Movalog Blog

After the dutchpink was released, I had an idea to skin Movable Type such that a user could easily switch between stylesheets. So after a lot of work with javascript, here is the package:

SkinningMT.zip SkinningMT.tar.gz

1. Extract the contents of the distribution
2. Upload the tmpl files in ASCII to the appropriate places (MTDIR/tmpl/cms)
3. Upload mt-styleswitcher.php and the styles/ directory into your StaticWebPath (if none then your into your MT Directory, same location as mt.cgi)

The drop-down menu shows up on the main menu (screenshot) The only requirement is that your server runs PHP. The styles directory, its contents and mt-styleswitcher.php goes into your StaticWebPath. In mt-styleswitcher.php, change movalog.com to your domain name

<?php setcookie ('sitestyle', $set, time()+31536000, '/', 'movalog.com', '0'); header("Location: $HTTP_REFERER"); ?>

An explanation of everything, the styles directory contains the different stylesheet and their corresponding images. Style 1 is the default style and Style 2 is dutchpink style.

If you want to add a new style, you need to create a new directory (and number it appropriately) and upload the default images (those that come in the MT distributions). Next upload the skin's stylesheet and any special images -- make sure these special images overwrite the default ones!

Next add the that skin option. Find

<option value="<TMPL_VAR NAME=STATIC_URI>mt-styleswitcher.php?set=2">DutchPink</option>

and add right after it

<option value="<TMPL_VAR NAME=STATIC_URI>mt-styleswitcher.php?set=3">Name of Style</option>

There are some major changes I have introduced to make sure everything skins properly. The most major changes occur in list_blog.tmpl. These changes were introduced because the images were hardcoded into the template, take a look at the stylesheet to see some of these changes.

This may not work perfectly yet, but I will be making more updates as time goes on!