Well, I've been running Mango Blog (on Railo) for about a week now, and I'm very satisfied with it overall. Mad kudos to Laura Arguello from AsFusion. Coming from a WordPress (PHP blog) environment, I'm particularly impressed with its plugin architecture. After doing some research a couple days ago (thanks Adam Tuttle for your tutorials), I spent a few hours today building my first plugin. While I'm very comfortable with CFCs and custom tags, I've never worked with an event-based/broadcasting architecture before. It was very different for me and quite compelling to figure out. (Its been a good few years since I printed source code to review away from the computer lol).
While I'm certain I've only scratched the surface with the Mango Blog engine, I believe I've managed to produce my first addition to the Mango Blog community with RandomString. This plugin allows you to output a different phrase, quote, magical incantation, or any other sequential string of words you choose, every time your page is refreshed. An example of its use can be seen at the top of this site underneath the logo (refresh to see the tagline change).
The list content for the plugin is managed through the Mango Blog admin settings page (once installed and activated), and can be configured to work as a pod (like in your sidebar), or can be called directly as a custom tag like this:
<mangox:randomString />
The RandomString plugin can be downloaded here. I am also submitting the plugin to RIAForge.com and it would be my first submission to that site as well. I could not find a place to upload or submit the plugin to Mango Blog's site. Perhaps someone will point me in the right direction there. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it. Thanks for the great work with Mango Blog! Also, of course, ColdFusion rules!
I'm Matt Hill, a Sacramento area application developer working with CF for close to a decade, and this is my personal blog. 
May 31, 2009 at 10:53 PM Great plugin. Nice and simple. Just the way I like it. :) I might try to use this for a random quote in my current projects sidebar. Welcome to mango blog!
May 31, 2009 at 11:44 PM Thanks for the welcome, Mark! Hope the plugin works for your project :)
Nov 24, 2009 at 3:51 AM this is nice information need to know more
Jan 7, 2010 at 1:06 AM Hi Matt!
I'm new to Mango and LOVING it. I was thinking of writing a plugin like this once I was more comfortable with plugins but it looks like you may have saved me the trouble.
I installed it and it works just fine as a pod... but I need to use it as a custom tag and that does not seem to be working for me.
I used your sample above and just get an error because CF can't locate the custom tag. The plugin is not installed in tags\mangoextras which is where the "mangox" shortcut points to so it makes sense that it would not work this way. I found the plugin files under the \components\plugins\user folder but I'm not sure how to point to that with a custom tag. I tried CFInvoking the getRandomString function with not much luck.
Any ideas on what I'm missing?
Thanks.
Jan 7, 2010 at 10:05 PM Found what I was missing...
For whatever reason the file mangoextras\randomString.cfm did not unpack from the zip file when I installed it from the mango admin plugins tool.
I just downloaded the zip to my local machine and checked the folder... there it was!
Now wouldn't you think I would look there first?
Works beautifully!
Thanks Matt!!