If you are a Moveable Type blog user and fan as I am then you will find these must have plugins will really help you manage and improve your blog.
I’ve been a Moveable Type user for many years now, and I have to say that I’m very impressed with how it has been improving. Simply upload the files, check to ensure you have the prerequisites and log in. Within a few minutes and some basic setup you can begin blogging.
Whether you are familiar with Moveable Type or not, you will also find that plugins can be extremely helpful. While Moveable Type comes with some great ones built in like spam filtering you will find a few others which are very helpful.
The first plugin every Moveable Type blogger should install is the Plugin Manager. As the name suggests, this plugin actually helps you manage any other plugins you would like to install.
Installation of this plugin is quite easy. It actaully has an install script which you can run from your web browser after you’ve installed it. It will then check for some required prerequisites (which you can download from the product website if you are missing any) and then install the plugin for you. Once it is installed you will find it in your admin menu under “system shortcuts”:
From here, managing your plugins is a breeze. It will monitor for updates and provide a much easier way to update those plugins as well as add new ones or remove ones you don’t wish to use anymore.
One of the biggest problem plaguing most bloggers is comment spam. Thankfully there is a great plugin that helps you control spam in your Moveable Type blog. It is the Comment Challenge plugin. You can either download and install this plugin the “old” way, or use the above plugin manager.
Once installed new comments require a “comment beacon” to be present within the blog post. This beacon is designed so that automated blog commenting.
Simply adding a special comment tag to your comment forms (likely on your individual entries and comment preview pages) “turns on” the plugin. You then need to enable it for each individual blog:
and then set your preferences:
The EnhancedEntryEditing plugin provides a great WYSIWYG editor for your posts which is built on TinyMCE, a very powerful web editor:
This is handy especially if you are unfamiliar with HTML yet have an image of how you’d like your post to look.
The FeedManager Plugin helps manage your feeds (as the name suggests).
It allows you to output your feed into an HTML page which a regular web browser can read. It also allows for 3rd party services like Flickr etc to autodiscover your feed:
And it has podcasting support so that people can download your podcasts from podcast directories:
The MTNotifier plugin greatly increases the notification options you have available on your site.
With it you can extend the notification process by allowing subscriptions to individual entries as well as providing new entry notification for individual categories or even across an entire blog.
It also has a handy admin section where you can see who is subscribed:
Of course there are many other plugins one can add to their Moveable Type blog. These are just a few that I’ve found to be the most handy.
In reality, Moveable Type is more than just a blogging platform. It can easily be converted into a full service content management system.
As with other blog platforms it is easily customizable (as I’ve shown here) and can take advantage of the latest “web 2.0” technologies.
