While looking for help on the Movable Type website on how to properly install my side navigation in the form of customisable widgets, I realised that SixApart is also in the midst of updating their documentation. This link on widget sets, at the time of writing, is broken. It is linked from this page for designers. I’ll wait a bit longer and see if they tidy things up.
Major improvements have been made to Movable Type. If it was a house renovation, it definitely went beyond changing the interior decor. They’ve torn down major parts of the house, re-piled the foundation and installed new utility fittings.
The problem is that because it is a very new building, not many contractors have figured out how to develop new ‘furniture’ (plugins) to spruce it up, and some existing contractors have yet to adjust their existing furniture for the new house. In contrast, the big mansion next door, called Wordpress, seems to be having a party with its contractors all day long. The owners of the grand old Movable Type house could not rest on their laurels and recall the glory days. They had to keep up with the Joneses. Where they once turned away strangers who wanted to collaborate with them, they too started an open-door policy. But could it be too late?
Also, because changes to Movable Type 4 were made up to the last moment, the architects’ plans haven’t been comprehensively documented yet. In some templates, the styles specified were called ‘beta’.
OK enough blogging… time to sleep. In the meantime, if you want to see my new navigation menu, please scroll all the way down. Sorry about that. At least it was easy figuring out how to convert stuff like MyBlogLog, Twitter and Google Reader into separate widgets, which can then be shifted about using a mouse. That is one really neat feature. Now if I can only just figure out where in the mass of MT tags the widget code should go…
[Update: I decided to just switch back to my old templates until I figure out how to make the new template work properly.]