I’ve set a few themes up for MT, and with gracious help from CIT’s Mike Austin & Jim Lawson installed the necessary plug-ins to make them work. Here are some instructions for installing a theme on your MT account.

NOTE: The following should be considered to be in “Draft” form, and has not been fully tested. Once it has gone through more thorough testing, I’ll move it over to the Blogging@UVM site. Also, as with any such process where data might be overwritten, you may want to backup your existing content (see import/export in the MT documentation).

UPDATE: These instructions have moved. The documentation you see here remains for archive purposes only, and should be considered out of date.

1. If you don’t have one already, request a blog account. Note that it could take up to 24 hours before your account is created, so plan accordingly.
2. Download the theme file by right clicking on template.txt and choosing “save as”.
3. log into your blog (should be something like yournetidhere.blog.uvm.edu/mt/mt.cgi - check the email you recieved when it was created)
4. Scroll down to “Configure Active Plugins” and click on “TypeMover“
5. Beneath “Or restore a previously made backup“, click on “Browse” and choose the file you just downloaded.
6. Click the “Proceed” button.

At this point, you’ll need to make some decisions regarding how and where the theme is installed.

First, let’s choose where it will go:

• If you want to create a new blog space using the uploaded theme, choose “As a new weblog“.
• If you wish to install the uploaded theme into an existing blog, choose “Replace existing weblog“, and select the blog that will be overwritten. NOTE: This seems to be problematic in some cases (causing blogs to be corrupted), and is reccomended against. If you *really* want to install over another blog, you should probably do so over one that is not your root blog.

You’ll also need to choose what will be restored into your blog. Your choices here will most likely depend on what you chose above:

• If you are creating a new blog (i.e. if you chose “As a new weblog” above), then it is recommended that you leave all but the “Authors” box checked.
• On the other hand, if you are restoring this theme on top of your current blog and already have entries & comments in your current blog, you’ll want to uncheck “Entries”, and “Comments & Trackbacks” in addition to “Authors”.

Once this is done, you can click on “Proceed” to restore the template.

There will be a progress bar, then a page telling you of your success in restoring the blog theme. As promising as that sounds, you’re not quite done yet - we still need to adjust the configuration settings.

From this page, click on “Go to your newly created weblog” to begin editing the settings. This takes you into the admin interface for the blog you are restoring. From here, follow these steps:

1. Click on “Weblog Config” from the menu on the left.
2. In the box labeled “Weblog Name“, enter whatever name/title you wish to use for your blog. For example, maybe I’m using this for my (fictional) introductory english course. I might put “English 001″ in this field.
3. In the next four fields (”Local Site Path“, “Site URL“, “Local Archive Path“, and “Archive URL“), you need to do two or three things:
• If present, delete the “[REMOVE_ME]” text from the beginning of the line
• Replace “blogging” with your netid
• Replace “tabbed” with a short version of your weblog name. This should be all lower case, devoid of special characters and spaces. Following our English 001 example, I’ll use “eng001″ for my short name.

Here’s an example of what these text boxes might look like when I’m done, if I my netid was “netid”, and my new blog was “eng001″:

Local Site Path: /var/www/html/blogs/netid/eng001 Site URL: netid.blog.uvm.edu/eng001/ Local Archive Path: /var/www/html/blogs/netid/eng001/archives Archive URL: Tags for this post:

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 8:42 pm and is filed under articles, Projects, Tool Box, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.