OFFLINE AUTHORING
Offline authoring of blog entries can be quite an issue. I used to do this for a while and tried some of the available desktop clients, but they all sucked badly, as none was made specifically for MT and none had a decent user interface. So I tried a very quick and dirty PHP/MySQL-hack that worked fine but gave me headaches anyway because it was just too creepy. But now there is SharpMT, the first decent offline authoring tool for MT I came across. It allows to compose and save drafts locally (and offline) and to publish them later when back online with just one click. SharpMT supports all fields the default MT entry form has, talks to MT via XML-RPC, syncs with the blog and category lists on the server, and keeps a local directory of existing blog entries - .NET runtime required though.
MOBILE AUTHORING
In related news, I will also try out the Azure weblog client for J2ME mobile phones. Given Azure works (it's in the 0.1 stage now), it could be a convient and bandwidth-saving tool for posting little notes from on the road using my Siemens S55 phone (and it should give a much better moblogging experience than those mail-to-blog scripts, too).
KEEPING CONTROL
MT-Medic is a tiny monitoring and emergency tool that lives in the MT folder. It offers a Configuration Listing, an Installed Plugin Listing and can be used to reset author passwords and to grant permissions. While for the latter two tasks PHPMyAdmin works fine, too, the Installed Plugin Listing is very useful. It does not only list all the plugins that you have installed, but the template tags and filters each adds to MT as well, and can also be used for debugging purposes.
AVOIDING DUPLICATE ENTRIES
By the same author, the Avoiding Duplicate Comments Hacks. This hack modifies MT to simply ignore the same comment being entered multiple times for an entry. Does not work with the Berkeley DB.
FUN HACKS
The Most Popular Entries Sidebar uses Apache::ParseLog, XML::RSS, XML-PRC, cron, two Perl scripts and a RSS parser plugin for MT, all just to display, well, the most popular entries in a sidebar. currybetdotnet's solution does the same, but requires no more than a single Perl script and a tiny MT template.
TUTORIALS
movabletype.org tutorial: Using multiple archive templates
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