Plug In To Movable Type 3.0 Developer Contest Winners

Tonight, at BlogOn, we announced the winners of our Plug In To Movable Type 3.0 Developer's contest. While we received many excellent plugins, we could only award six prizes. These were awarded to those plugins that first met a technical review for soundness and security and then received high marks for broad applicability, robustness, integration, clean architecture and design. Additionally, these plugins were plugins that took advantage of changes made in 3.0.

The winners and some additional plugins will be distributed in a plugin pack nearer to the release of Movable Type 3.1 (we'll be announcing more about 3.1 tomorrow). Additionally, we'll be assisting in testing of these plugins with Movable Type users with various hosting set-ups.

These plugins will be distributed for free by Six Apart.

And now to the winners:

First Prize:

Jay Allen, MTBlackList 2.0

A comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and trackbacks, complete with a management interface and remote importing of blacklist entries.

This new release integrates more easily into Movable Type�s core engine and provides pass-thru for comments authenticated through a trusted registration source, like TypeKey. Those familiar with MTBlacklist 1.0 will be blown away by the new interface, controls over spam blocking, along with attention to detail in the new release. For example, you can choose to automatically pass-through visitors who have already signed in through TypeKey. This is a complete rewrite of BlackList 1.0 taking advantage of all the new hooks in Movable Type 3.0.

Jay wins a powerhouse desktop system worth more than $7,000. An Apple G5 dual 2GHz with 23" Apple Cinema HD Display and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS.

Second Prize (2)

Andrew Sutherland, KoalaRainbow

KoalaRainbow is a visualization engine for Movable Type. It consists of a query language that allows users a good deal of freedom to construct the data they wish to visualize, and a procedural mechanism for visualizing that data. Features XPath-like query language supporting arbitrary queries with partial evaluation and constraint propagation of expressions to DB queries. Support for client-side image map generation.

Andrew's entry was certainly the most creative entry we received. His plugin is rooted in the geekiness that makes us love publishing on the web and is an example of what we've always said about the developer community: they think of ways to extend Movable Type that we would never think of.

Tim Appnel, XSearch/Plus

XSearch/Plus is a complete system for plugging alternate search engines into your Movable Type install and includes a robust sample implementation of a Plucene-powered search engine.

Tim recognized a need in Movable Type for a more robust, scalable search engine. He built not only a new engine around Plucene, the Perl port of the Lucene indexed search engine, but a new search framework for building additional engines that share the same interface and template tags.

Both Tim and Andrew will receive an Apple 17" PowerBook G4 Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS.

Third Prize (3)

David Raynes, MultiBlog

MultiBlog is a plugin that allows the user to include templated content from one blog in the template of another. It allows the user to define when a post to one blog should trigger a rebuild in another.

One of Movable Type's strengths is that it allows you to maintain separate weblogs from the same system installation. MultiBlog allows you to break down that divide between weblogs, adding cross-weblog template tags and rebuild dependencies, along with the ability to create an aggregated list of the posts from all of the weblogs in the system.

John Gruber, Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).Thus, "Markdown" is two things: a plain text markup syntax, and a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text markup to HTML. Markdown works both as a Movable Type plug-in and as a standalone Perl script -- which means it can also be used as a text filter in BBEdit (or any other application that supports filters written in Perl).

Markdown is impressive not only for its clean markup syntax--allowing non-technical writers to produce valid XHTML without having to learn, well, what that means, or why it matters--but for the flexibility with which it was implemented, which allows it to be used seamlessly in a number of different environments, from Movable Type to BBEdit.

Chad Everett, Notifier

Notifier provides a subscription service to your users so that they can keep up on changes to your site without having to check back repeatedly. Notifier also has support for opt-out records, to allow users to indicate that they no longer wish to receive notifications. MT-Notifier automatically handles blog security, allowing logged-in users to see only the blogs to which they have access, and requiring a unique security code for each user to modify their subscriptions. And it allows the user to define access rules between blogs.

Weblogs are increasingly becoming important communication channels, and Notifier helps to close one of the few remaining loops in the conversation, allowing site visitors to subscribe to comment threads, categories, or entire weblogs, and receive updates via email.

David, John and Chad will all receive Apple's latest 40GB iPod worth $399. We�ll be throwing in a $100 iTunes gift certificate to make up for the reduction in the cost of the iPod. They'll also receive Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS.

We wish all of our winners could be present tonight. Tim and Chad were there in person and Jay, who lives in Hungary, was on the phone when we announced first prize.

For those who didn't win, we'll provide feedback on any issues that may be technically improved for a final release (we want to make sure that all security issues are caught). Once again, we wish we could award more prizes since there were so many great plugins.

This contest and the award ceremony tonight really officially kicks off the network. For the 1000+ who have signed up to receive more news, you'll finally be hearing from us shortly.

Additionally, we thank our judges, Chris Shipley, Dan Bricklin, Cameron Marlow, Stewart Butterfield, Cory Doctorow and Jeff Jarvis. Also, we thank Adobe for generously donating the six copies of Create Suite Premium with GoLive CS.

We thank all for entering and look forward to making your work available!