but I sure was glad to see the U.S. elections finally come to an end. Of course, considering the past election season lasted almost 2 years, it may have finished just in time for the mid-term election season to begin!

I bring this up in order to share a bit of MT Presidential trivia: Both current President Bush (in 2004) and President-Elect Obama (in 2008) used Movable Type for their campaign blogs. Perhaps that will give them something to chat about as they are preparing for the transition of power.

Alright, enough politics, let’s get down to business.

This week, Brad Choate posted a proposal for trimming white space in templates. I love this idea, and hope it gets implemented soon. When you’re writing complex templates, it’s easy to have long blocks where all you’re doing is setting the values of MT variables. When your page gets published, you end up with lots of empty space. As an occasional Ruby on Rails programmer, I like the proposed implementation — the syntax is similar to that used in ERB templates.

Jay Allen announced a new version of Log4MT, a logging framework that helps with debugging in MT. The installation is a little daunting, but if you’re developing MT plugins, it’s definitely worth the trouble.

Mike T. has converted another WordPress theme to Movable Type: Pixeled. Be sure to check out some of Mike’s other themes — he’s done a lot of great WP to MT conversions.

Also, I’d love to feature more MT designs, so if you’ve created one, or seen one you’d like to share, send them to me.

Something else for designers: Byrne Reese posted about Six Apart’s efforts to enhance their documentation for designers. Good to see they’re working on this. I’m also looking forward to the free webinars on Building Web Sites with Movable Types that Byrne mentions.

Documentation

Speaking of documentation, there’s been a lot of new pages posted on MovableType.org. Here’s a few of the most recently updated topics:

What have you done with Movable Type lately? Let us know in the comments.

Billy Mabray

Billy Mabray is a web developer in the publishing industry. Over the years, he's written with and developed for just about every blogging platform there is. Blogging is in his blood, but the doctors think he can live a normal life anyway.