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:
- 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
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
Membership required, please sign-in or register:
Installation Instructions:
- Download and expand the zip file
- Upload the contents of the 'plugins' folder to the 'plugins' folder of you MT installation (there are two files, FormatList.pl and BigPAPI.pl)
- 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 ;)
Comments (11)
This is cool! Thanks!
Posted by Carla | January 25, 2006 11:51 AM
Posted on January 25, 2006 11:51
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?
Posted by Ton | January 26, 2006 4:24 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 04:24
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.
Posted by Mark | January 26, 2006 5:57 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 05:57
Great plugin. Thanks alot.
Posted by Kevin | February 3, 2006 12:31 PM
Posted on February 3, 2006 12:31
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.
Posted by Bobb Menk | February 6, 2006 3:07 PM
Posted on February 6, 2006 15:07
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?
Posted by Nick Aster | March 4, 2006 9:46 PM
Posted on March 4, 2006 21:46
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!
Posted by Nick | March 4, 2006 11:07 PM
Posted on March 4, 2006 23:07
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?
Posted by Nick | March 6, 2006 11:58 PM
Posted on March 6, 2006 23:58
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).
Posted by Mark | March 7, 2006 8:02 AM
Posted on March 7, 2006 08:02
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!
Posted by Nick | March 8, 2006 5:02 AM
Posted on March 8, 2006 05:02
No problem, Nick. Thanks for letting me know.
Regarding the extended entry bug, that has been fixed in v1.1.
Posted by Mark | March 8, 2006 7:38 AM
Posted on March 8, 2006 07:38