More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs: Feed2JS Templates

Graphic by Alan Levine

Movable Type Blog Templates

Notes: Case Study 1: MovableType Templates Used for Feed2JS

Since the publishing task is rather limmited in scope, we are able to use just 3 templates to provide the content used in the Feed2JS site

The About template is used to publish the three most recent updates to the front of the site. Rather than publishing an entire web document with the blog, we merely publish the content chunk needed as an output file name about.inc. The main features of the template are to insert the JavaScript needed to generate the pop upwindows foir comments, and to write the MT template tag to pull the 3 most recent entries:
```
<MTEntries lastn="3">
 <$MTEntryTrackbackData$>

 <li><strong><$MTEntryDate format="%B %e, %Y"$></strong> : 
 <$MTEntryTitle$><br />
 <a name="<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>"></a>
 
 <$MTEntryBody$>
```
followed by the post data, comment links etc. You can get a copy of this template.
The template to create the content for the history page, essentially an entire archive, is exactly the same, except we use a very high value for the <MTEntries lastn="X"> like 100.
The template for the RSS feed is no different from the standard RSS 2,0 templates provided by the blog. The only difference is publishing it as a specifically named file and location to match its URL
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/content/feed2js.xml