MovableType ships whith a series of tempaltes which do it’s bidding. What’s kind of silly about them, is that they are templates in that they are the basis for rendering your site, but they are not very abstract… that is, there is a lot of repitition.

I’m going to show you how to pull out the repeated bits and use MTs “Template Modules” to create “one stop shopping” to edit your look and feel.

I’m going to write a series of HowTo’s here and explain how to break your site’s templates up into their component parts which will allow for a few things:
– Editing single files, or modules for real code reuse
– Saving those page fragments off as text files, so you can include them in other applications and thereby have central control over hte look and/or content of multiple web apps.
– Edit these fragments from your favorite code editor, so your not tied to HTML form editing.

then we’ll move onto bigger and better things.

I’m assuming that you know a bit about MovableType and understand “Index Templates” and how they come into play. If not, read up on it and come on back, ’cause this just might get a little confusing otherwise.

The main areas we want to standardize are:
the header (the banner accross the top, or whatever makes up the start of your grid)
The Global Nav, if any. In my case there is
The Side Nav
Components of the side area, for instance, “Links”