UThink Blog Support (uthink@umn.edu) is the only resource on campus that helps students with UThink, and we do not go extensively into customizing templates. The possibilities for customization seem endless, the time it would take to help each person is disproportionate, and there are risks involved. The farther your templates deviate from the original code, the more likely you are to introduce code that undermines how basic UThink functions work, like authenticating and commenting.
That said, the best learning tool out there is the Movable Type Template Tag Reference:
http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/
Everything I know I learned from that page and trial/error.
The basic concept that you need to understand is that a Movable Type template tag uses a hybrid of traditional languages (HTML, CSS, etc) and the Movable Type language. There seem to be two types of Movable Type tags in the language: container tags and display tags. Container tags simply set a context for the display tags, the ones that actually generate something that gets displayed. Here's an example:
<mt:Entries>
</mt:Entries>
By themselves, these two container tags do nothing. All it says is "open up the entries table and run through all of the entries on this blog." But now I'll add something in between.
<mt:Entries>
<$mt:EntryTitle$><br />
</mt:Entries>
Notice how there are dollar signs on the inside of the brackets. That's what indicates that it actually displays something. So now, it says, "open up the entries table and run through all of the entries on this blog. At each entry, display the title of the entry, followed by a break tag." So on the public side of your blog, you get something like this:
10/24 - Today's Blog Entry
10/23 - Today's Blog Entry
10/22 - Today's Blog Entry
You can do the same thing with other types of data in your blog, like the names of authors:
<ul>
<mt:Authors>
<li><$mt:AuthorDisplayName$></li>
</mt:Authors>
</li>
</ul>
This would make a bulleted list of all of the names of your authors. You could even make a table:
<table>
<th>Name</th><th>Entries Written</th>
<mt:Authors>
<tr><td><$mt:AuthorDisplayName$></td>
<td>
<mt:AuthorName setvar="usernamevar">
<mt:Entries author="$usernamevar">
<a href="<$mt:EntryPermalink$>"><$mt:EntryTitle$></a>
</mt:Entries>
</td>
</tr>
</mt:Authors>
</table>
This is a table that displays the name of each author on the left side and links to all of his or her entries on the right side. I had to use a new concept in order to do that: variables. On the seventh line, I only wanted to show entries of one author. But since the code I've written moves through each author, I couldn't simply say, "
With these basics, plus the Template Tag Reference, you can build lots of great index pages, like an author archive page, a page for instructors to keep up on their students' work, or RSS feeds by category. You can also create custom widgets for your sidebar.
Good luck!
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