Movable Type supports many options for configuring the way your weblog works. There are four different screens in the Weblog Configuration section:
file(s) will be located. When
you use ``Rebuild'' to publish your site, your index templates will be
generated into this directory.
An absolute path (a path starting with /) is preferred, because it is not
dependent on the location of your Movable Type directory; but if you choose to
use a relative path, the path should be relative to your Movable Type
directory.
This is a required field.
Example: /home/melody/public_html/blog
http:// and your site's domain name) to your public
weblog. This URL should not include the filename of your index file; for
example, if your index file is located at
http://www.your-site.com/blog/index.html, then the value for Site URL
should be http://www.your-site.com/blog/.
This URL will be sent to weblogs.com when sending an XML-RPC ping (if you have enabled this option--see Notify weblogs of updates, below).
This is a required field.
Example: http://www.your-site.com/blog/
/) is preferred, because it is not dependent on
the location of your Movable Type directory; but if you choose to use a
relative path, the path should be relative to your Movable Type directory.
Note that, if you wish to place your archive files in the same directory as
your index files, the Local Archive Path and the Local Site Path should
point to the same directory.
This is a required field.
Example: /home/melody/public_html/blog/archives
http:// and your site's domain name) to the archives
section of your public weblog.
This is a required field.
This is a required field.
<$MTBlogDescription$>
tag.
MTEntries tag; this is merely the
default, used when you do not supply MTEntries with any attributes.
For example, if you wish to display the last 15 entries that you have
posted to your weblog, you could use the lastn attribute to MTEntries
instead of relying on the default behavior:
<MTEntries lastn="15"> ... </MTEntries>
Note that, if you choose 7 days, 7 days means the last 7 consecutive days,
not necessarily the last 7 days on which you posted an entry. So if you
have posted on just 3 of the last 7 days, only the posts from those 3 days
will be listed on your main indexes.
Note also that a ``day'' is defined as the time from 24 hours ago to now, where
``now'' is the time at which you are rebuilding your site. It does not mean
from 12 AM to now on the current day. As an example, if you are including
1 day on your index and you posted an entry one day at 6 PM, that entry
will show up on your index until the next day at 5:59 PM.
This is a required field.
<p> and </p> tags, and converts line breaks into
<br> tags. You can customize the text formatting setting on a
per-entry basis, meaning that you can specify one formatting option for one
entry, and another option in another entry. You indicate your preference
per entry when creating a new entry, or editing an existing entry, in the
Text Formatting setting.
The Default Text Formatting for new entries setting in your weblog configuration controls the default value for Text Formatting. You should select the text formatting option that you use most often, for the sake of convenience.
N
words of your entry.
The number of words in the excerpt defaults to 20.
Editing Menu, they will be
presented with a message welcoming them, and providing a link to the manual
and some introductory text. You can edit this welcome message in the
Welcome Message configuration field to send specific messages to your
authors, post news about your weblog, etc.
Keep in mind: Once you publish your work under a Creative Commons license, and someone accepts the terms you've offered, you can't revoke the license. You can always take your work down if you change your mind, of course, or specify that future entries in your blog are available under some new licensing terms or full copyright protection, whatever the case may be. For more information about the details of Creative Commons licenses, see http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/fullrights.
If you have not selected any archive types (Archive Frequency, above), you
should select No Archives for your Preferred Archive Type.
If you would like Movable Type to notify weblogs.com and/or blo.gs of updates to your site automatically--whenever you post an entry on your site--check the corresponding box.
In addition to weblogs.com and blo.gs, there are other services that provide similar functionality. If you would like to ping such services automatically, and if they support the weblogs.com XML-RPC ping interface (http://www.xmlrpc.com/weblogsCom), you can add the URLs for those XML-RPC servers to the Others box. Separate the URLs with carriage returns.
Recently updated key. This key will then be sent
to movabletype.org whenever you update your site, and your site will
be marked as recently updated.
<MTGoogleSearch>, for example), you
will need to sign up for a Google API key ( http://www.google.com/apis/ ),
then paste your API key into this field. Your key will be sent to Google's
servers whenever you use Google API functionality.
This takes all of the work out of using TrackBack. You only need to link to
permalinks as you always have, and Movable Type can do the work for you. You
will be notified of the sites that are being pinged on the Pinging...
screen.
This option determines whether you accept comments from visitors who haven't authenticated themselves using an outside authentication system like TypeKey. These visitors may be completely anonymous or you may require them to supply a name and email address, but there is no guarantee of such a commenter's identity.
To enable this feature, be sure to enter a ``TypeKey Token'' below. This is the identifier that identifies your site to the TypeKey authentication service.
Caveats: If your weblog domain is different from the domain of your
Movable Type application, commenters using Internet Explorer 6 may
have trouble logging in to comment on your site. This is because
Internet Explorer 6 doesn't allow your weblog to fetch your cookie
information from Movable Type, which contains the logic to decode
it. For example, this situation would arise if your weblog was at
www.joesjournal.com but you log into Movable Type at
http://www.my-hosting-company.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi
When configuring your TypeKey settings at typekey.com, be sure to
enter the URL of your Movable Type application, as opposed to your
weblog URL. To continue the above example, you would need to enter
http://www.my-hosting-company.com/ into your TypeKey preferences at
typekey.com. It is not necessary to enter the path information
(e.g. cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi).
To approve a new commenter, log in to MT and use the ``Commenters'' button at the left side of the screen. Once you've located the commenter, hit the ``Approve User'' button. This will display all of that commenter's pending comments, and future comments by that individual will be posted immediately. If you instead click the ``Ban User'' button, that commenter's pending comments will be deleted and the commenter will be banned from your site unless you later approve that individual.
Clicking on ``Ban User'' when a commenter is new has the effect of deleting all of that user's comments to date. However, if you have ever approved a user, clicking ``Ban User'' on that individual will not affect any exsting comments. ``Approve User'' and ``Ban User'' only affect the user's existing comments if you have already approved or banned that user.
``Auto-approval'' only applies to registered commenters.
If you prefer to ask TypeKey to pass each commenter's email address to your site, check this option. Upon signing in, the user will have the option to pass his or her email address, or to keep it hidden and cancel the comment attempt.
<p>
and </p> tags, and converts line breaks to <br>
tags. The option selected here will be applied globally to all comments in
the system. Note that Text Formatting is executed after the comment is
cleaned up using Sanitize.
You do not have to select any archive types, if you don't want archiving on your weblog; just leave all of the boxes unchecked.
Archive Type that you use, you can
define an Archive File Template in the box to its right on the
configuration screen.
By default, individual archive files are given a name based on the title of the entry; for example, an entry entitled 'Our Magnificent Day at the Beach' might be given the filename our_magnificent.html, and are stored in a directory based on the month of the entry: 2004/05/our_magnificent.html. (Note that users of previous Movable Type versions can choose backward-compatible filenames in Weblog Config.)
However, you may want to change the way your archive paths are formed.
For example, you may wish to impose a hierarchy on your archives,
based on the category into which you've placed them; for example, you
would place all entries in the category Books into a directory
called books/. To do this, you can use the following Archive File
Template for your Individual archives:
<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html
A final example: by default Weekly archives are named using only the start
date of the week (week_2002_01_06.html, for example). If you would like to
include both the start and end dates in the filename, you can use the following
Archive File Template for your Weekly archives:
week_<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y_%m_%d"$>-<$MTArchiveDateEnd format="%Y_%m_%d"$>.html
Archive File Templates are defined using a subset of the standard Movable
Type template tags. The following tags can be used in
Archive File Templates:
<$MTArchiveDate$> (doc)
and <$MTArchiveDateEnd$>
(doc) for date-based archives
(Monthly, Daily, Weekly)
<$MTArchiveCategory$>
(doc) for Category archives
<$MTCategory$>
(doc) for Category archives
<$MTEntry*$>
(doc) tags for
Individual archives
NOTE: when using Archive File Templates, you must append the file
extension that you wish to use for your archive files (as in the examples
above). The file extension that you specify in File extension for archive
files will not be used.
To ban a certain IP address from commenting on entries in your weblog and sending TrackBack pings to your weblog, you can use the IP Banning screen (part of the Weblog Configuration set of screens).
Note that IP banning is not an exact science, and that it should not be considered true security for your site, because an IP address does not necessarily ``mark'' a user as unique. IP addresses are often dynamically assigned by ISPs, for example; this means that a user's IP address may change from one session to the next. In addition, computers at public sites (a library, for example) may always have the same IP address, but the user using the system will certainly not always be the same.
In other words, you should be careful when banning IP addresses.
To add a new banned IP address, enter the IP address into the IP Address:
box, and press ADD TO LIST. To remove an IP address that is currently
banned, check the checkbox next to that IP address in the IP Ban List,
and click the DELETE button.