I often design sites for clients integrating MT. I have spent some time on my own developing a MT guide aimed at the user that is new to weblogs and basic HTML. It touches on things like "How to Log In," "How to Post an Entry," "How to Edit an Existing Entry," etc. I am always trying to improve the guide, but I still don't consider it anything beyond a supplement to my personal support.

Obviously, the better the guide, the less support time I need to provide. I have looked around for a better guide on the web, but have found very little. The "official" MT User's Guide is basically nothing more than a tag glossary and very much targeted to the admin.

Does anyone out there have any good beginners' docs? I'm talking about step-by-step, labeled screenshot, guides that a toddler could follow. I'd love to compare and combine my work with anyone else out there that has put something together. I think this could make the whole thing go a lot quicker.

If there isn't anyone else out there with something like this. How popular do you think a short-term mass effort to create MT step-by-step guides "for dummies" would be? If all of the smart people on the support forums took a different section under some simple formatting guidelines and I put it all together under an open source license, I think it would be a great thing for everyone.

I think we could literally knock out something like this in a week or two with enough people helping out. For developers who service and support less tech-savvy clients with MT, this guide would be an absolute godsend!

I'm hoping I'm just daft and have missed some obvious and great guides out there... please lead me in the right direction!

Cheers,

Tony

There is some good information in . You would probably be most interested in Part III: Using MT.

I have started to keep somewhat of a running log of things I'm learning as I work on my MT blogs at Learning Movable Type. In this you'll find write-ups I've done, some with lots of graphics, on Trackback, Syndication, Bookmarklets, Search Engine Optimization, Fighting Spam, etc. At this point Learning Movable Type is more "intermediate" than "beginner", mostly because it is mostly dealing with the things that I am learning now, versus several months ago when I was first starting up. It is however oriented toward the non-techie.

I'm not a programmer or a web designer and I have found the existing Movable Type documentation to be, although thorough, way too complicated for me. It assumes an existing level of familiarity and technical expertise that I simply don't have, and I assume many people don't have. I agree that an easier guide to getting started with Movable Type would be very helpful.

BTW, rumor has it that there is a book in the works for using Movable Type.

Best,

elise

ndns: Yes, I've seen that page. It's one of the only ones I have found that is close to what I'm looking for, but it doesn't cover near enough topics. What I'd like to see is something like the tokyoshoes mini-guide x 10, covering everything in step-by-step detail.

elise: The topics you mention are definately more "intermediate," but would still have a welcome place in a larger beginners' guide.

Does anyone else reading this have any information about this rumored upcoming book? Maybe I'll email Ben & Mena directly about it and see if I can get some info...

Sam's Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours

As I recall, the original release date was set for October/November 2003....

I have an indirect (very) contact at SAMS publishing, and just dashed off an e-mail to see if she can tell me about the release date. Amazon shows the rank at 750,000+/-, which is very respectable for a non-released book (meaning they've received a bunch of pre-release orders).

Gary: I shot an email to Molly Holzschlag (one of the authors) as well. Hopefully between the two of our inquiries we can get some additional information. Please let me know if you find anything out!

Just received a response from the publisher's customer service:

Just in time for MT 3.0!

I hope the guide is what we need... and that the release date doesn't get pushed back. I still say an online collaboration version of a beginner's guide would be useful - with or without this book. I may start to put something together on that...

you could always start up something on the MT Wiki. There's already a lot of good info there that you could easily link to from within a wikified beginners guide. And it's already set up for online collaboration.