Essential Movable Type Plugins

Movable Type is one of the most installed software solutions ever released and Web professional that use the platform (either as a blog or as a CMS) often choose to stay with the solution for its ease of use, powerful features and active support community - not to mention the many excellent plugins that provide some value-adds to both administrators and end-users. Let's look at a few now; perhaps you'll consider Movable Type over WordPress for your next install?

10 Essential Plugins (and a few extras) for Movable Type - MT4

Action Streams: A plugin enabling users to aggregate, control, and share data from around the Web, as well as list profiles from various services - sort of a plugin for life-streaming. The plugin allows users to fully control what data/actions are shown.

There are actually quite a few MT plugins for action streams including those for Blip.TV, Hulu, Facebook, Get Satisfaction, Joost, Reddit, 12Seconds, Disqus and many others.

Post Office - Moblogging: Allows users to post to their blog via e-mail. Works by connecting the blog to an existing e-mail account which periodically scans for messages to post. Each user can be given a unique e-mail address from which they can post by sending an e-mail.

TypePad AntiSpam: Developed by Six Apart, TypePad AntiSpam blocks comment spam to improve the quality of blog conversations. The spam filtering services combines several adaptive learning engines to score inbound comments, trackbacks and pingbacks to determine if the comment is spam.

MT-Approval: Another spam comment plugin that enables users to mask the true location of comments with JavaScript. Bloggers can add a beacon to comment forms to discourage direct post, require challenge and response for comment forms and even add a timer to root out quick-posting robots.

Refeed: Excellent plugin that pulls content stored in multiple external blogs and republishes or "re-blogs" them locally in Movable Type. Administrators moderate the content through a interface into which they enter URLs, RSS and Atom feeds which Movable Type then monitors for new content and pulling it into a blog.

reBlog: A similar MT plugin for reblogging content from many published RSS feeds.

Hypehenation: Provides automatics hyphenation of text based on the OpenOffice hyphenation dictionary. The plugin can be used to hyphenate all text, or just selected portions of it.

Visitor-Stats: A Movable Type plugin for version 4.0 that displays visitor and page view statistics for blogs. The pro version (commercial license $97, non-commercial $33) provides even more statistics and widgets including "most read entries," "most read entries in this category" and detailed stats for each entry - including tracking the activity of registered members.

Gravatar 2: A plugin that uses Gravatar's global recognized avatar system to put the correct image URL based on the commenter's email address.

Another, better option for commenting might the Facebook Connect for Commenters plugin, which adds Facebook Connect to any Movable Tupe powered site and allows FB users to sign in, comment and share their actions back on FB.

Customized Email Templates: allows for the customization of email notification templates on a per blog basis through MT4 template management screens.

Joomsayer: Enables users to display quotes with different style sheets. The plugin takes content and displays two quote at the upper left corner and one in the lower right. Since this is a difficult effect to achieve in HTML and style sheets, a plugin like Joomsayer makes implementing this effect a breeze.

Another design related plugin is Curvaceous, which forces text to flow smoothly around the edges of irregularly shaped images.

SocioTags: A plugin which adds a list of social tag and bookmark images to Movable Type entries. Each of the page sharing services featured within the plugin can be enabled or disabled with ease.