Link to Theme

Designers who spend a lot of time in Movable Type are no doubt familiar with the need to "refresh templates." When in the process of building out a new web site, the need to refresh templates over and over in order to test out changes being made to the web site's design can be cumbersome. This plugin removes any need for a theme's templates to be refreshed, allows designers to edit templates using tools they feel more comfortable in, like Coda or TextMate, and greatly improves the designer experience of Movable Type by making changes easier to make make and see on a live web site.

This is accomplished through the simple functionality of two new batch operations being added to the template listing screen which this plugin provides:

• Link template to theme
• Unlink template to theme

When a template is linked to a theme, its contents are pulled directly from the theme itself (residing on the filesystem). In this mode, templates do not need to be refreshed. Thus, changes made directly to the theme are made in real time which is a huge time saver for designers.

Download

The latest version of Link to Theme can always be downloaded directly from github.

Installation

This plugin is installed in a manner similar to every other Movable Type plugin.

Usage

To use Link to Theme, navigate to Templates under the Design menu. Then select the templates you want to link directly to theme, then select "Link to Theme" from the "More Actions" menu. Then click Go.

Once that is complete, you can edit the file corresponding to the template that is linked to the theme directly on the file system using TextMate, WordPad, vi, emacs, Coda or your text editor of choice. Then to see your changes on the live site, just select the template from the Manage Templates screen and click the "Publish" button. That's it.

Support

Link to Theme is an open source plugin that is supported and maintained by Endevver when we can. Please submit bugs and feature requests to lighthouse.