I’m start­ing the process of putting my whole site onto Mov­able­Type, even the old sta­t­ic pages.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate’s site, I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing today with putting the whole Non​vi​o​lence​.org site into Move­able­Type. At first I thought it was just a tri­al exper­i­ment but I’m hooked. I espe­cial­ly love how much clean­er the entry for the links page now looks and I might actu­al­ly be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also inte­grat­ed Choate’s “MT-Textile” which makes a big dif­fer­ence in keep­ing entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related “Smar­ty­Pants” which makes the site more typo­graph­i­cal­ly ele­gant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes)

So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Mov­able Type blogs inter­act­ing with one anoth­er (not includ­ing this per­son­al blog):

• One is the more-or-less stan­dard one that is pow­er­ing the main home­page blog of Non​vi​o​lence​.org.
• The sec­ond I call “NV:Static” which holds my sta­t­ic pages, much as Brad out­lines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real title into the Key­words field (i.e., “About Non​vi​o​lence​.org”) and have that give the date for the title field and the first head­line of the page. It might seem back­wards to use Title for URL and then use Key­words for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT look­ing to edit a par­tic­u­lar file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
• The third blog is my “NV:Design Ele­ments.” This con­tains the block of graph­ics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wher­ev­er. This blog out­puts to HTML. All the oth­er pages on the site are PHP and its a sim­ple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I’m also think­ing of incor­po­rat­ing guest blogs in the near future and all of these ele­ments should make that much easier.

Here’s anoth­er site to check out, about how some­one inte­grat­ed Mov­able­Type into their church web­site using some inter­est­ing techniques.