A quick pagination hack for Movable Type

One of the most common feature requests for Movable Type is entry pagination. It is actually a sticky problem for a system that utilizes static publishing like Movable Type though. *As an aside, I am become very unfond of the term “static publishing” and am coming around to what I think is a more apt term: “pre-emptive caching.”* Anyways, there are a number of well supported techniques for pagination, and the one I send most people to is Mark Carey’s [Pagination plugin](http://mt-hacks.com/pagination.html). But when people feel that is overkill, I often help them implement the following hack.

The hack is simple when you think about it:
* Create a template that outputs a relatively large number of entries.
* Segment the entries into several groups.
* Using some simple template code, wrap each group of entries with a simple PHP statement that will only be evaluated according to the current page being viewed.
It is simple and quick to implement. For example, here is the code I use on Chicago Now to achieve some simple pagination:

<?php if ($page == ) { ?>

<?php
$limit = ;
$page_count = ;
if ($page < $page_count) {
echo '« Older Posts‘;
}
if ($page > 1) {
echo ‘Newer Posts »‘;
}
?>

You see a [live demo](http://www.chicagonow.com/recent/) on [Chicago Now](http://www.chicagonow.com/)…
**Pros of this method**
* Its free.
* Fast to implement
* Fast page load times
* More page views for your site and more ad impressions
* Achieves desired objective
**Cons**
* The more pages you want your users to be able to navigate back in time, the longer it will take to publish, *cough* I mean cache the page.
* You can’t really go back in time infinitely. You have to choose a reasonable number of pages to allow your users to paginate through. On the plus side, most users most navigate that far back – rarely more than 10 pages in fact.
Anyways, I hope this hack helps you. If you have any questions, or need help, please let me know.

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