Congrats to the people at Six Apart on today’s release of Movable Type 3.1 and the Developer’s Contest Plugin Pack. The former is a pretty big update to the weblog publishing tool I can’t live without; the latter is a demonstration of the cool things that independent developers can do to add functionality to Movable Type. (The Plugin Pack is also the only way that you can get a fully-supported version of MT-Blacklist that works with Movable Type 3.X.) The third piece of news is that Anil is heading up the new Six Apart Professional Network, which looks like it’s going to be devoted to connecting developers and users with the resources they need in order to use Movable Type, TypePad, and TypeKey in their own applications.

All very cool; now that there’s a version of MT-Blacklist for 3.X, I’ll probably upgrade tonight. I also joined SAPN, so we’ll see where that leads.