I'm creating a blog for a nonprofit and just lost a lot of dev time to illness. So any advice, pointers to existing docs, etc will be helpful! I've looked through MT documentation, this forum, and lists of plugins, and have some helpful details but not solutions, yet.
We're using MT 4.01a, RegEx plugin, and Custom Fields plugin (Arvind's last beta). Our rollout is within a week and a half, so I'd be nervous about switching to the beta Movable Type 4.1 ... Professional? to get the new stuff, but tell me if that'd solve all problems.

I would like to change the order of all fields within the 'Create Entry' template so that they match the order in which my boss normally writes material. Unfortunately, that's pretty different from how the Create Entry form currently looks. I need to ask for some Custom Fields, some normal fields (e.g. the Body text box), and then more Custom Fields. Like this:

Tease Headline [custom], Body, default Title/Headline, Extended, Time Zone [custom] ... etc.

Obviously, that's not something I can solve by using the "rearrange fields" tool, which only rearranges the custom fields and doesn't touch the Title or the Body. And I realize I might not be able to split up the Body & Extended boxes; that'd be okay.


Danwolfgang said in an earlier post where to find the template: tmpl/cms . And my question is a little different from babx's request, since babx needed to conditionally change the Create Entry template based on type of user.


So I looked in tmpl/cms and found the Create Entry template. Understandable, but scary. I don't see how I can change this to get what I want, seeing as this template is (I believe) asking for a list of custom fields and then displaying them, without naming them first. perhaps there's prior work doing something like what I have in mind?

Help, please!

A year later, and I have exactly the same issue (right down to being delayed due to illness. Winter sucks.)

I need to linearize my Create Entry form (by editing the alternate copy of its system template) such that the fields are in the order my editor expects. One of the challenges involved is mixing custom fields in with the default fields. For example, I might want to put a custom field above the Title field.

I currently can't do that b/c I don't know how to tell the template, "Display a form element that fills custom field named x."

thanks for any tips!

Are you using the real custom fields or Arvind's beta still?

Sorry. I'm now using MovableType Pro 4.21 with the built-in (real), non-beta custom fields.

I don't know if this helps http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/p.../templates.html

Not for this task; that describes how to add custom field tags to the display template; I need to edit the administrative system template to add a form field where you'd enter the custom field value.

Good link, though. thanks.

It should be similar, the back end pages are build with the same templating engine.