Authoring: intermediate
Now, after the gentle introduction given in Authoring: basic, this piece will deal with more complicated features of Movable Type and so will be more long-winded. 🙂
- In order keep the main window relatively clutter-free, IMHO (in my humble opinion) it is better to break up all entries which are too long into two parts.
For example, if you scroll down further, chances are you will be see many entries ending with a link labeled Continue reading “xyz”!? This is done by placing the part you want to show on the index page (or the main window with all entries) into the Entry Body, and the rest into Extended Entry box. Just exactly where to break is by trial and error, although I find good rule of thumb is at the point when the Entry Body box is first filled.
- Anywhere within the text of the entry, you can insert some shorthands for smiling faces. The exact command will be tabulated in another post.
- As long as the Post Status is set to Draft, the entry will not be seen. You can come back later to finish if you had stopped halfway through. Also, an entry Published can still be edited.
- There are three modes for Text Formatting. The default is to Convert Line Breaks which will automatically start a new paragraph when an empty line separates two blocks of text – my preferred arrangement.
The None option is really only useful if you want to code all the HTML tags by hand.
The Textile option provides some advanced inline text formatting commands. Consult the help (the little ? mark) if you want to try that.
- Finally, the last option to note is the Send A Notification which allows the author to send an email alert to email addresses supplied.
- New addition: authors need to inform me if they have special requests for pictures representing themselves. Basically I require gif files of around 10-15KB, 256 colours in possible.