Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

One of the best features TypePad has, in my opinion, is the Template Builder, which allows you to easily select from among a large number of pre-defined designs or to create a custom design using a GUI rather than HTML and CSS.

Movable Type has now taken a big step towards that kind of ease-of-use with the StyleCatcher plugin. Now you can select from among a large number of pre-defined designs and apply it to your blog with just a couple of clicks.

First, you will need to be using the new default templates for 3.2. Getting going with these is easy too, thanks to a built-in plugin called RefreshTemplates. Go into your Templates area, select the templates you want to update, and choose the Refresh Templates action from the drop-down menu. Your templates will be updated, with the old ones saved as backup templates. You can copy over any customizations that you had made (for instance, code from plugins) from the backup to the active templates.

After this, go into StyleCatcher, load a library (the Six Apart library is the default choice), select the design you like, and click the button to apply it.

Republish your blog and you're done. Six Apart has really taken MT to a new level with RefreshTemplates and StyleCatcher.

Update: This blog has now been updated. Interesting new look, eh? I couldn't find anything that looked at all like what I was using before. Oh well.