13 Super Wordpress Plugins
Apr 26Here is a list of Wordpress plugins that I both use and recommend to anyone who is interested. It’s not exactly a typical setup (but then again what fun what a “normal” setup be?). Even if you don’t have a Wordpress blog, feel free to read the list and find out about some of the software that is powering this blog. Maybe you’ll discover some features that you didn’t know about!
And onward (not in order of preference or importance but rather just so that you can make sure that I have 13).
The ubiquitous spam comment catcher for the Wordpress community. It’s so popular and well-done that it’s a default plugin. I didn’t actually activate it initially because I didn’t think that I needed it as my blog doesn’t have extensive traffic. And thus I didn’t think that I would get picked up by any spammers. Of course I turned out to be wrong. And of course I got spammed hundreds of times. And of course it happened while I was on vacation. Ah ‘tis life.
Not a normal plugin to have I would think. But this is definitely a crucial one on my blog because of the community (small as it is) that I have on xanga. I enjoyed installing it because it allowed me to learn about PHP cURL (which is basically a way for you to access remote sites through PHP!). Additionally it definitely upped my readership and got the word out there about my blog. This is better than having to tell people about it. It gets old telling people to check out my blog.
With some fairly prompt response to my report that Croissanga wasn’t working (within the week), Ryan stepped up and pushed out a new version to handle the changes. That is just sweet.
Replacing the default RSS feed is useful because you can track more information by sending the feed through Feedburner. Very easy to set up, and there are some interesting things that you can learn through them that you wouldn’t if you hosted your RSS feed on your own site.
This is a very useful plugin, in my opinion, because it gives you the ability to bring the comments part of your blog to the front and center (the main home of your blog). I encountered this by seeing it on other people’s blogs and thinking that it was very handy. You know when I publish a new post, and now you can know when someone else adds a new comment!
There is something that is very hot lately in the world of the Internet. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s called social bookmarking. Basically it’s a way for people to share what they find interesting with other people. This plugin allows your posts, pages, etc to have an instant connection with such sites as Digg or reddit. I have this on my blog because I think that it’s cool and I try to participate in social bookmarking. However, I hardly think that my content is the type of stuff that will get put onto these sites. But if you feel that it is, feel very free to use the links on the side of each post!
Worked with the author a little on fixing a slight bug with the plugin, and I really appreciated Ankur’s responsiveness and work to fix it!
A plugin that allows you to choose different smilies to use in your blog. Basic and useful if you’re into customizing things.
This is a big deal right now in the Wordpress community. Basically it allows you to have drag-and-drop functionality in your sidebar when you’re setting things up! A widget (in the web sense) is an arbitrary piece of code that conforms to some standards and can be dropped into place without any changes. This is a good way of approaching software projects (where you can just substitute in a component for another component and nothing will know about it), and it’s also a good way of approaching third party software like plugins. I am not currently using this too much, but I have every intention of doing so once I finish re-organizing the structure of the site. I might also have to write my own widget(s) if there isn’t one to do what I want. How fun! But this is seriously a plugin that you should use because it just makes customizing Wordpress even easier than it was before!
An easy way to utilize a free service (statcounter) easily without having to muck around in the source code. This keeps the code clean while simply adding an action to the Wordpress functions. This appends the necessary code on each page and thus allows you to keep track of all of your pages! Very useful for those that like to know what is going on in terms of page loads, hits, etc.
This is an interesting plugin that I saw first-hand while looking at someone else’s blog. I was interested in it because I found it interesting to stay “in the loop” to the comments that were posted as follow-up discussion to the post that I was reading. Basically you check a box when you’re leaving a comment, and you will get an e-mail when a new comment is posted. Pretty nifty if you ask me!
Well first of all the name is just awesome, in my opinion. Additionally, I think that the functionality is pretty amazing. Basically it allows you to tag your posts with tags that you create. Continue to tag your posts and eventually you’ll end up with a list of tags that somewhat accurately (depending on how good you are at tagging) will represent what your site is generally about. I really enjoy the tag cloud in the sidebar because it gives a visual representation to how often I tag about certain things. And from there, if any particular tag is clicked, a new page will display that shows all of the posts that have that tag. Pretty nifty, if you ask me! There are numerous other ways to display aggregate tag information, but the plugin is even useful if you just want the tags to display for each post! It kind of gives a summary of what the post is about.
This plugin gives a you some statistics to your blog such as number of posts, number of commentators, and the like. Even though the information isn’t exactly ground-breaking, it’s still nice to just have a plugin that will allow you to easily see it.
This is a really simple plugin in both idea and code. Basically it allows you to visit http://www.yoursite.com/?random and it will take you to a random post. I have yet to actually put a link somewhere to use this plugin, but I very much mean to sometime soon. If you’d like to, you can try it using a link to a random post on this site.
Although my site doesn’t exactly get hammered because of all of the traffic, I would still say that this is a great plugin to have. Basically it will save pages as they’re visited to a flat file. What does this do for you, you might ask. Well a flat file is much easier to serve than a dynamic page generated from PHP and MySQL. Thus your server will have less processing to do, and it will be able to serve the page more quickly! Even if your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic to actually utilize this plugin, there’s no difference if you do or do not have it. So I say that you might as well install it. Who knows, maybe you will get your site submitted to digg, and with this plugin you might be able to withstand the digg effect!
I am very grateful to the respective authors of these plugins because it’s amazing to see how a community (such as the Wordpress one) can make amazing products that are so functional. I’ve enjoyed hacking around and making them do what I want them to do, but this is by no means an end to configuring my blog exactly how I want it. This is just a snapshot of my blog.