tips and tricks for movable type

one year ago today
March 24, 2002

How I used the MTEntryExcerpt and MTEntryIfAllowComments tags to implement a "one year ago today" feature on my journal. (I ended up calling it "retrospective" though!)

I realized that I'm almost at the one-year mark for keeping my online journal (although that doesn't necessarily represent an entry a day!!). I thought it might be nice to have a "one year ago today" link to a prior entry. I considered somehow using the entry date to generate the link, but as I said, there simply isn't a guaranteed entry for each day.

So I thought: what if on the days I wanted to reference a link to a year ago, I put the a href and any text excerpt of my choosing from *that* entry into the current entry's excerpt field? Then display it in a little table in my sidebar for the individual entry. (I'm not using the excerpt field or tag at all presently.)

So far, so good, I think. Except that I don't want the HTML for the table to display in the sidebar when there's no excerpt indicating an entry from a year ago.

I looked at what tags MT has which are "IF" tags. The only one I'm not making use of is MTEntryIfAllowComments - because I don't use comments in my journal.

So, I have decided to try enclosing the table in that tag, and when I create an entry with the one year ago excerpt, I can check the box to "allow comments" on that entry - so the table and excerpt will display.

(Excerpted from my posting in this Community Forum topic.)