Gadgetopia

Builderoo User Manual: This is an apparently amazing plugin for Movable Type called Builderoo that let’s you things with plain text markup that would be difficult with even WYSIWYG. Specifically:

1. Change text filters in the middle of an entry using Roo tags […]
2. Use special purpose filters to generate sophisticated content in the middle of an entry, and use your favorite text filter for the rest. […]
3. Apply multiple text filters to a section, or an entire weblog entry
4. Use several small filters to spice up your formatting, in addition to your favorite filter. […]
5. Speed up site building by caching the filtered output for a section. […]
6. Create macros to be expanded in an entry before filters are applied. […]
7. Build plugins that generate files based on mark-up […]

The example of switching filters is pretty cool — they go from Textile to something called Lilypond which generates musical notes (very cool by itself), then back to Textile.

The macros have huge promise too, though there have been other MT plugins for this. Still, this ability to abstract away repetitive formatting can make a lot of things easier and give you database-ish consistency between pages.