MT Plugin Winners

Six Apart has announced the winners of its Movable Type developer's contest. I'm thrilled to see there's going to be a new MT Blacklist that will be compatible with MT 3.x. Blacklist deserves the first place it won. I had to delete 54 spam comments today alone; something that I never had to do when running MT 2.6 w/Blacklist installed.

One of the second place winners, XSearch/Plus, also looks like a great addition. Even if no one ever uses it besides me (which I think is the case) the search function built into MT leaves a lot to be desired. This new plugin sounds like it will fix a lot of the weaknesses.

I'll also be installing one of the 3rd place winners, Multiblog, which allows you to include content from one blog in another. This should will finally solve a technical annoyance I've had for some time, which is that you don't see updates to the sidebars on this site (ambivalent images and ambits) until I rebuild this page, meaning I can update those "blogs" a zillion times but you'll never know it until I update this one. You hadn't noticed? Yeah, well, it's annoying to me, and that's really what this is all about, isn't it?

Finally, one of the competitors that didn't actually win looks like it should have. TypeMover is a plugin that lets you back up your entire MT installation—comments, trackbacks, templates, everything—rather than just the xml of your posts, which is what MT currently allows. I'll definitely be installing this soon.

Multiblog and Typemover appear to be available now. The others will be coming soon in a "plugin package" with all or several of the winning plugins packaged together. I'm looking forward to it.

Posted July 27, 2004 05:59 AM | meta-blogging