Brad shared with me this cool Widget Manager hack that surfaces a drop down menu in the template editing interface allowing developers to easily insert the template tags necessary to insert a collection of widgets into their blog.

Of course I use the term "hack" loosely here because there is nothing hackish about it - the technique utilizes completely kosher plugin API calls introduced in Movable Type 3.3.

To install this hack, insert the following code in your plugins/WidgetManager/WidgetManager.pl file:

And insert this at the bottom of the same file: