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Best MovableType Plugins
First off Movabletype is server based blog software. In fact, I
would say it is hands down easily the best blog software
available today - for a few different reasons:
- Maximum SEO potential - My entries normally appear well ranked
in Google 48 hours after posting them.
- Movabletype can be configured to spit raw .html or non dynamic
pages.
- There is a free non-commercial version, although I recommend
buying a license if you use it even casually.
- Install, usage, and maintenance are all very well documented
and easy for even a novice user.
- The application itself is extremely portable: mySQL, Postgres,
Berkley DB (file system).
- Automatically generated RSS compliant feeds aka 'spider food'.
- Most of the hot chicks I see blogging are using MovableType or
Typepad.
- Movabletype's plugin system is very advanced and the community
is always pumping out new plugins and widgets for MT based
bloggers. SEO'ing Movabletype takes some tinkering but the
rewards are well worth the pain.
Here are a couple of my recent rankings for some rather
competitive keywords: Sendstudio
Review, Aweber Review. Keep in
mind this blog is only 3 months old, and I do virtually nothing
to promote it. Right then. I am focusing on my last point and
will outline in my opinion the best Movabletype plugins, why I
think they are useful, and if needed a small blurb of code to
help you along. As of version 3.2, Movabletype comes installed
by default with the following plugins: NoFollow, and the 3 Spam
Lookup plugs. These guys are fairly self explanatory and well
documented in the MT manual pages.
Now for my own personal must have list:
Dashify
Dashify is
based on dirify. What it does is allow for some handy parsing of
pretty much any text you want on your blog, for adding your own
useful characters. Here is an example to illustrate:
Hover over the title or look at the page title of this entry you
are reading and you will see how well my pages are optimized for
search: best-movabletype-plugins.php is a much better filename
than 289374.php or even best_movabletype_plugins.php - as of
this writing Google sees the hyphen as a space but not the
underscore. Simple, yet effective.
MTPaginate
Movabletype is not all that scalable right out of the box. In
fact, not at all really. If you bust your ass filling your
weblog with content, before you know it your category pages are
reduced to bandwidth hogging scroll sessions. MTPagina
te does what the name says, it paginates any entry or
category listing you like into user friendly navigable areas:
1 |2 | 3 or Previous | Next,
etc. I would speculate that Stepen Riya's MTPaginate will
eventually be built into MT by default before too long. The tags
are covered in full on Stepen's website, and are staight forward.
Typepad Users: I notice Emily Robbins rants up Typepad's lack of pagination on a recent blog
entry. She raises some very valid points with the MT support
staff. Again I think this will be addressed by Sixapart quite
soon.
MT Blogroll
Movalog has too many good
plugins to cover here but their Blogroll has long been a favorite of the majority of MT users. A
blogroll is an essential tool for building links with other same
themed sites as your own. MT Blogroll keeps track of a link's
URL, name, description, relationship, category and more.
MT InlineEditor
Another Movalog plugin Inline
Editor allows you to edit your comments and entries via cool
Ajax code. Ajax is that nifty new technology that allows you to
talk back to the webserver without reloading the page. Catching
typos is no longer a 4 click solution.
MT-Textile
This is Brad Choate's well known plugin for performing various
text formatting functions. Mt-Textile
integrates the Perl Text::Textile module with Movable Type.
BigPAPI
BigPapi by Kevin Shay is an extension to the MovableType API allowing
users to modify MT's own interface - the screens you see when
using Movable Type to manage your content. If you are wanting to
tinker with MT's control panel, this is worth a look. There is
also an growing list of some very useful plugins that rely on
the BigPAPI architecture. From the developer:
The BigPAPI plugin doesn't actually do all that much. It
simply overrides a couple of subroutines in the MT::App module
that are called whenever a page of the MT CMS is about to be
displayed. Before going ahead and building the page, it runs
some callbacks. So your plugin simply needs to install
appropriately named callbacks for a particular CMS page (or all
pages), and you'll have the opportunity to tinker with the
contents of the page before it's displayed to the user.
Honourable Mentions...
There are literally hundreds of movabletype plugins and my short
list is by no means the same as another users. My list is
focused on getting a movabletype publishing platform ready for
spidering. Different tasks require different tools. Props to the
various authors and contributors and DO support these people
with donations or praise, or we will all be stuck coding these
tools ourselves ;)
Sixapart's
main movabletype plugin page - Definitely start here.
Sixaparts forum is
also essential.
Ajaxify -
Another great tool from Movalog, Ajaxify is a set of plugins
that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type
interface. It currently consists of EnhancedEntryEditing - that
adds a WYSIWYG editor and resizable textarea controls to the
entry screen - and Search Suggestions - that add a "Google
Suggest" like feature to the quicksearch box.
The CheckLi
nks plugin tries to access all the URLs linked to in your
entries (or a subset of your entries), and lets you display a
list of the ones it can't successfully access. Another fine
StaggerNation.com creative based on BigPAPI extensions.
FormatList v1.0 - Easy Bullet
Lists in Entries. I use this personally and I find it a nice
keystroke saver.
Better File Uploader - This one relies on
BigPAPI and is a sexier interface for uploading files.
About the author:
----- Miles Evans provides indepth reviews on every
SEO/marketing or killer app he can get his paws on. His reviews,
essays, and tools on SEO, OLM, reporting, and other equally
fascinating subjects are normally carried out at ProfitPapers.com - Stop
by and check out the free
backlinks page.