I checked out http://www.movabletype.org and found out that there was update to MovableType 3.x. Naturally, I thought “what the hell, might as well upgrade too.”

Absent-mindedly I set the FTP upload to replace any existing directories… so the plugins directory was obliterated and replaced with a fresh empty one.

My blog is heavily modified with plugins and hacks, it simply will not work without them at this juncture, so I began the quest of looking for every last one of ‘em – which was rather difficult since you don’t really remember these things.

So here I am, online again. And this time, I’m listing the plugins I use for later reference (read: in case I try something stupid again)

While I’m at it, might as well include links and explanations.

System plugins

• MT Blacklist 2.x – Best spam comment filtering for any blogging system.
• Kill nav-commenters.gif – Obsessive compulsive tool that deletes a useless file that keeps on spawning on every publish/rebuild.
• MTAdminLinks – check here for more info
• MTCheckLinks – checks posts for dead links (not that I do anything about them, but it’s nice to know I can if I wanted to)

Organization

• IfModified – There’s a tag that displays the last modified date of a post. This plugin however makes it possible to control when it is shown. I set it to only display if there has been a considerable amount of time that has passed from the creation date (to avoid false-positives by immediate spelling grammar corrections)
• FirstNWords – Outputs the first bunch of words of any post (useful for content snippets)
• MTPhotoGallery – Outputs raw links of images found in selected folders.
• WordCount – Calculates number of words in a given post.
• XMLSmartestEncode – Needed to fix some parsing errors with MT to validate with Atom feed.

Aesthetics

• MarkDown – More info here
• SmartyPants – Used in tandem with MarkDown, this plugin translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.
• MTGrid – I use this in conjunction with MTPhotoGallery. It organizes the images in a grid layout like in this page
• MT-Ellipsis – I use this in conjunction with the FirstNwords plugin; since words may vary in length, to ensure a decent “cut” to fit the layout/stylesheet dimensions MT-Ellipsis counts by character and neatly puts an ellipsis (…) at the point of termination.
• Archive Date Header – This is what I use to achieve the neat consolidated year-then-months listing in the sidebar of the main page.
• Bö – Footnote support
• MTRoundRobin – Toggles alternating data based on what you set. Very useful if you want to generate rows/columns that have different classes/ids so you can style them with alternating colors.

Navigation

• MTPaginate – Allows breaking up blocks of information into multiple pages. Used in almost every page that has tons of output (archives, gallery)
• ArchiveYear – What I use to achieve what you see in pages like this.
• OnThisDay – Fun plugin to use. Shows links to other entries in the past/future that were posted on the same day – like on this page
• MT RelatedEntries – Lists possible related entries by keywords