Extended entries
A while back I helped Invisible Adjunct suss out Movable Type’s extended-entry capability. I’ll do the same for everyone else now.
If you’re a short-form or link-and-comment blogger, you can safely skip this post, as you don’t need extended entries. (You might be able to remove some extraneous crud from your templates and your entry screen, though, so by all means stay tuned.)
Movable Type allows you to split a single weblog entry into three parts. One part, called the “excerpt,” is intended to be a quick summary of the entry. One part is the main body, and the last part is the extended body. The typical setup is to have only the main body and a link to the extended body show up on your index page, while your archive pages display first the main body and then the extended body.
Some prominent webloggers argue that you should almost always write an excerpt, crafting it very carefully so that your readers know whether they’ll be interested in the whole entry. Part of the reason for this is that your RSS feed (what people read in a news aggregator) probably sends out only the excerpt, not the entire post. If you don’t write an excerpt, Movable Type sends out the first 20 words of your post, which may or may not be a good indicator of its content.
Your call. I stick with the first 20 words, myself, acknowledging that many aggregator users curse me for it. I suspect that in CavLec’s case most people find post category rather than excerpt the best guide to whether they’ll be interested.
The Movable Type tag that represents an entry excerpt is <$MTEntryExcerpt$>. It has one attribute, convert_breaks, which adds p and br tags if set to "1" and does not add them if set to "0".
Every MT blog in existence, pretty much, uses the <MTEntryBody> placeholder. The convert_breaks attribute is available here also, but there’s a catch: if you set it, either way, it overrides whatever value you set in the “Text Formatting” box on the entry screen. I recommend staying away from that attribute on this placeholder.
<MTEntryBody> represents the main body of the entry, the part of the entry that should appear both on the front page and as the first part of the archived post.
Only those blogs that use extended entries need to use the <MTExtendedEntry> placeholder. If you never use extended entries, you may still have this chunk of code (or one similar) in your template:
<MTEntryIfExtended>
<span class="extended"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#more"> Continue reading “<$MTEntryTitle$>“</a></span><br />
</MTEntryIfExtended>
You don’t need this code. All it does is give a “Continue reading (your post title)” with a link to the extended entry. Since you never use extended entries, you don’t need this code. Get rid of it.
The rest of you, now that you understand the parts of an entry, can probably figure out what the above code does for yourselves. Hope so, anyway.
If you don’t use extended entries, you obviously don’t need the extended entry box on the page you type your posts into. Lucky you—you can get rid of it. Click the link at bottom that says “Customize the display of this page.” Choose the “Custom” option, and uncheck the box by “Extended Entry.” It’s quite safe to play around with the checkboxes, by the way; just click the link and check the checkbox to bring back any part of the page you got rid of and now want back.