I worked for a bit tonight on the blog, attempting to understand how the templates all fit together in Movable Type. My biggest stumbling block was that the templates in a default installation of Movable Type 4 completely ignore Widgets. I started tonight moving things around so that the templates can use Widget Sets while still maintaining the use of the variable switches at the top of each template.

For users of Movable Type, the obvious and immediate advantage to this is a graphical interface for moving content around on your pages via the Widget Manager. I still have not found any drawbacks, and am puzzled at SixApart’s decision to not take advantage of this.

Another accomplishment tonight involved the addition of a dynamic “latest images” from our Flickr feed, now displayed to the right on the main page. This involved both phpFlickr and help from Jesse. There is nothing fancy in this implementation, but one of the nice things is that the feed is set up as a Widget, and contains only six lines of functional code (plus five for variable declarations)! Jesse mentioned plans to outline his excellent implementation on Movable Tweak, and I do not want to steal his thunder (as if our readership looks at all alike). Once I figure some more things out in the templates, improve the Flickr integration on this site, and glean from Jesse’s upcoming post, I will post some details of how I put things together.