Movable Type is a great content management system but it's missing a few features. Thankfully the authors anticipated this and have included a flexible plug-in system.

These are the plug-ins currently used by Snowdune:

• FilterCategories
• FirstNWords
• MTEntryIfComments
• RelatedEntries
• catx - supplemental category tags
• ifempty
• macros - superb plugin that makes more complex article layouts dead simple
• otherblog
• randomentries
• regex
• sql
• textile - great text processing system

The best place to find out about Movable Type plugins is at the MT Plugin Directory. As you'll see Brad Choate wrote many of the above plugins - so a special thanks to Brad!

Now if only someone would write a decent email to entry plugin the world would be a better place....