It should be noted that the code in this tutorial has a lot of conditionals, so it may not scale well for your whole blog. Which is to say if you have thousands of pages or entries, this may slow down your rebuild process... maybe a little or maybe a lot. How much really depends, on lots of things that are beyond the scope of this post.

Next to useless?

There is a standard HTML head element, which contains meta data. The standard does not define what kinds of meta data may be present, but one very commonly used meta element is keywords. It is sometimes referred to as meta-keywords or the <meta> keywords attribute. Google says that http-equiv attribute keywords is next to useless. In the same article they note that it is still the second most commonly used attribute value of the meta element.

How we did it at Kinetix

As always, we recommend making a new template and including it where applicable. This makes it easier to upgrade your customizations in the future if template sets change. And when have they not changed?

There are two template tags that refer to keywords, because both pages and entries can have keywords. The tags are: <mt:EntryKeywords> and <mt:PageKeywords>. This code is included in the all output HTML (pages, entries and archives) so it has to check which context it will be render for, and select the appropriate MT template tags to render. Additionally, The KinetixHosting site uses the Professional Template Set so the code takes into account the special condition of the home page.

<mt:If name="entry_template">
  <mt:IfNonEmpty tag="EntryKeywords">
   <meta name="Keywords" content="<mt:EntryKeywords>" />
  </mt:IfNonEmpty>    
<mt:ElseIf name="page_template">
  <mt:IfNonEmpty tag="PageKeywords">
   <meta name="Keywords" content="<mt:PageKeywords>" />
  </mt:IfNonEmpty>
<mt:ElseIf name="main_index">
  <mt:Pages tag="@home" lastn="1">
    <mt:IfNonEmpty tag="PageKeywords">
      <meta name="Keywords" content="<mt:PageKeywords>" />
    </mt:IfNonEmpty>
  </mt:Pages>
</mt:If>

What, no keywords for the archive pages?

Well, its true. But those pages always represent a collection of entries. What would the correct keywords for the archives be? What do you think should be done in this case?

We believe that what you write (what search engines see on your site) is the most important part of a business web site. No matter how many people you can reach with your site, the major search engines reach more. So we think you should concentrate on what you write. The MT platform makes it easy to focus on the words, and the Movable Type UTS provides a simple visual framework to easily drop them in. KinetixHosting provides the servers and fast network platform your company needs to put your content on the web.

Over the coming months, we will be using this power to help our customers by creating articles which will allow them to better use our systems and the Movable Type publishing platform. We got started with an article describing the similarities and differences between pages and entries. Another example is our description of a great way to begin to customize the templates by building on a predefined style sheet.

One of the first ways you can begin to make the Movable Type predefined templates look more customized is to change the image on the front page. The selector for which you must change the CSS properties is #homepage-image .

You may save any of the images linked to this post, or make your own 905 × 170 pixel rectangular image. Then you must change to URL of the background image to refer to the image you have selected. This article describes how to write such customize CSS code for MT in an organized way that will allow you to update templates easily in the future.

From CSS2 Specification : Assigning property values, Cascading, and Inheritance

Imported style sheets also cascade and their weight depends on their import order. Rules specified in a given style sheet override rules imported from other style sheets. Imported style sheets can themselves import and override other style sheets, recursively, and the same precedence rules apply.

On our site, we create a new template, and name the output file kinetix.css.

Then in the Style Sheet template we add a line to include our own styles. Since we import our style sheet after the StyleCatcher style sheets, any property values we define will over ride the values from the StyleCatcher files.

@import "/mt-static/themes-base/blog.css";
@import "/[...]/universal-black/screen.css";
@import "/kinetix.css";

Another advantage to making changes this way is that if we refresh templates we will only have to add one line to have all our customizations replaced.

By dragging and dropping on the "Installed Widgets" column of the screen, (as shown above) users can control what is displayed in the sidebar of different parts of the site when the site is next published. The default template includes three widget sets, appropriately named: "2-column layout - Sidebar","3-column layout - Primary Sidebar", and "3-column layout - Secondary Sidebar". n.b. In release candidates for 4.2 I see there are some others as well.

Users can create their own widget sets, and insert them into templates using code like: