Hi,
I am new to movable type and I am trying to get it to fit in my web site with my current layout. Or at least the entries pages. I thought a good place to start would be to learn how to modify the header banner of the entry page.
So I went into template editor and added some text in the banner header. This worked for the page that shows all my entries, but on the entries pages themselves the banner doesn't change.
I thought perhaps this is because the pages were allready created, even though I thought perl creates the pages on the fly. So anyways I created another page no luck.
It doesn't seem to be grabbing the header banner from anywhere else then the main entry list page so whats happening here?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
matt
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
What I meant to say was.
"So I went into template editor and added some text in the banner header. This worked for the page that shows all my entries, but not on the entries pages themselves."
Basically the entry page doesn't display the text in the banner but the other pages that use banner do and I can't figure out why.
What template set are you using, and on which template, exactly, and where in it, did you make those changes? Have you tried to rebuild the individual entries archives?
Francois thanks for your reply.
Let me answer some of these questions and hopefully I can get this resolved.
First off this is the default template set that comes initially after downloading movable type. I haven't changed any template settings at all. The latest version of movable type downloaded 2 days ago. If there is a name of the template style I am using I don't know where to find something like. All I know is this is what came loaded when I did a fresh install.
As for the changes this is what is happening. I ran a test to see if I could further illustrate the problem and I can. Here it is in a few simple steps.
With those settings specified above if you go to Design tab drop down templates.
Then in templates go to Template modules. Click on Banner Header. Add some text after
what the hellllll
which is what I did.
Then go to your blog you will notice on the index.html page the what the hell will be reflected in the banner as it should be.
If you go to the entry page the banner will be the same.
Which is confusing because Perl seems to call the two banners the exact same way.
I could not figure out what was causing this so this is what I did.
I first deleted all code on the entry page to see if I had the write template selected. Sure enough refresh on an entry the page is now blank as it should be.
So I decided to grab the code from the index template and paste it into the entry template. To see if I could make the two pages identical.
i saved and published this change. Refreshed the entry page and wah lah. The two pages looked exactly alike accept the header was missing the text I added to the banner template.
That means that the banner must be getting its instructions from somewhere else or the banner is being modified by another set of code I am missing. I know there is alot of javascript and other pieces of code going on in this software but I am new to it so I can't even seem to succesfully make a simple change as you would think it should be.
Thanks for your help.
Matt
Francois thanks for your reply.
Let me answer some of these questions and hopefully I can get this resolved.
First off this is the default template set that comes initially after downloading movable type. I haven't changed any template settings at all. The latest version of movable type downloaded 2 days ago. If there is a name of the template style I am using I don't know where to find something like. All I know is this is what came loaded when I did a fresh install.
As for the changes this is what is happening. I ran a test to see if I could further illustrate the problem and I can. Here it is in a few simple steps.
With those settings specified above if you go to Design tab drop down templates.
Then in templates go to Template modules. Click on Banner Header. Add some text after
what the hellllll
which is what I did.
Then go to your blog you will notice on the index.html page the what the hell will be reflected in the banner as it should be.
If you go to the entry page the banner will be the same.
Which is confusing because Perl seems to call the two banners the exact same way.
I could not figure out what was causing this so this is what I did.
I first deleted all code on the entry page to see if I had the write template selected. Sure enough refresh on an entry the page is now blank as it should be.
So I decided to grab the code from the index template and paste it into the entry template. To see if I could make the two pages identical.
i saved and published this change. Refreshed the entry page and wah lah. The two pages looked exactly alike accept the header was missing the text I added to the banner template.
That means that the banner must be getting its instructions from somewhere else or the banner is being modified by another set of code I am missing. I know there is alot of javascript and other pieces of code going on in this software but I am new to it so I can't even seem to succesfully make a simple change as you would think it should be.
Thanks for your help. If you want a link directly to the example to further illucidate the problem let me know through email.
Best Regards,
Matt
Let me know if you would like to see the example directly.
Thanks.
MT uses "static" publishing by default, i.e. it generates HTML pages at publish time, not on the fly as pages are requested.
If you change a template module (e.g. banner header), you will need to do a full republish to see that reflected on all your pages (round arrows icon in toolbar).
Sounds like what's happened is you've changed the banner header and republished the index but not the archives.
Hi Richard,
I tried that and still no luck. In the example above I know I can make changed on the fly to the templates without publishing the whole site because I deleted the entry templates code and then refreshed browser and entry page was nothing but a white screen.
Then I copied the index template to the entry template. I refreshed the browser and they looked identical. The only difference was that the index page had the text I wrote in the banner visible, and the entry page did not.
If this were working like any regular html file if you copy one and past it into another in the same directory there should be no way that they could differ at all.
That's my background so that is why I am slightly confused why this would produce any alternative results.
Haha you know what I just looked at the header code again and I figured it out.
There is an if statement. The if statement tells it to display a different header if it is the index page than all other pages.
Thanks for all your time.