Basic reordering of custom fields is possible on the edit profile page in the MT app. Using the “Reorder Fields” in the “related content” sidebar.

If you want to intersperse custom fields between default fields it’s a little more trickey; by default all built-in fields are output and then all custom fields are output in the order specified on the edit profile page.

The <mt:AuthorCustomFields> tag should be used for this but as of MT4.2 I couldn’t get it to work on the edit profile or registration form, so for now you can use the same loop that currently outputs the custom fields, but limit the output with an <mt:if> tag. Here’s an example of how you can do it…

Description

Use three loops each containing an conditional tag (if or unless) to limit the output of the loop by custom field basename. The first and second loops limit by checking to see if the basename is equal to a value. The third loop outputs all fields except the the two I’ve specified (if fields are duplicated on the form the html will be invalid and only the second input’s value will be saved)

Example

Thi example uses the custom fields “Level” and “Bio”. You may place each loop anywhere in the Edit Profile template’s form.

<mt:Loop name="field_loop">
   <mt:If name="__first__">
   <input type="hidden" name="_type" value="author" id="obj_type" />
   <input type="hidden" name="customfield_beacon" value="1" id="customfield_beacon" />
   </mt:If>
   <mt:if name="basename" eq="level">
   <!-- start-customfield_<$mt:Var name="basename"$> -->
   <mtapp:setting
   id="$field_id"
   label="$name"
   hint="$description"
   shown="$show_field"
   show_hint="$show_hint"
   required="$required">
   <$mt:Var name="field_html"$>
   </mt:App:Setting>
   <!-- end-customfield_<$mt:Var name="basename"$> -->
   </mt:if>
</mt:Loop>

<!-- Default field here -->

<mt:Loop name="field_loop">
   <mt:If name="__first__">
   <input type="hidden" name="_type" value="author" id="obj_type" />
   <input type="hidden" name="customfield_beacon" value="1" id="customfield_beacon" />
   </mt:If>
   <mt:if name="basename" eq="bio">
   <!-- start-customfield_<$mt:Var name="basename"$> -->
   <mtapp:setting
   id="$field_id"
   label="$name"
   hint="$description"
   shown="$show_field"
   show_hint="$show_hint"
   required="$required">
   <$mt:Var name="field_html"$>
   </mt:App:Setting>
   <!-- end-customfield_<$mt:Var name="basename"$> -->
   </mt:if>
</mt:Loop>

<!-- Default field here -->

<mt:Loop name="field_loop">
   <mt:If name="__first__">
   <input type="hidden" name="_type" value="author" id="obj_type" />
   <input type="hidden" name="customfield_beacon" value="1" id="customfield_beacon" />
   </mt:If>
   <mt:unless name="basename" like="(bio|level)">
   <!-- start-customfield_<$mt:Var name="basename"$> -->
   <mtapp:setting
   id="$field_id"
   label="$name"
   hint="$description"
   shown="$show_field"
   show_hint="$show_hint"
   required="$required">
   <$mt:Var name="field_html"$>
   </mt:App:Setting>
   <!-- end-customfield_<$mt:Var name="basename"$> -->
   </mt:unless>
</mt:Loop>

Aaron Vanderzwan offers a similar solution and Elise summarized the solution on LearningMT4.com

Strangecode has got FastCGI enabled for all hosting accounts. So after installing Movable Type all I had to do to was the following two steps:

1. Create symlinks to the primary MT scripts with names ending in .fcgi.

   $ cd /PATH/TO/MT
   $ for F in mt{,-comments,-search}.cgi; do ln -s $F $(basename $F .cgi).fcgi; done
   

2. Add these lines to mt-config.cgi.

   AdminScript mt.fcgi
   CommentScript mt-comments.fcgi
   SearchScript mt-search.fcgi
   

Mie asked if I could add an archive widget to her blog’s sidebar like the one Anil sports on dashes.com. After looking at the source HTML I realized that coding it in MTML was gonna be kinda complex. In MTML typically for each year in your archives you’d list all the months, but—because of the way that html tables are built—I’d need to list all the months for each year. For example, I need to list all the Jan archives, then all the Feb archives, etc. etc.)

So I asked Anil for his code. Doh! He admitted he was manually updating it. =P

I mentioned this to Brad, and he got so excited that he wrote a rough draft. I added the code to the sidebar on Kokochi.com, but the code wasn’t working. =/ After some testing, I realized that there were a few limitations (year’s w/o posts, and the inability to output the month as a number w/o a “0” prefix on single digit months), but then after consulting with Brad, solutions were found!

Follow the below code and you too can have this advanced archive table widget as seen on kokochi.com and dashes.com/anil.

Update: The blog must be publishing a yearly archive file. This file can have zero content, but needs be published in order for the Yearly ArchiveList block tag to output content. 2008 Oct 7

The MTML Code

<table id="archives-table">
<mt:ArchiveList type="Yearly" sort_order="ascend">
    <mt:ArchiveListHeader><tr><$mt:ArchiveDate format="%Y" setvar="start_year"$></mt:ArchiveListHeader>
    <th><$mt:ArchiveDate format="'%y"$></th>
    <$mt:ArchiveDate format="%Y" setvar="year"$>
    <$mt:setvar name="is_posts_year_{$year}" value="1"$>
    <mt:ArchiveList type="Monthly">
        <$mt:ArchiveDate format="%m_%Y" setvar="month_year"$>
        <mt:SetVarBlock name="links_{$month_year}"><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><mt:ArchiveDate format="%b"$></a></mt:SetVarBlock>
    </mt:ArchiveList>
    <mt:ArchiveListFooter></tr><$mt:ArchiveDate format="%Y" setvar="end_year"$></mt:ArchiveListFooter>
</mt:ArchiveList>
<mt:for var="month" from="1" to="12">
    <tr>
    <mt:for var="year" from="$start_year" to="$end_year">
        <mt:if name="is_posts_year_{$year}">
            <mt:setvarblock name="month_year"><mt:var name="month" sprintf="%02d">_<mt:var name="year"></mt:setvarblock>
        <td><$mt:var name="links_{$month_year}" default="&nbsp;"$></td>
        </mt:if>
    </mt:for>
    </tr>
</mt:for>
</table>

The Code Explained

Here’s a play-by-play on the MTML code used to produce this list…

Open the table.

<table id="archives-table">

List yearly archives in an ascending order (2001, 2002, 2003, etc).

<mt:ArchiveList type="Yearly" sort_order="ascend">

Open the TR; set the $start_year variable.

    <mt:ArchiveListHeader><tr><$mt:ArchiveDate format="%Y" setvar="start_year"$></mt:ArchiveListHeader>

Output the two-digit year in a TD.

    <th><$mt:ArchiveDate format="'%y"$></th>

Set $year variable with the current year in the archive list.

    <$mt:ArchiveDate format="%Y" setvar="year"$>

Set $is_posts_year_$year using year variable set above. This is a boolean variable that determines if there are posts within the year in context.

    <$mt:setvar name="is_posts_year_{$year}" value="1"$>

List monthly archives for the current year.

    <mt:ArchiveList type="Monthly">

Set the $month_year variable after removing the “0” from the front of the month if it exists (eg. 1_2005, 2_2005 … 12_2005).

        <$mt:ArchiveDate format="%m_%Y" regex_replace="/^0/","" setvar="month_year"$>

Set the links_$month_year variable. This variable name is dynamically set using the $month_year var set above. The value will be a month linked to the correct archive (eg. <a href="http://kokochi.com/archives/2004/05/">May</a>).

        <mt:SetVarBlock name="links_{$month_year}"><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><mt:ArchiveDate format="%b"$></a></mt:SetVarBlock>

Close monthly archive list.

    </mt:ArchiveList>

Close the TR. Set the $end_year variable.

    <mt:ArchiveListFooter></tr><$mt:ArchiveDate format="%Y" setvar="end_year"$></mt:ArchiveListFooter>

Close the yearly archive list.

</mt:ArchiveList>

For months 1 thorugh 12 do the following.

<mt:for var="month" from="1" to="12">

Open TR.

    <tr>

Loop through the years between $start_year and $end_year.

    <mt:for var="year" from="$start_year" to="$end_year">

If there is posts in the current year, then continue.

        <mt:if name="is_posts_year_{$year}">

Set the $month_year variable using the $month and $year variables from the above for loops.

            <mt:setvarblock name="month_year"><mt:var name="month">_<mt:var name="year"></mt:setvarblock>

Use the $month_year variable to output the links_$month_year set in the archive lists above.

        <td><$mt:var name="links_{$month_year}" default="&nbsp;"$></td>

Close all the MTML loops, MTML conditionals, and HTML tags.

        </mt:if>
    </mt:for>
    </tr>
</mt:for>
</table>

Scaleable?

As long as your sidebar is wide enough, you’ll have room for this widget as it get’s wider. But by hacking the above code it shouldn’t be to hard to break the table into two vertically stacked tables or add some javascript to produce a solution involving hiding/showing of content.

If you hack the above, I’d love to hear about it.

Enjoy.

And thx again to Brad Choate, Mie Yaginuma, and Anil Dash for the instigation and assistance to produce this advanced example of MTML.

What the f*ck is cgi-bin mt mt cgi?

Apparently that doesn’t make sense Mr. Client.

So I updated his .htaccess file with this:

Redirect /admin http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?blog_id=1

Now he points his browser to http://www.domain.com/admin and he is redirected to his blog in his MT install.

Then he decided he didn’t want to type, just click… but didn’t want a link to “admin” visible on his site… so I made an invisible one.

So just after the date that appears on every entry in his blog, we linked a non-breaking space to his install:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?blog_id=1">&nbsp;</a>