ReadWriteWeb report today that Six Apart have announced the release of some Six Apart plugins for WordPress at Wordcamp Mid-Atlantic. RWW think this is “shocking”. If they think that counts as shocking they need to get out more….

I was intrigued enough to zip on over the their page for WordPress users, and yes, sure enough, there are some shocking plugins available.

On initial examination, I kind of felt there wasn’t much new to it: wow a comment spam plugin, an advertising plugin… The only one that caught my eye was the TypePad connect plugin, and even that one I kind of knew wasn’t going to be a runner.

Yes it does lots of fantastic stuff, see the above page for a feature list, but it struck me that:

• users had to go off to TypePad.com to register for your blog
• comments were no longer stored on your own blog
• the gains offered for the above are really not worth it

So I gave it the benefit of the doubt and installed the code on a test blog site. Installation itself is pretty easy, so no complaints there.

As expected, the newly activated plugin does make users go off to TypePad.com and create a TypePad account in order to become a member of your site. This doesn’t sit nicely with me: users click a link on your site and all of a sudden they are on TypePad.com being asked for their email address, set a password and their date of birth (TypePad: you don’t need my DOB, you might think you do, but you just don’t).

Ok so if you do all that and post a comment on my site it shows up and there are all the extra goodies they mention on their page.

Some points against:

• You no longer have comments stored within your own site
• Comments are harder to manage: two different sites to manage your blog, your blog site and your comment site
• Not offering much: threaded comments are available in WP 2.7.x, Comment Spam is not an issue with plugins
• The community thing: wow, you can create profiles. Not a big seller for me.
• I can’t find any option to export your comments back to WordPress if you choose to leave TypePad connect???

The very fact that comments are no longer stored within my own WordPress database, not even duplicated there, is a deal breaker for me. Comment counts are often used in my work for listing most popular posts, etc. I see no need to have data stored elsewhere.

In short, there are some nice features here and I think it is great that Six Apart are opening up their work to other platforms, but so far, there is nothing here that makes me want to use one of their plugins.

TIP: If you think TypePad connect might be something you find useful, check out IntenseDebate also.