LinkBox, a plugin for Melody and Movable Type

Overview

Manage and publish multiple blogrolls (lists of links).

Features

Create and Manage LinkBoxes
Add links with label for each to LinkBox
Plugin preferences for:
- list style: "ul" or "ol"
- link list sort order: order added or alphabetical
Tags to output LinkBoxes

Requirements

Melody 1.0 or newer
Movable Type 4.x

Documentation

Deploying Link Boxes with Themes

The following YAML structure is an example of a link box named "Blogroll" that is bundled with a hypothetical theme named BloggerTemplates.

template_sets:
    blogger_templates:
        label: BloggerTemplates
        linklists:
            blogroll:
                label: Blogroll
                links:
                    google:
                        label: Google
                        url: http://www.google.com
                        description: Big search engine.
                        order: 1
                    slashdot:
                        label: Slashdot
                        url: http://slashdot.org
                        description: Old as the hills tech news site.
                        order: 3
                    melody:
                        label: Open Melody Software Group
                        url: http://openmelody.org
                        description: The OMSG website
                        order: 2

The following simple facts should clarify how LinkBox handles this YAML:

A link box does not need any links under it.
A link only needs two attributes: label and url.
The order attribute controls the actual order in which LinkBox will display the content.
The default value for order is "0" which means that links without an order attribute will take precedent over this with one.
LinkBox will not alter or remove an existing link list with the same name.

Container Tags

mt:LinkBoxes - Loops over linkboxes for the blog and name provided

Attributes:
- id - optional id of a single LinkBox
- name - optional name of a single LinkBox
mt:LinkBoxLinks - Loops over links for the linkbox in context

Function Tags

mt:LinkBox - Returns a single linkbox specified by name (or it grabs the latest one) as a html list.

Attributes:
- blog_id - optional blog id
- name - optional name of list
- list_style - "ul" (default) or "ol" (can be specified in plugin settings as well)
- sort_order - "added" (default) or "alpha" (can be specified in plugin settings as well)
mt:LinkBoxDescription - description for the linkbox in context
mt:LinkBoxName - name for the linkbox in context
mt:LinkBoxLinkURL - URL for the link in context
mt:LinkBoxLinkName - name for the link in context
mt:LinkBoxLinkDescription - description for the link in context

Examples

All LinkBoxs

<mt:LinkBoxes>
    <div class="linkbox-container">
        <h3><$mt:LinkBoxName encode_html="1"$></h3>
        <ul class="linkbox">
    <mt:LinkBoxLinks>
            <li>
        <mt:If tag="MTLinkBoxLinkURL">
                    <a href="<mt:LinkBoxLinkURL encode_html="1">"><$mt:LinkBoxLinkName encode_html="1"$></a>
        <mt:Else>
                    <$mt:LinkBoxLinkName encode_html="1"$>
        </mt:If>
        <mt:If tag="MTLinkBoxLinkDescription">
                    <span><$mt:LinkBoxLinkDescription encode_html="1"$></span>
        </mt:If>
            </li>
    </mt:LinkBoxLinks>
        </ul>
    </div>
</mt:LinkBoxes>

Specific LinkBox

<$mt:Var name="linkbox_label" value="Favorite Sites"$>
<div class="linkbox-container">
    <h3><$mt:Var name="linkbox_label"$></h3>
    <$mt:LinkBox name="$linkbox_label"$>
</div>

Installation

Move the LinkBox plugin directory to the MT plugins directory.
Move the LinkBox mt-static directory to the mt-static/plugins directory.

Should look like this when installed:

$MT_HOME/
    plugins/
        LinkBox/
    mt-static/
        plugins/
            LinkBox/

More in-depth plugin installation instructions.

Desired Features

add further mt:LinkBox attributes to mt:LinkBoxes tag

Support

This plugin is not an official Six Apart, Ltd. release, and as such support from Six Apart, Ltd. for this plugin is not available.

Authors

Six Apart, Ltd., OpenMelody Software Group

Copyright

2009 Six Apart, Ltd.
2011 OpenMelody Software Group

License

Artistic License 2.0

danwolfgang/mt-plugin-LinkBox