What Are Your “Essential” Plugins?


Published on December 1, 2005 at 8:56 PM EST
In the Discussions category.

A new mixed drink, featuring three of your favorites. An alcohol-free version is available for minors.

There are gobs of plugins available for Movable Type. I’d bet that most people who use version 3.2 are using the SpamLookup and Nofollow plugins, and many of you probably have at least a few others installed.

Of all the plugins you use, what are the three most essential? (Yes, you have to narrow it down to three!) Which ones make your site run the way it does, provide you the options you want, or otherwise improve your Movable Type installation?

My favorite three?

  • SpamLookup is essential for keeping a site spam-free. It does a great job, but you probably already knew that.
  • SmartyPants provides typographically-correct punctuation: curly quotes, ellipsis, and em-dashes amongst them. Typographically-correct punctuation just looks better.
  • Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I find Better File Uploader necessary. It makes it so much easier and faster for me add photos and build photo galleries. (Of course, since it requires the BigPAPI plugin, I suppose I broke my self-imposed “three essential plugins” rule.)

What are your three picks?

This article is tagged as: Better File Uploader, Discussions, nofollow, Plugins, SmartyPants, Spam, SpamLookup

Comments

So far, there are 4 comments and Trackbacks on this entry. Add yours!

1

By Minh Nguyá»…n Author Profile Page, written on December 2, 2005 at 7:34 PM.

Since I maintain my own MT installation, as well as a couple installations for others, I’ll post three sets of three. First, my personal installation:

  1. Gravatar, because most of my readers are used to Xanga and LiveJournal, where you get buddy pictures
  2. OpenID Comments, because most of my readers have LiveJournal accounts
  3. processtags.pl

Apparently MTLJPost has been updated to work with 3.2, so I’ll have to try that out soon.

For my church, I maintain their website using MT. The website uses the typical website structure, rather than a blog structure:

  1. A modified Enhanced Entry Editing, because the parish staff doesn’t know any HTML, but they always like to include tables in their posts
  2. UpdateAuthoredOn, since the staff doesn’t like to deal with multiple versions of the same page
  3. SomeDays, to display upcoming events that are stored as forward-dated entries

For my dorm’s blog:

  1. Smilies, since the dorm members love to include those little things (thanks!)
  2. MT Blogroll
  3. StyleCatcher

If Enhanced Entry Editing worked with that site, it would be essential, too.

2

By bruce21 Author Profile Page, written on November 5, 2006 at 12:15 AM.

A Better File Uploader for easy image handling.
RightFields for extra fields and conditional statements in templates.
CatEntries to manage Menus and prevent redundancy.

And…and…oops, three eh? ;)
Have two more essential ones but its a secret…

3

By Alex , written on November 12, 2006 at 4:28 PM.

Plugin Manager, Feed Manager, RightFields

4

By Mihai Bocsaru , written on May 5, 2007 at 6:23 AM.

As a Movable Type Consultant, I am always using movable type plugins for my customers

Among these plugins, I often use:

- MTSQL for performing advanced database queries;

- ifempty for being able to use tag conditional displays;

- Compare;

- EmbedImage.

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