I’ve been looking for a Movable Type plugin that would easily allow me to make and update a blog roll for my site. In the past I would have used MT’s MultiBlog plugin, create my links as a separate blog, and trick in into displaying in the sidebar as a widget. That’s too many steps for me to take when I want quickly add a link to the blog roll.
My alternate way of making a blog roll was to create a new widget consisting of a bulleted list and manually adding my new links when needed. Though it served its purpose this seemed a bit torturous and I couldn’t see instructing a client to do it this way.
I installed the Link Roller plugin today and after a little tweaking I got it to work perfectly. The instructions did a fairly good job of walking me through the installation but left out a few things. What the Link Roller plugin does is it adds a new asset to the asset library called ‘links’. These links are the links that make up your blog roll. The instructions leave out a critical step and that is: making a new widget for the blog roll.
After you install the plugin, create a new widget for your blog roll using this code:
<div class=”widget-recent-entries widget-archives widget”>
<h3 class=”widget-header”>Link Roller</h3>
<div class=”widget-content”>
<ul class=”widget-list”>
</mt:LinksHeader>
<mt:assets type=”link”>
<li class=”widget-list-item”><a href=”<mt:assetURL />”><mt:assetLabel /></a></li>
</mt:assets>
<mt:LinksFooter>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</mt:LinksFooter>
To
add links to your new blog roll go to your dashboard and choose Create
> Link. You can find a walk through of adding and customizing links
at the Link Roller plugin page. Publish your blog and there is your new blog roll.
I wanted my blog roll links to have a bullet in front of them so I changed the above underline class from <ul class=”widget-list”> to <ul class=”widget-list-link”> so my bullets wouldn’t affect my other widget lists. I then added this style to my style sheet:
.widget-list-link li,ul {
list-style:inside;
line-height:1.3em;
list-style-image:url(http://liberationiannillo.com/images/bullet.gif);
}
The blog roll looks good. Down the road when I have more links I may want to organize them into different categories or, at the very least, alphabetize them. The documentation for the Link Roller plugin, or lack thereof, is typical for all things Movable Type. If it wasn’t for the comments left by other frustrated designers and developers that helped fill in the blanks, I’d have passed on this plugin. That’s a shame considering the time and effort that goes into making them.
Update
I just found a post called Sensible Link Management in Movable Type that connected the last few dots for the Link Roller plugin. Using the following code I am now able to sort my links using the tags which gives me the organization I was desperately craving:
<div class=”widget-linkroll widget”>
<h3 class=”widget-header”>Blog Roll</h3>
<div class=”widget-content”>
<mt:Tags type=”asset” sort_by=”name”>
<ul class=”widget-list”>
<li><h4><mt:TagName></h4></li>
</ul>
<MTSetVarBlock name=”linktag”><mt:TagName /></MTSetVarBlock>
<ul class=”widget-list”>
<mt:Assets type=”link” tag=”$linktag”>
<li><a href=”<mt:AssetURL>”><mt:AssetLabel escape=”html”>: <mt:AssetDescription></a></li>
</mt:Assets>
</ul>
</mt:Tags>
</div>
</div>
I made one slight modification which was removing : <mt:AssetDescription> because I don’t want to provide a site description beyond the name of the links in the blog roll.
Many thanks to Justin for the documentation.
I design websites, blogs, and develop social media campaigns for creative professionals who want increase their online visibility, promote their latest projects, and attract new creative opportunities.