My side, your side

Blog work for today

I spent this morning trying to get MTAmazon, and MTMacro to work. I think I've got it all figured out, the fact is however that both these tools could use a bit more documentation.

Things I learned that I wish had been on a main page somewhere:

1) MTAmazon by default will not work inside entries. It will work in templates which is great for static things, or things you want to edit manually, but I wanted to use it more tightly within my entry framework. To make this work you need MTMacro

2) MTMacro is really complicated and powerful. The docs take a lower level approach than I was ready for. Everything is fine with the put this file here part, but they go right from there to the use this tag etc. What I didn't understand is that you probably want to make a template to hold your macro, then include that template just below the body tag for any other template you want to have this macro apply to. i.e. Make a template called macro, use the $MTinclude module="macro"$ tag to stick that into the index, or archive template of your choice.

3) Once you have that figured out, it wasn't immediately clear to me that I needed to precede the macro definition (or template include in this case) with the MTMacroApply tag, and then put a /MTMacroApply at the bottom of the body.

4) Once I had all that working the last thing I struggled with was how to make things show up the way I wanted in the consumptives section on the side bar. I was either losing the link to that items archive page, or the amazon generated materials. To fix, or at least get close enough to fix that I'm happy, I changed the MTentries for that section to include the excerpt. That excerpt is where I put the amazon macro. The downside is that if you don't have an excerpt it automatically samples a portion of the main entry body which isn't what I wanted.

All better now.

Posted by Mark at August 2, 2003 02:08 PM | TrackBack