Since I have been working with cron issues in Movable Type recently, I thought it would be good to list some resources that you can find on the MT site.

• Setting up run-periodic-tasks
• Using Movable Type's Publishing Queue

I am not sure if setting it up as a daemon process is a good idea or not, something I will need to ask support.

It seems I am having issues with run-periodic-tasks ever since Feb. 27, the day I installed MT 4.24. I have all the archive types like Monthly and Author set to publish via the Publish Queue. It is not working, even though other Index templates set to Publish Queue are. I am working with Movable Type support and our dedicated host, Liquid Web, to figure out why the cron job is not working as it did prior to 4.24.

In other news, Batch Template Options is another wonderful time saver from Byrne. This is another utility plugin that every MT admin should have installed. It allows you to change publishing options without having to actually edit the template, major time saver.

I tell ya, if it is not one thing, it's another. The old saying is true, if you want something done right, you'd better do it yourself. I found a free Joomla template that was close to what I needed, and modified it from there. I should have coded it all from scratch. When you use Adblock Plus or similar, the top banner position collapses, and the background image, which has the black bar in it, moves down the page. Click to enlarge.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about Movable Type Community Solution. I was critical of it, and then someone used by comments as a springboard for the great WordPress v. Movable Type debate. My comments were taken out of context, and I hope that does not happen again. I am back to point out a few more items, good and bad.

Movable Type 4 has come a long way since its initial release. My first interaction was with MTCS 4.0 and 4.1, and it needed some polish, especially in the way templates were put together, widget sets, in particular. I can recall voicing my irritations with Anil Dash over IM, he seemed to understand where I was coming from. MTCS was eventually rolled into MT Pro, and 4.2 came out with pretty much every issue I had had with 4.1 addressed. Life was good, except I now had to go back into my 4.1 based templates and make the changes.

Our new BG Views Blogs site is based on the code from Tristan Blue 4.2, the Community Blog and Community Forum templates. These tempate sets are a very solid jumping off point -- and that is what they are, nothing more. It is up to the designer to make them work for your application. I originally tried working with the base 4.2 templates, but have strayed a bit to achieve the site you see today.

You may recall (or not) that I took a look at the Custom Header plugin earlier, adding it to the Community Blog and Community Forum template sets. Well, Motion is not a package in the addons folder. You need to edit this file:

$MT_HOME/plugins/Motion/config.yaml

Around like 83 you will want to put in the code to enable Custom Header for all blogs that use Motion. At this point it is still up to you do design your Motion template to utilize a banner image, Custom Header just provides an easy framework for adding them. Click thumbnail to embiggen.

When I tested out Poll Position and Poll Position Champion yesterday, I was getting the following returned instead of the results:

Global symbol "$vote_text" requires explicit package name

Dan tells me this is usually only found on IIS servers, however we run Apache. I have tried both Poll Position 1.0.3 and Poll Position Champion 1.0.4 in my Movable Type 4.25 install and both work now.

Many thanks to Dan Wolfgang in providing very fast fixes for both Poll Position and Hot Date.

If you are unaware, the best way to modify the look and feel of the Movable Type Admin UI is to use the alt-tmpl folder. I have done this for a number of the application templates.

login.tmpl
asset_options.tmpl
asset_upload.tmpl
chromeless_header.tmpl
footer.tmpl
header.tmpl

It is worth noting up front that if you modify any of the default application templates, Six Apart Support will require that you remove any customizations and ensure you are using the current code. This is yet another reason to use alt-tmpl files, as they are non destructive.

This is Part 1 of 2, and meant to be less technical in nature and more informative. In my testing of Motion for BG Views, I have come across something that perplexes me: A Motion-based blog has its own Login Form than any non-Motion blogs in the system.

Wouldn't it be a better solution to have one universal template for the end user login? (MT 4.24 did this) With the introduction of Motion, Six Apart has taken what was once universal and now broken it into Motion and non-Motion based blogs.

Recently, actually a few weeks ago, Andrew asked if they could have a daily archive for the Sports blog. This is something that is pretty easy to do in MT, and so now we have a short 15 day daily archive list on the main archive page, this links to a full list of daily archives, too.

Since publishing daily archives is a resource intensive process, we will only install daily archives on the blogs or communities that request them. Thanks to TemplateExporter, I now have a one-click install to add daily archives to any of our BG Views sites.

In testing out Movable Type Motion, the next version that BG Views will be upgrading to soon, I found that Hot Date, a great plugin for selecting the publish date for stores, did not work.

Dan Wolfgang was quick to send me a modified perl file, which does work in Movable Type 4.25. Though the fix is not public yet, I am sure it will be soon.

Since my weekend was spent in Oconomowoc, WI, I have not had much time to work on the BG Views site, and the time I have had has not been spent in testing out 4.25, but testing continues, which I will update here.