Writer's block, an owner's guide: Navigation in Movable Type

Updated with my current code 05/17/05

My inner nerd has been quite active lately while I’ve been encouraging him to fine tune Movable Type. He’s entitled, I hope, to write here about one of his little achievements. Here’s his report:

I didn’t like the usual links that appear at the top of a typical weblog page:
Previous Entry | Home | Next Entry. I wanted a hierarchical, path-aware, display that would read something more like
Home page: Parent category: Subcategory: Title of this page.

So I did that, and you can see the result above (I hope). I don’t know if this has been done before but in case it helps anyone, here’s my code.

On category listing pages I use

<a href="<MTBlogURL>index.html"><MTBlogName></a>
->
<MTParentCategories>
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>">
<$MTCategoryLabel$></a>
->
</MTParentCategories>
<$MTEntryTitle$>

and then on my individual archive pages I use

<a href="<MTBlogURL>index.html"><MTBlogName></a>
-> 
<MTParentCategories exclude_current="1">
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>">
<$MTCategoryLabel$>
</a>
-> 
</MTParentCategories>
<MTArchiveTitle>

You’ll probably also want to redesign your category archive pages. You might want to do that using conditional code, so that you can have different content on upper-level and bottom-level categories. I used <MTHasNoSubCategories> and <MTHasSubCategories>.

Published on March 31, 2005 at 7:44 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/navigation-in-movable-type.html

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