I’ve Installed (Some Of) The Movable Type 3.11 Plugin Pack

Having recently installed Movable Type 3.11, I decided to have a look at the newly-available Plugin Pack for Movable Type. One plugin--MT-Blacklist--is very worth while; others are interesting but not particularly useful for me, and others don't even interest me.

I installed MT-Blacklist because this past week we've been getting assaulted by comment spam. Over the past year we've gotten one or two comment spams per week, but this past week we've gotten over 60! This plugin looks at every comment (and trackback) left on this site. If it's spam, it's never posted; if it's questionable it's put in a "moderation" queue; if it's clean it gets posted. MT-Blacklist is doing a good job of stopping it all--it's already caught 15 pieces.

Markdown is a text-to-HTML tool, designed to make it easy to make formatted entries to your site without knowing HTML. It's a little less complicated than HTML and is very readable--which I suppose makes it good for a novice--but it's still a new language/syntax to learn. Why not just learn the basics of HTML?

Pulling content from multiple weblogs is MultiBlog's purpose. It looks to offer lots of good features to do just that, but I'm primarily using PHP to accomplish the same thing.

danandsherree.com doesn't get enough comments for Notifier to be useful. MT-XSearch is an alternate search engine tool for developers (Movable Type comes with a pretty good search engine already). And KoalaRainbow is a tool to visualize activity and statistics of an MT-powered site--neat, but not too useful.

On the bright side, the Movable Type Plugins Directory has gobs of awesome plugins--several of which we're using.