I'd like to use Moveable Type to generate pages that use the same template as my usual entries, but which don't have dates associated with them, and which don't show up in the archive.

Just in case that garbled syntax wasn't intelligble, let me give an example.

In one of my entries, I have a quiz. I'd like Page 1 to feature the questions, and Page 2 to feature the answers. I want Page 2 to be accessible only via a link from Page 1. But if I use Movable Type to generate Page 2, it will automatically make Page 2 accessible via the index. Also, I want Page 2 to have the same formatting and layout of all my MT-generated pages.

Of course, I could just make a copy of page 1, open it up in a text editor, delete all the questions, and type in the answers--but I can't help suspecting there ought to be a more elegant way of doing this from within Movable Type. Is there?

There are scads of ways you could approach this.

First off, comment-out the "recent entries" block from your main index. You *do* want your pages to be archived, you just don't want all of them to be listed on the front page.

You might want to start a separate blog for this project--it might simplify things in the long run. You could assign entries 1 and 2 to separate categories. You could set up their paths so that entries are stored as domain.com/categoryname/entry.html, and you could even password-protect the category 2 directory if you wanted to. You could set up your front page to show only entries in category 1, or exclude those in category 2.

To explicitly reference entry 2 in entry 1, entry 2 will need to already exist, of course, so you'll need to go in and edit the reference to it in entry 1.

If you don't want the date to appear in the posting, just remove that chunk from the template.

Spend some time looking over the docs (particularly the tags section) to get an idea of what is possible and how you want to approach it; you might also want to check out http://mt-plugins.org to see how you can extend MT, and http://wiki.virtualvenus.org/ for more specific "how-to" recipes. It's hard to give specific advice without a clearer idea of the direction you're headed in, but there's no question that what you want to do is entirely do-able.

Adam,
Thanks for your speedy reply (less than an hour after my post!) Sorry to be slow in responding to it.

One thought:
You *do* want your pages to be archived, you just don't want all of them to be listed on the front page.

That's not really true--I don't want my quiz answer page to be archived anywhere; I don't want it to turn up in the category archives, or the date archives. I don't want there to be any automatically generated links to it; I want the only link to it to be one that I manually put on the quiz page.

But the idea of using categories is an elegant one, since I can presumably set all of my archive templates to exclude category 2. Thanks for the all the suggestions!

Best,
Jacob

Here is a tutorial from Brad Choate on Doing your whole site with MT. It might give you some good ideas on how to handle this sort of thing.