Until then, hope your holidays are blessed! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! :-)

So you want to create alternating background colors for your (dynamically published) comments? I just came across a sweet little *gem in Hacking Movable Type about Smarty's "cycle" function... worth the price of the book, IMO. But, I digress. :-)

If you are using dynamic publishing for your individual entry archives, you can very simply edit your template to create alternating comment background colors (or any alternating style) with Smarty's "cycle" function.

The "cycle" funtion will, as the name implies, cycle through a list of values each time it is used within a loop. This is a perfect little solution for the task at hand. An added bonus is that it can cycle through more than two values, allowing you to alternate two, three or more styles. In MT's dynamic archives templates, the smarty cycle tag is written with double brackets {{cycle values="x,y,z"}}, using whatever values you want (numerals, words, etc). Here is one way to use it in your (MT3.2) individual entry archive template:

The template code outputs an alternating class around each comment, in this case: commentbg-x, commentbg-y, and commentbg-z. This is then easily styled with CSS.

The following sample style is a little overdone (read: ugly), but that is just to show the variety of ways in which the alternating styles can be tweaked beyond background and border colors.

FYI, you can also use Smarty's "cycle" function inside PHPSimplecomments, instead of that plugin's SimpleCommentOrder tag which is limited to only two values - "odd" and "even".

*I just ran into this same info online in a ProNet article that I know I read several times when it came out. I guess it never jumped out at me before... even so, Hacking MT is VERY MUCH worth owning - I highly recommend it. ;-)

I became an MT convert about three years ago and will always fondly remember my first installation (pathetic, I know) -- once I finally decided to take the leap to MT, it took another three days just making the decision to install it myself. Sweating bullets (on a cold winter night!), I proceeded with fear and trepidation through the installation process. Although the installation was straightforward, I entered into it with a deficit of knowledge and experience in such matters. Thus ensued a bit of bumbling, a fair amount of googling and finally... victory triumphant! I had a shiny new blog powered by Movable Type v2.51 and my first introduction to the mysterious Melody Nelson. ;-)

Since then Movable Type has become a family affair here, with each of my daughters, my son-in-law and my grandbabies (with their mama's help) now blogging with MT on their own sites... sharing their stories, photos, hobbies, and passions. I even use MT as part of our homeschooling studies with my teenage girls... teaching them some basic html, css, and MT template tweaking skills, as well as giving them a medium for practicing their writing and communication skills. My personal favorite MT project is an online "journal" created for a volunteer group of young historic interpreters who portray 18th century Virginians at local historic sites (such as the childhood home of George Washington, etc). Although sprinkled with some factual details, the journal entries are the fictional accounts of the kids' 18th century personas. I am presently working on redesigning their entire site to be powered by MT, so that these young historic preservationists can easily manage their own website. I will also say that, in addition to my own blogging, learning the inner workings of Movable Type over the past few years has been a therapeutic pursuit and a (mostly! LOL) healthy diversion through some challenging personal times, occasional obsessing over tweaks and hacks notwithstanding. ;-)

Again, congrats to SixApart for a wonderful product and for cultivating an equally great community of users. I look forward to celebrating many more MT "birthdays" with you!

With a tiny bit of hacking, you can also create your own "default" templates that can be created/ refreshed along with MT's default templates. This could be especially useful for "about" pages, includes, etc., that you would want to use across multiple blogs. For example, I prefer to have my banner code separate from my other templates and call it in as an include. Because I typically use the same banner code and a generically named image in my banners (banner.gif or whatever), I can use the same code in every blog. I created a default template with my banner code, named it banner.tmpl, and dropped it in the default_templates folder. Next, I did a teeny hack to lib/MT/default_templates.pl by inserting the following under any other code snippet in the list :

(where rebuild_me 0 = don't rebuild with indexes and 1 = do rebuild with indexes)

Finally, I edited all the default templates where I wanted to replace the banner code, using instead a php include:

<?php include ("inx/banner.inc"); ?>

(Regarding banners, the beauty of using an include is that I can change the banner code in just ONE place rather than in every index and archive template.)

I refreshed the templates for my blog(s) and a rebuild of all files finished the job. Note that when TemplateRefresh will be creating new templates, you must do this action through the System Overview/Weblogs menu. Refreshing through Main Menu/Weblogs/Templates will only refresh existing templates. I haven't tested this out in different situations so no guarantees. These are just examples of things that work for me within my particular templates, etc. Please note that this was done most recently with MT3.2b5... I will test it again when the public release comes out.

As always... please BACKUP your stuff before tweaking, hacking or customizing. ;-)

Installation (on MT32b2) was not too difficult. First, I edited mt-config.cgi to specify my mt-static path (even though I do have it in the default location). Then I uploaded MTAmazon32.pl and MediaManager into my plugins directory (making sure to CHMOD 755 mmanager.cgi). In System Overview/Plugins I configured MTAmazon32 with my Amazon subscriber ID and cache location. Then I configured MTAmazon32's Amazon associate ID through each blog's plugin settings.

Oh, I forgot about MediaManager's static folder. Rename it mmanager and move it to your mt-static directory.

I think that did it. Hope I didn't forget anything... oh yeah, the cache folder... I actually forgot to create one and there's been no fussing about it. Is it not required with MTAmazon32? (I have gone ahead and created it.)

Anyway, the awesome new "Review" feature looks... well.. awesome!! Byrne brilliantly incorporated the Amazon image hacks that he had described previously on his site. I finally figured out how to use it. After you create your review (I had to do it as a draft), go to your entries and edit it by selecting a new Text Formatting option: "MediaManager: Layout1", select Publish, then save. You will have a very cool and nicely formatted review entry. Unfortunately, this plugin does not (yet!) have a php counterpart, so the review entries will not work with dynamic archives. :-(

FYI, MediaManager beta4 results are in the "books" section on my beta blog as well as in the left sidebar on this blog.

Also limited blog searches to originating blog by adding to default search template form:

More details about "take 3" forthcoming...

I restored my backups and everything was back to its old self in no time. Gotta love those backups. They save my neck every time. ;-)

I will continue in the morning... already turning into a pumpkin due to too many late nights this week.