Simpler Templating for Comments and TrackBacks

Part of the reason so many attractive and uniquely-designed sites are published with Movable Type is because designers find the template tag system straightforward and easy to understand for anybody who knows (X)HTML and CSS. But we wanted to encourage even more customization and experimentation with templates in Movable Type 3.2 while still allowing for all the power of the new features being made available.

As a result, Movable Type 3.2 introduces a number of simple, logical template tags for configuring comment and TrackBack submission and presentation. These tags eliminate the need for much of the complicated JavaScript and logical loops used to enable authenticated comments and other advanced features in older 3.x versions of Movable Type, while still giving total flexibility in configuration and design.

For example, the javascript used to switch between authenticated and unauthenticated comment submission has been moved to its own template, where it never needs to be edited in order to be used in any design. In addition, the comment and TrackBack listings have been made much more modular, to reduce the need for repetition of parts of the template. Plus, comments and TrackBacks now have header and footer tags, making it easy to wrap each piece of feedback in custom markup.

Simpler Template Tags

We worked hard with Movable Type 3.2 to make sure that confusing and obscure conditional tags like MTIfCommentsAllowed, MTEntryIfCommentsOpen and MTEntryIfAllowComments have been replaced with simpler tags that just do the right thing and don't require you to make changes if you modify your weblog's feedback settings.

All of the old template tags will of course continue to work, so your templates won't break, but new templates can be as little as half the size of previous Movable Type 3.x templates, while offering even greater functionality. And as always, you don't need to know any complicated programming functions to choose which information from your posts you'd like to publish in a template.

[This is part ten in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]