[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

I'm sort of fooling around with a side project, with the intent of using Movable Type as a general content management system, and I came up with something that I thought was kind of clever. I wanted a list of offsite links on the front page, and I thought it might be nice to allow other blog authors to add links, but I didn't want to give full template modification access. Thought about it a while; came up with a solution.

I created a category named "Offsite Links" and added a bunch of entries in that category. Each entry had the name of the destination site as the title, and the URL for the site as the entry body.

Then I added the following MT template code to the front page template:

<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend" category="Offsite Links">
<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br/>
</MTEntries>

Boom. Quick and easy link list effect. Note that this would also be a way to maintain a blogroll if you didn't want to use blogrolling.com.

Comments

I assume you escape things when you do that, right?

[dtm]

So that, for example, someone couldn't make the content of the entry contain extra HTML that causes great mischief, correct?

Re: I assume you escape things when you do that, right?

[bryant]

Nope. MT trusts people who can add posts not to include bogus HTML. This technique leaves you no more and no less open to abuse than simply adding another weblog contributor.

In the next major MT release, you'll be able to more easily specify the filter used on any given post (and perhaps class of posts). It'll be easy to add new filters, as well.