How To: Create a Movable Type Blog from scratch
I used to have my own CMS software. A little piece of hand-built sotware which a friend built for me for a project. I could modify it and tweak it to suit my needs. I spent more and more getting frustrated when I wanted to know how to do something. When calling a mate is your only support option and your CMS has a community of 1 you know you need to start looking elsewhere.This is the extended entry for my write up on how I created this site using movable type…So, with the latest redesign efforts I decide to implement a blogging engine as my content management system. There were a few choices on the market. My decisions were mainly based on ease of implmentation and the ability to ‘customise the shit’ out of it. I thought I would worry about rebuilds and scalability later.To be brutally honest it was articles by Douglas Bowman and Jon Hicks that really inspired me to have more of a look at Movable Type.Douglas Bowman over at Stopdesign has provided on his website and article on how he used Movable Type to power a personal photo gallery which is customized to suit his preferences.Additionally, Jon Hicks of hicksdesign put together some notes — quite some time ago — on his easy-to-implement approach for using MT to manage one’s link lists.This article is an attempt to document the steps that I went through, the plug-ins that I installed and how hacked the templates have now become. It will serve as a reminder for me in the months to come. It may also save someone some time not making the same mistakes as me.Please note, this article is work in progress and not finished yet. If you are interested to know when it has been finished leave a comment and I’ll let you know.
Installation
This is one area that I will not touch on. The installation of Movable Type has been well documented all over the web and there would be little point in me repeating what someone has already written.
Plug-ins
Movable Type plugins add powerful new capabilities to the core platform. There are a number of things that you can’t do out-of-the-box with Movable Type. However, with plugins it becomes one of the most customizable blogging applications in the world. See the plug-ins I’ve used in creating this blog.
