So as we’ve covered before, RedMonk’s selected Movable Type as the platform to power our blogs. The reasoning behind the decision was in part my own familiarity and comfort level with the application, but the prevalence of community plugins and functionality extensions played an equally large role. As we’ve seen with other platforms such as Eclipse, the success or failure of the application is ultimately defined as much by the ecosystem it fosters (or doesn’t) as by the functionality of the platform itself.
So what about MT’s ecosystem? It’s seems to be quite healthy, despite the furor over the pricing changes, and in my experience MT-Blacklist is the best of the bunch (Six Apart agrees).
Like many others, RedMonk has ongoing issues with comment spam, but MT-Blacklist has been a godsend for us. The ability to hunt down and delete useless comments system-wide would be pretty good, but it’s ability to dynamically update spam rules from a central clearinghouse just as you would for a commercial email anti-spam solution is outstanding. There isn’t a perfect fix for the problem of comment spam yet – and I don’t see one on the horizon – but MT-Blacklist at least makes the situation sufficiently manageable that I haven’t felt compelled to shut off comments. So thanks to Jay Allen, its developer. We’ll be donating shortly.
