As part of the giant overhaul I am preparing for kadavy.net, I was checking out all of the available plugins for Movable Type. So far,

• Compare, which enables you to use conditionals in your templates, is absolutely essential.
• I’ll also have to eventually get Acronym, which automatically attaches an acronym tag to known acronyms…and you can even add your own.
• Get XML looks very promising: you can suck data from an XML document to syndicate on your site. This would be good for syndicating my recent posts on Be A Design Group, but I couldn’t get it to work, and I think FatCow may not have the required Perl Modules installed, so I’m waiting to hear back on that.
• Notifier also looks nice. It enables users to subscribe to comments on specific entries.
• As a typography enthusiast, I have to get Smartypants to automatically generate “smart quotes”.

I also thought I saw one that would automatically generate hyperlinks for certain keywords that you could specify. That would also be a must-have. In exploring these plugins and Movable Type Template Tags, I am really beginning to appreciate how incredibly flexible Movable Type is.