While reading an old article about MT, I thought of a way to maintain dynamic content in the sidebar without having to use PHP or service-side file includes.
Take the Recent Movies section, for example. Right now, it’s just a list in a PHP file that I update when I watch a movie - remove the oldest one, add the new. Alternatively, I could create a “Recent Movies” category, and make a post to it each time I see a movie - maybe I use the movie name as the title, short synopsis as the body, and the IMDB link as the keyword, or something like that. I could exclude this category from the main and archive pages (using the CatEntries plugin) so that they would never appear between actual posts. Similarly, I could use the same plugin to show only the “Recent Movies” category in the sidebar, and just display the title of the last five posts. It would be easy to use standard MT template tags to make it a list of links using <MTEntryTitle> and <MTEntryKeywords>.
The problem with this approach is rebuilding. If every page in my site has the same sidebar, which includes those MT tags, they would all have to be rebuilt when I added a new movie. Granted, it’s WAY faster on the new host than it ever was before, but I’ve only got a few dozen posts right now; it will become an issue when I start getting into hundreds of pages that will need rebuilding.
It’s too bad that an entire template can’t be included in another one, but that would basically be a server-side include. I haven’t got it solved yet, but at least I’ve got some ideas.
Tags: blogging, movabletype