First steps with MT4 (2) - arranging the content

Having decided upon the content and structure, at least as a starting point, we need to start to control the way this content appears on the website. The standard format of all entries appearing on the home page in reverse chronological order and all the category archives by date isn't what we want in this case.

Only the entries tagged as 'Articles' will appear in the main blog part of the home page. Entries tagged as 'Morgue', 'Resources' and 'How to' will appear in separate flows. For now, these entries will not appear on the home page other than as lists of titles under the appropriate category headings - the full entry will not appear on the home page.

I'm going to resist the temptation and leave the styling alone for now - just concentrate on the content! I'm working with the default templates as there is some good stuff in there that I don't want to lose. I don't understand how half of it works but it's too good to chuck away so I'm keeping it in the hope that I can eventually understand it and use it.

Now onto the initial changes to the default templates...

mtdefaultindex.jpg
The home page is controlled by the index template. Without modification, the site appears as shown in the screenshot.

A few things we need to change straight away:

  1. All the entries appear in the main section when we only want articles here.
  2. Get rid of the 'Powered by' in the sidebar
  3. Remove the list of photos
  4. Remove the list of categories and add a navigation bar to access these and the static pages

Modifying the templates


Before jumping in and changing anything, I want to make sure that I keep the originals untouched so that when the inevitable happens I can go back to the starting point. I've copied the main index and called it tn_main index. This page refers to other template modules that I want to customise (sidebar 3 column layout, header and footer) so I've done the same copy and rename with those. I then changed all the references to these modules to use the new name with the tn prefix so the site is then running with my new files and the originals are safely untouched.

On to the initial changes above:

  1. Just add category="Articles" to the <MTEntries> tag in the main index template
  2. Delete the division with the class: class="widget-powered widget">
  3. Delete <MTassetsHeader> from the sidebar to remove the photo list. Remove the surrounding conditional code as I don't think this is needed if we're not displaying the assets.
  4. Delete the code block beginning : <MTIf name= "module_category_archives">. I'll come back to the new nav bar later.
Now I want to add a list of How-to's and Resources to the sidebar.



By Tim Felmingham on August 21, 2007 12:44 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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