Movable Type Monday: Custom Header, jQuery, ImageMagick, and More
Happy Monday, folks! First off, I’m sorry there was no Movable Type Monday last week. Seemed like most of the community had taken off for the holidays, so I decided to hold what I had for an extra week. But now it’s a new year and there’s lots of new stuff to talk about.
Plugins
Custom Header — Byrne Reese put out a new plugin for uploading and customizing the header image on your blog. Custom Header handles the whole process of uploading, cropping, and positioning your banner image. This will be great for personalizing template sets, and it modifying an existing template set to use this plugin looks very straightforward.
Share — This plugin lets you add an “email to a friend” form to your blog posts. Created by Dan Wolfgang, Share is customizable and works with MT’s junk filters. Thanks, Dan!
Tips & Tutorials
Besides his Share plugin, Dan also recently wrote instructions for using his Poll Position plugin with jQuery. Poll Position lets you add polls to your blog. I’m a huge jQuery fan, so I’m glad to see Dan write this up.
Beau Smith wrote improved installation instructions for the Action Streams plugin. Looking at Beau’s method, it seems odd Action Streams isn’t set up this way to begin with. Glad somebody explained the right way to do it.
Writer Susan McNerney posted instructions on changing your banner image. It’s clear that Susan was frustrated by how much trouble it was to change her banner. Sounds like she needed Byrne’s Custom Header plugin.
Over at TMCnet, Tom Keating out does himself, writing a tutorial that offers several things one can do with MT assets. He starts with listing recent image assets linked to entries, then creates a related entries widget that includes images, and finally shows how to add images to the FastSearch plugin. Thanks, Tom!
Finally, John Walker describes how to install Image::Magick on CentOS 5.2 for your Movable Type blog. His instructions may not be limited to MT, but since ImageMagick is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to install for any blog platform, I wanted to share his instructions.
What have you done with MT this week? Let us know in the comments.
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.
>>Over at TMCnet, Tom Keating out does himself
Thanks for the kudos on my various MT Assets tips & tutorials! Took quite a bit of work, but I hope other MT users find them useful.
I’ve come across this site several times as well. One of my favorite sites for Movable Type info.
I have one other very recent tutorial regarding the Facebook Connect beta plugin for MovableType. I solved some bugs in the beta. One of the Six Apart developers even posted a comment to it.
You can check out the entry I just blogged yesterday here:
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/movabletype/movabletype-facebook-connect-problems-and-fixes.asp