I upgraded my copy of ecto over the weekend...the new version supports a rich text editing mode (sort of like using MS word instead of typing in raw HTML). I haven't used ecto much lately but it is a nice frontend to MT.

The only problem I'm seeing with the Rich Text editing option is that it doesn't support all HTML tags. While understandable, it'd be nice if there was an option to ignore HTML tags it doesn't understand (or define new tags, or something other than to strip out tags it doesn't understand).

I see from this post that the developer of ecto is running into the same problems using the various blog APIs I've been running into (though I'm only frontending MovableType these days). My biggest problem: getting content entered by users converted into clean UTF-8 encoding for XML-RPC. MovableType does not appear to normalize content when you retrieve it via the XML-RPC interface, so you can end up with content entered via the MT forms which you cannot retrieve via XML-RPC (at least using the PEAR PHP XML classes). I'm not necessarily blaming MT, I have no idea where the fault lies.