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Dog/Blog House Updates Part Trois

Another squirrely thing about MovableType right out of the box is that the category archive templates it create is more or less a never-ending appending of your posts to a long scrolling archive. It hardly seems useful once you have blogged say 10, 20 entries in a category, much less if you have written long pieces and/or embedded images.

Previously I wrote about my funky strategy for creating two sets of category archives, the recent 20 linked to "all the rest", but I have modified the output templates to produce more or less a title/abstract view (example) rather than a mimic of the original post, with a link to the full post (the individual archive, old example)...

This is pretty easy, it is a modification of your Category Archive template, and replacing the part between the <MTEntries>...</MTEntries> tags with something more like:


<MTEntries><$MTEntryTrackbackData$><p><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><strong><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></strong> (<$MTEntryDate format="%x"$>)<br /><$MTEntryBody words="50"$>... «<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>">more</a>»</p></MTEntries>


Being in the Category Archive template context, this pulls data from only one category at a time, so it loops through all the entries for a category named, say, "Foo". It first embeds the TrackBack data for that entry (hidden code, but useful).

Next it spits out the entry title, puts it in bold (<strong>.. </strong>tags), and hyperlinks the title to the individual; entry. This is followed by a readable date format for when the entry was posted. Then, it echos just the first 50 words from the entry. "..." with a redundant "more" link that again leads to the full entry.

There are more things one could do- I do not have the comment/trackback count added here ("left as an exercise for..." you know that song), but the result is a more compact listing of the entries for each category.