Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

In the "posted by" tagline below each post I include a nickname for myself, which differs based on category. When I post to A Quranic Journal, the nickname is "a student of the Quran"; when I post to The Clipboard, the nickname is "a libertarian niqabi"; when I post to veiled4allah, the nickname is "the niqabi paralegal". As far as displaying a different nickname for each category, that uses the Supplemental Category Tags plugin, which I'll discuss in more depth later, since I make extensive use of it on the archive pages.

I could just hardcode the nickname for each category on each of the pages, but I wanted more flexibility than that. I wanted it to be easy to update the nickname on every page if I changed it. I also wanted to be able to use different nicknames for other blogs. For instance, I have a nickname for this Movable Type Tips blog too: "a fully-veiled geek".

To do all of this, I use the ExtendedAttributes plugin. In order to use this plugin you will need to create some type of data file to store the extended attributes. In order to use the same data file across multiple blogs, I have an external CSV file. In order to make it easy to use and edit the data, I then pull the contents of the CSV file into a template module in each blog and I call the module in the plugin tags.

This plugin is a bit more complicated than most, because of the external data file. It also offers you a great deal of functionality. I'm barely scratching the surface with my nickname trick.