From MovableType

FYI: MT4 Default Template Organization provides the default organization of templates in MT4.

The following is a list of template sets for MT4 that can be easily installed using the Template Installer plugin (no cutting and pasting required). Please add your templates sets to this list. Remember to include a brief description of the template set and note any plugins required.

• 2 Column Layout Header - This set provides a replacement to the "Header" template module. The default MT4 templates use a 3-column layout. If you want to easily change your blog to a 2-column layout, just install this template set. (This template set is also included with Template Installer).)
• Default Templates with Prefix Notation - A version of the default templates that use the new prefix notation. For example, <MTEntries> becomes <mt:Entries>, and so on. This template set will have the same output in your published blog as the default set, only the notation used is different. Note that the tags in this are not complete lowercases (it used mt:EntryTitle and not mt:entrytitle). (Note this template set is also included with Template Installer).
• Search Results Template Only - This template set includes only the Search Results template. Some people have been affect by a bug that has deleted the Search Results template -- if yours has gone missing, install this set to get it back.
• Google Sitemap Template for MT4 - An index template that creates a Google Sitemap feed. This sitemap template includes the new MT4 archives for author, category-monthly, and author-monthly. Publishing a sitemap feed can help get all of your pages indexed by Google and other search engines.
• Customizable Commenter Sign In Templates - These template sets can be used to customize the commenter login and registration screens. Requires the Customized Sign In Templates plugin.
• Podcasting Templates - This template set includes replacement templates for the Atom and RSS templates, but with podcasting supporty. Requires the Podcasting plugin.

Flattened Template Sets

There's been a lot of talk on the Pronet mailing list regarding the difficulty of learning the MT4 templating system. Two frequently occuring complaints in that regard are:

• Conditional logic that makes them more like programs with html interspersed than html with additional stuff thrown in.
• The basic non-html-ness of the templates themselves. Specifically, the way the MT4 templates are carved up into modules, they disregard what many html designers might think of as basic rules for html pages and code snippets, in particular that they be well-formed (i.e. tags are nested in the module file itself). When you first encounter the MT4 templates, it can seem as though someone took a jigsaw to an html page, and it's your detective task to reassemble it.

These are easy critiques to make, but it should be noted that the MT4 templating system has some significant benefits as well:

• rapid implementation of a new design because there is no duplicated code (ie. edit the header module once and the header of every page is updated)
• a lot of flexibility in the administration UI. For instance, in style catcher, you can just automagically switch from 2 column to three column format with many different configurations for the columns. A more html-like design for the template sets might hinder this flexibility.

So, the great challenge in this section is for people to come up with more flattened template sets that still enable this flexibility. Contributors should add their flattened template sets below and state what the template set can do (i.e., wondrous html-likeness, will not work with standard style-catcher because I was not able to achieve that flexibility).

If you want to flatten your templates there is a plugin to do this for you: Template Hammer