Any MoveableType experts around? I’d love help on this. You see, if someone sends me a trackback, but the entry it’s sent from doesn’t have a title, MoveableType substitutes the URL of the post instead. The URL is invariably far too long and on PCs this breaks the layout of this site. There’s a nasty overlap thing that happens. Macs (Explorer and Safari, at least) deal with the long URL by elegantly breaking it up. If you’re on a PC you’ll be seeing the ugliness of this right now, because I got a titleless trackback.

Here’s my code for showing the trackbacks:

<MTPings lastn=”7″>
<a href=”<$MTPingURL$>”><$MTPingTitle$></a><br>
(<$MTPingDate format=”%e/%m”$> from <i><$MTPingBlogName$></i>)<br />
</MTPings>

I tried putting in a trim_to=”15″ (one of the global tags) as an attribute to <MTPingTitle>, hoping that would cut the long URLs short enough to show neatly in the menu, but that simply stops titles or links from showing.

Now, MoveableType won’t do if-then statements, will it? I’d love to be able to say “if there’s a title, use it, otherwise, just put in “titleless” and link from that. There’s heaps of other places I’d have liked to use if-thens as well…

So, any suggestions to how to solve this? I really don’t want to have to scrap the trackbacks in the menu or delete trackbacks without titles, though I suppose the second may be the logical choice.

I posted this question to the MT Support Forum too.

3 thoughts on “layout problems

  1. Robert

    You could try getting around it, so that instead of

    “>

    you might use

    “>Entry:

    It changes the aesthetics but it might help.

  2. Robert

    (Whoops. When I hit preview it removed all my careful encoding…)

    You could try getting around it, so that instead of

    <a href=”<$MTPingURL$>”><$MTPingTitle$></a>

    you might use

    <a href=”<$MTPingURL$>”>Link</a>: <$MTPingTitle$>

    It changes the aesthetics but it might help.

  3. Jill

    Mm, that might need to be what I do. I could use an icon of some sort instead of the “link” text, too. Or I’ll just have to delete every trackback without a title. I suppose I have only had two in the last two months, and one of those I crafted myself. Silly of me, huh?

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