Smart New Templates

Movable Type's often been praised for both the elegance of its user interface and the way the system's published pages look. But the current generation of default designs have gotten a little long in the tooth, and we wanted to make sure that designers who take the time to make templates and styles get the most value out of their effort. So, we've made some significant improvements to Movable Type 3.2's templates. Here's some highlights:

• An attractive new default stylesheet that works easily with 1, 2, and 3-column layouts
• Dozens of great new themes available for download for your blog, and the ability to customize these or create your own using professional tools like Adobe GoLive CS2
• Consistent XHTML markup and CSS structure between Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal, making it easy to share styles or design for a community of over 10 million blogs

As we mentioned, we've added a new default template and default stylesheet. The new stylesheet, called Vicksburg, offers a cleaner, more modern look for your blogs right out of the box. And extensive customization is easy as always, just by tweaking the CSS file, since the same stylesheet works on the common one-, two- and three-column layouts. We'll also be backing up the default Vicksburg look with dozens of new, professionally-designed styles for your sites.

If you dig a little deeper into the new templates, though, you'll find some more interesting opportunities below the surface. The basic XHTML structure of Movable Type's new templates is the same markup used by our TypePad and LiveJournal services, meaning that there's a much broader base of designers and developers who'll be coding compatible templates and styles. If you're looking to learn from other people's designs, there's a large community of bloggers who'll be working with the same markup. And if you design templates either for free, as linkware, or for a fee, you've now got an audience of 10 million bloggers all able to use a single stylesheet, regardless of their tool of choice.

But what about more practical concerns, if you just want to tweak your styles to look more like your existing site? You can make use of the support for Movable Type template tags in Adobe GoLive CS2, as well as community-contributed template support in other tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver. You don't need to know any template tags to make your site look exactly as you want, and as always, you don't have to know any programming or scripting language other than XHTML and CSS to customize your design.

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