I have downloaded and installed the upgrade to the new release of Movable Type, version 3.1, which came out August 31. I had been running version 3.0D. I didn't need or want the Developer edition but the tried and tested version 2.6n was no longer available when I moved my blogging from Typepad to my own hosted web site.
One disadvantage of MT 3.0 is that MT-Blacklist, an important Plug-in for controlling comment and trackback spam in MT 2.6n and earlier versions, did not work with MT 3.0. But there is a new release of MT-Blacklist designed for MT 3.1. This was important to me because I started to get comment and trackback spam in August and it became a nuisance to clean it off my site. I disabled trackbacks for a while.
It was also useful to visit the MT Plugin pages and to explore some of the other tools. For instance there is plugin to navigate to the next entry within a category that works nicely on the Individual Archive template.
MT 3.1 also handles sub-categories, and I will have to work on all my templates to work this feature in. I think this feature will help me to organize the log and to sharpen my writing.
Tony: How is 3.1 working for you? I am still on 2.661, still getting tons of spam despite MT Blacklist doing all it can. I think I will switch to 3.1 this month. Are you still getting a lot of spam? - Randy
Version 3.1 is working fine for me but I see that SixApart has had to release a new bug-fixed version 3.11. It looks like users with Berkley DBs have had problems. That hasn't been a factor me because I installed with a MySQL DB. So far, I have not tried to enable the new dynamic page features which also seem to have generated bug complaints.
The new version 2.0 Blacklist seems to be working. I have not had to manually delete any comments. I had some Trackback notification emails but Blacklist held the trackbacks and I despammed them. My Blacklist log indicates a lot of spam is getting bounced. The new Blacklist has a central Blacklist and it has an auto-update feature. I did not use the older versions and I don't know if you had to manually import updates to your local Blacklist.