Possible hack updates to the 1.5.x?

Hello all! I have been a cutenews user since the early/mid 2000's and remain a loyal fan of the simplicity.

I have recently upgraded to 1.5.2, and let me just say, yowzas~! It's fantastic. The security updates are superb; I'm glad the overall look and feel remain the same. I could provide a litany of favorite changes but thats not what I'm here for.

What I'm suggesting is the updating of some old hacks to work with the new 1.5.x files. I'm personally not capable of doing so otherwise I would. I did manage to install the advanced comment management module and it seems to be working fine after changing the file extension of moderator.mdu to moderator.php . . .

However, there are some other favorite hacks that could be updated, such as the Show All Commentators hack. I guess thats the only other update I personally would like to see.

Some other things I was wondering thinking was plug-ins. Has anyone written any? I've googled that whole business but the search hasnt been particularly fruitful. I was hoping to find some things like the commentators hack; articles written stats; maybe a list of archives to show on main page as sorted by month; possibly a hack to show the number of words contained in an article or something. I guess I am listing a lot of wordpress-y type stuff and I dont even know if that's the type of thing a plug-in is meant to do...? Anymoo, those are my thoughts/suggestions.

tl;dr version: Is anyone able to update the show commenter hack and we should get some wordpress-esque plugins up in here