Common templates for different blogs in MovableType

Say you have more than one (we have eight, and growing...) number of MT blogs that have templates that are the same for every one of them. (For example the RSS feed, individual archive, whatever.) You'd love to have them at a central place, so when it's time to finetune, you don't have to modify all the blogs' templates for the same changes. I hate doing repetitive stuff, so instead I found out that how I can avoid it.

MovableType supports a feature that lets you link a template to a file. Yes, that's going to be the solution: we link the same temaplate (in this example the RSS feed index.xml one) to the same file at every blog. The only problem is that the "link template to a file" input box's rootdir is the root of your blog, which is of course different for the different blogs.

For example you have this setup:

/home/blogs/blog1/ - www.blog1.com
/home/blogs/blog2/ - www.blog2.com

Now if you try to link to "/common_index.xml.tmpl" at blog1, it will create the file /home/blogs/blog1/common_index.xml.tmp. Which is of course hard to see from blog2. What you can do is set up a directory for all the common templates (for example: /home/blogs/common_templates) and link to it like this: ../common_templates/index.xml.tml

I know it's a dirty hack, it might even be a bug in the MovableType engine (but so far it's working at MT 3.2), but it works like a charm, you just have to set it up once at every blog, then a modification at any blog will affect all the other blogs too. You might need to rebuild all of your blogs to see it working in case you're not modifying a dynamic template.

To master this technique, you can separate common parts from individual ones with referring to template modules. If you refer to a module with <$MTInclude module="head"$> then every blog will look for the template module "head" in its own templates, so you can achieve individual heads, while having common index templates. Way to go!