I'm starting to switch to movabletype from my Golive manually-edited weblog.

I'd like to be able to easily update a sidebar with new links, new tips and a .plan. What are the options to do it in a practical way?

I consider 2 ways:
a) Directly modifying the index.html template everytime I want to add something.
b) Having extra blogs for each 'section' and using php includes to put all together.

Could you please comment?

Thanks,
/J

You could check out blogrolling.com (there a few different options for getting this on your page, like javascript or php, among others) or the Add A Link Script (php) at Scriptygoddess for you links.

For your tips, you could create a category for tips, and then have a list of the recent entries in that category on your sidebar. Or, you could do the same thing with a new blog, and includes.

I'm sure others will chime in with more suggestions! I don't know what you mean by a .plan, so I'll leave that one alone!

Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestions, I am reading the links you provide.

About creating a category for tips, the problem is i wouldn't like 'tips' to be displayed in the main blog, only in the sidebar. Is there a way to list all categories but one? I know how to include categories but not how to exclude them.

Finally, a .plan is just a small excerpt of one's own plans for the future, things to do, projects to start... There is a UNIX command called 'finger', you could 'finger someone@someplace.org' and it would return info like last login time, contact information and the contents of the '.plan' file in the main directory, that's the origin. Anyways, the finger server is disabled in most installations nowadays.

Thanks
/Josep

You could check out this script, or obviously you could set up your index page to display all the categories (say you have 5 Categories and you want to exclude Cat5)you want by using   but that could get really annoying if you later add categories, or have a heap to start with. I'd check out the script!

Is that maybe something could include with php or SSI? Could you create a file with that kind of information outside of MT (or create a new index template in MT if you wanted to use some MT tags) and then pull it in?

Alternatively, could you create a new Template Module in MT with the relevant information, and include that on your index page with MTInclude? That would save you having to wade through all your code to update it, you would just update the contents of the Template Module, and then rebuild?

Just some more ideas. I don't know if they will work for what you want to do, but that's my best shot!

I think Maddy's ideas are good ones.  I just thought I'd add one more thing.  If your .plan file changes frequently, you might think about creating a blog that you can scale the index WAY back on and include it in your main blog.  This way, you'd have easy access to posting, and a way to see what you've done as an archive in the future.  You could have a category for "in process" and "completed" and just show the in process ones, and change them to completed when you were done with them.  

I think it really depends on how frequently you will update this!  If I find myself updating a file more than once a week manually, it signifies to me that its something that could be automated!!

Kristine