October 25, 2004:

Upcoming …

I guess you probably noticed by now I have been wanting to have a simple way to highlight upcoming MINI events for people that are not regular visitors to MINI2 or NAM - events that I plan to go to so “local” to me.
I created a new “UPCOMING” category and added a few events “in the future” - MoveableType allows you to add entries for dates yet to come. But this gave me two problems - too much screen space at the top of the weblog taken up by the upcoming events, and not enough “real” entries lower down (my weblog is configured to display the most recent 5 entries).
MoveableTypes templates can be set up to include only certain categories so selecting only “upcoming” events was easy ([MTEntries lastn="5" category="upcoming"]), but you can’t select everything-but-upcoming with MoveableType - you can list a number of categories (category=”MINI Meets OR Purchases OR …”) but that left out all the un-categorised entries.
I did some searching of the MoveableType plug-ins tried a few hacks, to some degree of success, but was still not happy. Then finally I found CatEntries which is a perfect solution - it replaces “MTEntries” with “MTCatEntries” and has the same options, but also has “include” and “exclude” options for selecting categories; now everything works nicely:
[MTCatEntries include="upcoming"]
(formatting for “upcoming” events)
[MTEntriesFooter][br/][br/][/MTEntriesFooter]
[/MTCatEntries]
[MTCatEntries lastn="5" exclude="upcoming"]
(formatting for normal entries)
[/MTCatEntries]
The result is just what I wanted - a list of upcoming events at the top taking up minimal screen space, and an unaffected weblog below … thanks Mark Paschal!