I got tired of always including target="_blank" when making links in my posts here in Moveable Type. So I went searching for a way to make this happen automatically. (This was one of the reaasons I wanted to get away from Newspro, in fact). I searched through the support forums on moveabletype.org but only found one tip that seemed to do what I wanted.
You basically add a line that says <base target="_blank"> in the <head> section of your main template. That works fine, but the problem is that it affects every link on the page. I wanted to have links in just the entries themselves open in a new window. I looked all over and didn't see a solution that fit, so I hacked up one.
If you're in need of this sort of thing as well, I have a fix (of sorts). It's kind of a drastic one, too. But first, the fix. On or about line 515 of $MTDIR/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm (in the '_hdlr_entry_body' subroutine), add this line:
$text =~ s/<\s*A\s+HREF\s*=\s*(["'])(.*?)\1\s*>/<A HREF="$2" target="_blank">/gi;
That will turn every anchor tag into one which opens in a new window. As I said, it has drawbacks:
You can get around #2 by using a conditional with a regex test. You could also use another regex right before it to strip any existing target=... stuff, then re-apply the target="_blank" Not terribly elegant, though. But since I only have ~100 entries and two authors (who both want the same thing) on my web site, and it's kinda late, the solution works for me.
I'll likely wind up investigating a more permanent/graceful way to get his done but this works for now...