StyleCatcher: Easy Styles for Movable Type 3.2
Everyone loves having a great looking site, but for most people who aren't well versed in the technical details of HTML and CSS, tweaking your blog's look isn't easy. Being able to easily pick a style from a rich library of choices is essential.
So, we made the move in Movable Type 3.2 to a new set of Six Apart standard styles that are shared with both our TypePad and LiveJournal services. There's an immediate benefit of being able to use any one of a number of existing styles. But in the future, with over ten million blogs sharing the same single set of styles and markup, there's going to be a new and rapidly expanding base of additional styles available that we think is really going to blossom.
And while we're very proud of the work that goes in to making an attractive style, we realize it can still take work to apply a design to your blog. So we've reduced the work of switching styles by making StyleCatcher, a new plugin that lets you change designs with just a few clicks, any time you want.
StyleCatcher is a plugin made exclusively for Movable Type 3.2 which enables you to easily download and install styles on your blog with just a simple URL. Even better, it maintains a library of all of your downloaded styles allowing you to switch between them — completely transforming the look and feel of your site — with only a few clicks. Plus, StyleCatcher can even retrieve styles from repositories other than our own Six Apart Style Library, so if you'd like to use themes that are shared elsewhere, you can do that just as easily.
We'll soon be publishing more details about creating your own styles that fit the Six Apart standard, as well as stripped down templates with only template tags and basic markup for those of you who would rather get your hands dirty building your own HTML and CSS. This documentation should make it easy for designers and developers to see the benefits of this new markup structure, and why we've made these changes.
There's a great opportunity for designers (and Greasemonkey script writers too!) who want their names spread far and wide to make their creations readily available across the web. And designers who like to make their designs available as shareware or linkware now have a much bigger audience to address, without doing any additional work.
So, keep an eye open for developers and designers who are taking advantage of the new designs. And in the meantime, enjoy StyleCatcher and go help beautify the blogosphere!
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Design , MT Newsbox , Releases18 TrackBacks
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