Handy Tools For An Enforced Redesign

Some tips, applications and utilities for folk needing to knock together a website using Movable Type 3.2 as quickly as possible (assuming you’re doing it all on a remote server and use a Mac):

1. Get some simplified Movable Type templates. I used Chris Vannoy’s Simpler Movable Type templates , which are stripped of all the gubbins included in the default templates to ensure compatability with LiveJournal and TypePad.

2. Link your templates to files on your server. This speeds things up no end, since you have all the features of your text editor to play with, and can save and rebuild templates without having to faff about navigating to them inside Movable Type. This also makes it easy to quickly back up your templates via FTP before making major changes.

3. Use TextWrangler. Since it has FTP built in, editing those linked template files is a doddle, and being able to access them all in the Documents Drawer makes it easy to move chunks of template code between templates. It’s free, too. (Also, John Gruber’s release of his CSS Syntax Checker for BBEdit and TextWrangler was a timely one for me. It does what it says on the tin.)

4. Break everything into tiny little pieces. You’re likely to be tinkering a lot, so it’s a good idea to break down your templates into reusable chunks, either by making use of Movable Type’s Template Modules or by keeping snippets in custom Index or Archive templates and including them with PHP. (I did the latter while setting up the site, as it means less rebuilding, but will probably go modular when I’ve finished the enforced redesign.)

5. Install SafariStand. Another timely release, and another freebie. The latest version of SafariStand adds a sidebar to Safari with thumbnails of every tab you have open, which you can reorder, in the manner of OmniWeb. Very handy for keeping track of all the pages of your site you have open, ready to be refreshed each time you make a change, and keeping them separate from the various parts of the Movable Type interface you need open.

Obvious stuff, maybe, but since I started with the default templates, randomly switching between editing in SubEthaEdit and within Movable Type, using Transmit for FTP and hitting the W3C CSS validator every five minutes (when I could find it in the jumble of open tabs and windows in Safari), I thought some future searcher might find the above handy.

Posted at 5pm on 10/09/05 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
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Tags: applications, design, movabletype