Other Movable Type Developer's Contest Entries

MultiBlog by David Raynes makes the content of blogs available to other blogs in the same Movable Type installation. Access control features let you specify which blogs can use the content of which other blogs. A single template can include aggregated content of multiple blogs.

KeyValue Entries by Michael Sheets extends Brad Choate's KeyValues plugin with a replacement tag for MTEntries that only returns entries with certain keys/values. Brad's plugin lets you add "key=value" lines to the end of the entry text to assign arbitrary properties to the entry, which can be used elsewhere in the template. Michael's extension lets you filter a collection of entries by their keys.

Timothy Appnel has two entries: Tiny Orwell [tar.gz] is a locally-managed TypeKey-like replacement authentication package. X-Search [tar.gz] is a pluggable search engine framework for Movable Type. Tim is also working on a Plucene-based engine for X-Search, which is not yet released.

Andrew Sutherland gave us a preview of his blog activity visualization engine, KoalaRainbow. Some of the things it can do include a "pulse" monitor, a timeline with shapes to represent content, VU-style activity meters, and pretty cross-bar category displays. A preview of the documentation is also available.

Jay Allen entered a new major version of MTBlacklist, Jay's popular comment spam countermeasure plugin and service. The latest public release doesn't quite work in Movable Type 3.01D, so the public release of this new version is highly anticipated by the bleeding edgers. (I'm not running it, and I'll be curious to see how big a problem comment spam will be. It wasn't much of a problem when I ran custom software, though occasionally marketers would post advertisements by hand. Given the length of the blacklist, it sounds like a very serious problem indeed.)

Bits and Pieces by John Wehr lets you create macro-like Movable Type template tags with a web interface. It's great for changing a section of text in multiple places on a website all at once.

TypeMover by Sebastian Delmont is a backup, restore and migration system for Movable Type. MT's existing "export" feature does not dump all of the data, making it insufficient for backups or migrations. TypeMover does it the right way.

Chad Everett submitted updated versions of several of his plugins, including MT-ModCheck, a troubleshooting plugin that detects Perl modules; MT-Notifier, which lets blog readers sign up to receive email when comments are posted to an entry; MT-Outliner, MT template tags that render OPML outline data; and MT-SomeDays, which lets you build sophisticated calendar displays. Chad also submitted an early version of MT-Moderate (not yet publicly released), which will automatically set comments to be moderated for older entries.

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No doubt these are just a few of the plugins contending for prizes. If your plugin is not mentioned here and is (or will be) publicly available, please post a comment or a TrackBack.