Technology and design in plain language.

In the Movable Type Support Forums, Gingermonkey asked a question that will become more and more relevant as the official release of Movable Type 4 draws near:

"After reading that MT4 supports previous versions templates, I have been trying to get templates from thestylearchive.com to work. MT4 is able to connect to the thestylearchive.com, view & select the template -- and files get copied into mt-static equivalent directory. However, the template doesn't reproduce properly at all (in fact neither did any of the templates choosen from thestylearchive.com, only templates built in to MT4 and those from the MT4 Style library. Is this a known bug with with Movable Type 4.0 RC1b, or am I not setting up something correctly?"

Well, for those of you that don't know, the new Movable Type 4 templates are much, much cleaner. Lots of unnecessary code has been whacked and the end result is a meaner, leaner template. Now, the good thing about cleaning up MT4's default templates is that they're much more manageable. Hurrah for clean code!

The bad thing, however, is that all of the styles over at TheStyleArchive.com are designed to work with the MT3.35 default templates. Now, MT is MT, so the default templates from MT3.35 still work with MT4. If you copy the old MT3 templates over into your new MT4 install, Stylecatcher can still pull in the styles from TSA and your site will look as the designer intended...

I know that using the old templates certainly isn't ideal, and because of that, we're working to get the TSA styles functional with the MT4 default templates. Realize, however, that it's going to take some time as converting stylesheets isn't always as simple as search-and-replace.

In the meantime, rest assured that MT4 is shipping with some really beautiful styles that will tide over you styleophiles.