Going all the way with MovableType

Inspired by “Doing Your Whole Site with MT”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001656.php on Brad Choate’s site, I started experimenting today with putting the whole Nonviolence.org site into MoveableType. At first I thought it was just a trial experiment but I’m hooked. I especially love how much cleaner the entry for the “links”:www.nonviolence.org/links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also integrated Choate’s “MT-Textile”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related “SmartyPants”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M-dashes and curly quotes).

So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):

• One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
• The second I call “NV:Static” which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real title into the Keywords field (i.e., “About Nonviolence.org”) and have that give the date for the title field and the first headline of the page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
• The third blog is my “NV:Design Elements.” This contains the block of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I’m also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near future and all of these elements should make that much easier.

Here’s another site to check out, “about how someone integrated MovableType into their church website”:http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/archives/000864.shtml using some interesting techniques.