Hour 10. Using Movable Type Templates

One of the most powerful features of Movable Type is its template system. Movable Type templates control both the design and behavior of your weblog. You can use default templates to manage a wide range of weblog needs such as entries and archives (you worked a bit with templates in Hour 6, “Managing Archives”), and you can modify those templates to look and act the way you want them to.

In this hour, you'll learn

• Which templates are available in Movable Type

• How to select and apply design styles from Movable Type

• How to find and apply design styles from third-party sources

The only real challenge in working with Movable Type templates is that without some awareness of markup and style languages, it's easy to get lost. We'll spend this hour, plus Hour 11, “Customizing Movable Type Templates, and Hour 12, “Adding Custom Designs to Movable Type,” working on various aspects of using templates in Movable Type, so as to make the process easier for you. This practice, combined with the excellent template tag reference available in Appendix B of this book, should give you the guidance you need to use, modify, and customize Movable Type.

The Movable Type manual does contain general information pertaining to the templates used in Movable Type, but the content in this chapter will expand on that information with visual and step-by-step examples. In this hour, we focus on examining and working with the template code that Movable Type provides; in Hours 11 and 12, you'll learn to modify and customize the designs. The goal is to get you familiar with which templates exist, what they consist of, and how you can choose from a selection of default styles.