Better Archive Management and Simple Custom File Paths

Movable Type's been able to publish multiple templates for all of your content for years now, but many people haven't taken advantage of this power. Part of the reason for this feature's relative obscurity was that the interface for the feature was confusing and complex. And though you've always been able to publish files to any address you want, customizing those paths wasn't always intuitive.

But now, in Movable Type 3.2, you can:

• More easily publish as many different versions of your content as you want, all at the same time
• Manage all your archives from one simple form that displays their status
• Choose the exact format of the URL for each bit of content, without having to know any complex scripting or programming language.

How does this work? In a nutshell, archive mapping lets you publish a particular template as an archive type (Monthly, Individual, Category, etc.) in order to produce a set of archive files. And then, for each file you publish, you can choose the specific format of the URL the file sppears at, using a simple set of shortcut codes.

Using archive mapping, you could, for example, provide a PDF version or an XML feed of each entry. You could output posts in a certain category as a custom template such as a Microsoft Word XML document. You could even publish two completely separate sites with the same entries in the same blog.

In Movable Type 3.2, we worked hard to to humanize this feature a bit to make it more accesible to all users. First, we combined what used to be three slightly different, but very similar, forms into a single place where you can configure archive mappings.

In addition, we've made the layout much easier to understand. Smart defaults for URLs let you choose any common address scheme just by picking it off a list. And if you want to create your own unique URL system for your site, you can just use short codes like %y/%m/%d to represent year/month/date or %c to automatically insert the category for an entry.

And as always, you can use Movable Type's built-in template tag syntax to lay out your file paths as well. So if you're familiar with building templates in Movable Type, the same tags and attributes will work for your archives.

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