Dynamic Publishing with Smarty

I’ve been trying to get dynamic publishing working today, specifically with the category archives. Well, I think I’m finally there. Thanks to some of Brad‘s amazing Smarty-fu, a whole lot of testing and a fair number of insults hurled in the way of the server, my category templates are now dynamic.

Perhaps more importantly, they are now paginated as well. Visit any category page with more than 12 entries and you’ll see what I mean. No more having the entire category archive on one page. Now you get to see a svelte 12 entries at a time, in their entirety (no more excerpts here).

Frankly, I’m very impressed. Not only because it works, but because that navigation piece was done entirely with Smarty code, inserted directly into the template. It’s like PHP on Movable Type steroids. Very sweet. I’ll definitely have to do some more learning in this area.

In the meantime, let me know if you run into any problems. I think the dynamic publishing and navigation will be okay, but during the day I also resumed serving XHTML pages, so there may be some code out there that doesn’t render correctly. Let me know if you spot any.

Update: I’ve now built true pagination (instead of entry-ation) into the archives. Rather than seeing entry counts, you will see the total number of pages, and have a page navigation section for browsing. Check it out and let me know what you think.