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FormatList v1.0 - Easy Bullet Lists in Entries

FormatList is a plugin for Movable Type that makes it easy to create bulleted or numbered lists when creating or editing entries.

FormatList adds the following two button to the formatting toolbar that appears just above the "Entry Body" and "Extended Entry" fields:

To create a bulleted list:

  • Enter the list of items, hitting enter after each line (you can leave blank lines in between list items if desired)
  • Select (highlight) the list
  • Click the button

To create a numbered list:

  1. Enter the list of items, hitting enter after each line (you can leave blank lines in between list items if desired)
  2. Select (highlight) the list
  3. Click the button

Requirements:

  • BigPAPI Plugin (For convenience, I have included this plugin in the FormatList download) (more about BigPAPI)
  • Movable Type 3.16 and higher (I think....currently tested with MT 3.2 only)

Download Now

FormatList.zip

Installation Instructions:

  1. Download and expand the zip file
  2. Upload the contents of the 'plugins' folder to the 'plugins' folder of you MT installation (there are two files, FormatList.pl and BigPAPI.pl)
  3. Upload the contents of the' images' folder to the 'images' folder within the 'mt-static' folder. This is the location of the images and docs for MT, for most people it will likely be in '/mt-static/images' (outside your cgi-bin).

I hope others find this as helpful as I do. I created this plugin becuase it was quite tedious to create list manually, and this plugin makes it really quick and easy.

Note: As you would expect, each of the lists above was created using FormatList ;)

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Comments (12)

This is cool! Thanks!

Ton:

Absolutely brilliant. A very welcome addition to the MT toolbox. Haven't tried this out yet, but do the list buttons allow for a list inside a list? Or do we need to make a table to accomplish that?

Mark:

Yes, it does support lists inside of lists, but you have to be careful how you create the each. If you create the "parent" list first, then use the button to make a list and then insert the "child" list where desired, then use button on that list, it will work.

Technically speaking, the plugin treats each line-break as a new item in the list. So if you create your nested lists with this in mind, it will work.

Great plugin. Thanks alot.

Bobb Menk:

I like the way this works, but of course have a question about it.

Everything works find for making alist in the Entry Body field, but even though your list buttons appear on the Extended Entry field, they don't work there.

Looking at things abit more closely, I see that the output looks a bit like this
"formatList(document.entry_form.text...."
while to work in the Extended Entry filed it needs to be slightly different - like this:
"formatList(document.entry_form.text_more..."

Any chance of having it work in both fields?

Thanks in advance.

Very cool!

Is it thinking twice about those line breaks though? What I mean is, since MT normally ads a br tag for any line break, does it take this into consideration for anything inside the ul tags and eliminate those or something like that?

Nick:

Bobb's right - I just noticed that bug too. Been trying to hack a fix myself, but best to do it in the actual plugin I reckon!

Nick:


Another Major Bug - these babies make Opera go berserk... totally freezes up if you use them, or, in fact, any of the little buttons after installing this!

Thoughts?

Mark:

Bobb and Nick,

Thanks for pointing out the extended entry problem. I think I can fix that one easily in the next version (soon).

Nick, regarding the Opera bug, I don't have opera installed. Can you explain exactly what happens? And just for clarity, this happens only with the FormatList buttons and not with the normal MT buttons? (I did some tweaking of the javascript to get things to work consistently between Firefox and IE, but I haven't tested Opera).

Nick:

Thanks!

I think I was mistaken about the Opera bug (one of my users was complainint) because the bug is still there after I took down the plugin. Sorry about that!

Mark:

No problem, Nick. Thanks for letting me know.

Regarding the extended entry bug, that has been fixed in v1.1.

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