I am attempting to help someone out, but if I don’t put this stuff someplace permanent, I won’t remember what I did. It has to do with setting up archives and sidebars in movabletype. I am using 3.3?? so your results may differ (as may some of the screenshots). Click on the extended entry if you are actually interested in reading any of this, or if you are just plain bored.
To set up the different archives, go into the movabletype control panel, and for the blog you are working on, find ‘settings’ and click on the publishing tab. It should look like this:
Then just scroll down the screen till you see this stuff:
Just select the archive types that you want, and any other specifics, click ‘save’ and rebuild the entire site. If you have a bunch of stuff it will take awhile. That’s pretty much it for the archives. Rather than just having each separate archive (which I still have) I like to have date and category based archives as well. When I go searching for stuff it makes it easier to find, as well as any advertisers that might be looking to see if I post enough in say “news”. They can find all the news in one place. All mixed in with my other nonsense.
Setting Up Sidebars.
My templates are three columned and full of all kinds of crap, so I went to Six Apart’s site to dig up the default templates. I have stripped everything out except what is relevant to the sidebars. The FULL templates are located at http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/default_templates. The basic template for the main index is as follows (my comments are in bold italic, take them out:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" id="sixapart-standard"> <head> This is all the crap that goes in the head. </head> <body class="layout-two-column-right"> This is what you are looking for to have one sidebar. <div id="container"> <div id="container-inner" class="pkg"> <div id="banner"> <div id="banner-inner" class="pkg"> <h1 id="banner-header"><a href="<$MTBlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$></a></h1> <h2 id="banner-description"><$MTBlogDescription$></h2> </div> </div> <div id="pagebody"> <div id="pagebody-inner" class="pkg"> <div id="alpha"> Alpha is the main body of your page, where the entries and stuff go. <div id="alpha-inner" class="pkg"> <MTEntries> This is where all the stuff for the entries goes.
</MTEntries>
</div>
</div>
<div id="beta"> Beta is the sidebar portion of the page.
<div id="beta-inner" class="pkg">
<div class="module-search module">
<h2 class="module-header">Search</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<form method="get" action="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>">
<input type="hidden" name="IncludeBlogs" value="<$MTBlogID$>" />
<label for="search" accesskey="4">Search this blog:</label><br />
<input id="search" name="search" size="20" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>
</div>
</div>
<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled archive_type="Category"><div class="module-categories module">
<h2 class="module-header">Categories</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<MTTopLevelCategories>
<MTSubCatIsFirst><ul class="module-list"></MTSubCatIsFirst>
<MTIfNonZero tag="MTCategoryCount">
<li class="module-list-item"><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>"><MTCategoryLabel></a>
<MTElse>
<li class="module-list-item"><MTCategoryLabel>
</MTElse>
</MTIfNonZero>
<MTSubCatsRecurse>
</li>
<MTSubCatIsLast></ul></MTSubCatIsLast>
</MTTopLevelCategories>
</div>
</div>
</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>
<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled archive_type="Monthly">
<div class="module-archives module">
<h2 class="module-header"><a href="<$MTBlogURL$>archives.html">Archives</a></h2>
<div class="module-content">
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<MTArchiveListHeader><ul class="module-list"></MTArchiveListHeader>
<li class="module-list-item"><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></a></li>
<MTArchiveListFooter></ul></MTArchiveListFooter>
</MTArchiveList>
</div>
</div>
</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>
<div class="module-archives module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recent Posts</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTEntries lastn="10">
<li class="module-list-item"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div class="module-syndicate module">
<div class="module-content">
<a href="<$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml">Subscribe to this blog's feed</a><br />
[<a href="http://www.sixapart.com/about/feeds">What is this?</a>]
</div>
</div>
<MTBlogIfCCLicense>
<div class="module-creative-commons module">
<div class="module-content">
<a href="<$MTBlogCCLicenseURL$>"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="<$MTBlogCCLicenseImage$>" /></a><br />
This weblog is licensed under a <a href="<$MTBlogCCLicenseURL$>">Creative Commons License</a>.
</div>
</div>
</MTBlogIfCCLicense>
<div class="module-powered module">
<div class="module-content">
_POWERED_BY
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
This stuff isn’t word-wrapping in my editor, hopefully it won’t look like crap when I publish it. These are the templates for 3.2+. For the older templates, they are also located at the link above.