Just in case would-be WordPress developers were feeling empty since the completion of Alex King’s theme competition, along comes Mark with Weblog Tools Collection’s Wordpress Plugin and Mod Competition!

Given the popularity of Alex’s theme competition, this Plugin and Mod competition is sure to spark the creative juices of many in the WordPress community (much to the benefit of the entire WP community!) This is utterly fantastic because who knows in what ways new plug-ins will enhance the functionality of WordPress 1.5! I can’t wait to see the entries roll in.

The contest will run for two months, starting on April 15th (ugh – tax day…guess you can’t expect folks to have time to work on much before that), and while the prize list hasn’t been fully determined, there’s at least $500 in it for one lucky developer courtesy of weblogs.us, and Mark may even contribute a Sony PSP (which, btw, has one of the best TV ad campaigns I’ve ever seen – every commercial I see REALLY makes me want to buy one (and that says a lot since I usually pooka pooka (tivo) my way through commercials), alas I lack the funds

Creating Static Pages using WordPress

WordPress creates dynamic pages on the fly, using PHP, which means that it takes a WHOLE lot less time to publish your pages/site with WordPress than it does with MovableType. However, some have said that the dynamic pages create an additional load on the server (hey, but so does the process of publishing using MT), and others want static pages as they are more easily cached. According to Jeff Minard, a plugin for WordPress called ‘WP-Statictize’, will make ‘WP will create static versions of pages on the fly and essentially act like MT by creating static pages, just in a slightly different (note: better ) way.’

Fighting comment and TrackBack spam with a WordPress Plugin

Craig from nuclear moose candy said, ‘If you use WordPess in combination with Kitten’s Spam tool plugins, you get fantastic comment spam moderation. I can delete a comment, flag it as spam, add the IP, email address, and some keywords to the spam words list with a single click of the button. The tool is intelligent enough to delete duplicates from the spam words list, as well. Additionally, Kitten created a ‘retrospaminator’ which will go back through all of you old comments looking for any you may have missed.

Note - his site has a lot of great WordPress tips on it which I’m gonna go check out right now!

Brad Choate has created an amazing plugin for Movable Type that allows you to create and reference additional fields, making it more easy to use Movable Type as a semi-full featured CMS System