Used WordPress for over 6 months now, and am still pleased with it. There are so many plugins available for WordPress that tweaking minor nuances is a fun hobby.
Currently I have these plugins installed and active, in no particular order:
- WP-Footnotes – quite useful – adds a numbered footnote to a post. Good for my style of breezy, top of mind writing. Triggered by enclosing text in double parentheses.1
- WP Super Cache
– supposedly speeds access to particular pages, and WordPress blogs in general. Haven’t tested it really, but who wouldn’t want a speedier rendered page? - WP Ajax Edit Comments
– some Ajax goodness, eases editing of comments for me, and from you. Registered users can edit their comments, non-registered can edit in a certain time frame. - Smart Youtube
– better YouTube embedding than the default from the YouTube site. Copy and paste a YouTube URL into a post and add the letter v to the URL right before the “://”. Simple, yet useful. - SimplePie Core
Load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it. - Postalicious
– creates the daily links page via delicious.com. Requires SimplePie Core these days, but other than that, seems more reliable than the links post option from delicious.com itself. I’ve started going back in and editing to add quirky images for some reason. - Quotes Collection
– fuels the Random Quote sidebar widget on the upper right margin. More for me than you probably. Love me some quotes… - AJAXed WordPress
– don’t use all the options this plugin enables, but some are useful. - Akismet
– spam comment filter. The last few days quite a number of spam comments have made it past the Akismet filter, but all in all, it does a great job. Occasionally, marks quasi-legitmate comments as spam, but no more than 5 times. According to its statistics, 4,872 spams caught, 18,972 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.849%. Umm, no, but we’ll keep you anyway. - All in One SEO Pack
– not so sure about the usefulness of this plugin, but have kept it so far. - Around this date in the past… – Widget Edition
– testing this (see the lower sidebar), a tip toe through this blog’s history. Of course, a year ago, I was using Movable Type, so only reposted items end up there currently. - Blog Copyright (by BTE)
– sure, why not. Preemptive move against the splogs. - FD Feedburner Plugin
– re-directs the default RSS feed over to FeedBurner which has a hell of a lot of more interesting features. FeedBurner also generates the “email of today’s posts” feature, which is pretty useful if you don’t use a newsreader or visit everyday, as it includes Flickr, Digg, and whatever else. - Flickr Photo Album
– haven’t really used this, might go away. - Google Analyticator
– Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. - Google XML Sitemaps
-generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Contributes to good search engine ranking presumedly. - Lightbox 2
– used to make uploaded images appear in their own “embiggened” window. Am using it less and just using Picasa’s bandwidth instead of my own, but will probably keep this too. - MobilePress
– just installed this – presumedly creates a mobile friendly version of the blog, suitable for iPhones and the like. Haven’t tested it yet. - WordPress Automatic Upgrade
– aids in painless upgrade to the WordPress software. - WordPress Popular Posts
– again, enables archive digging. Currently residing in the sidebar under “Hot Action”. - WordPress.com Stats
– Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. - Twitter for WordPress
– sometimes fails, but works better than a straight RSS feed. Haven’t given up on Twitter yet, come follow me - Subscribe To Comments
– useful addition to a comment feed, not that I get many comments, but in the rare instances. - ShareThis
– for posting to Digg, delicious, FaceBook and various other social media sites. Don’t know if it ever gets used, but its here anyway. - Redirection
– for those occasions where I make a typo in the URL of a post, and don’t notice until later, this plug-in smoothly re-directs to the proper page. - Random Redirect
– try it!!
Geez, didn’t realize this would turn out to be such a long list.
Do you have any plugins essential to your blog’s functioning and aesthetic?
- like this, duh [↩]
Hi Seth,
What a great list. I’ll have to try a few of these.
I’ve been using WP for going on 2 years in March when I finally had to give up on Graymatter. I have WP on the J LHLS review blog and the Wapshott Press. Both of those blogs have a lot of contributors, active or not, so I use Role Manager which gives me control over what they can and can’t do on the blog. Works great. On all my WP blogs I use WP-SpamFree, which filters bot comments and has made my blog-managing life much easier. Mad Kane blogged about it, so I knew it was worth a try and it’s great!
What I’d like is a plug-in or widget that would list all the posts by contributor. I know we can search and do the same thing, but a one-click thingy would be cooler.
Seems like one of the plug-ins I currently have installed has a “post by author” widget, I’ll have to check.
Have you tried Akismet for spam? or does WP-Spam free work really well?
Thanks, i love Smart Youtube plug-in.
If you have a post by author plug-in I’d love to know about it.
I’ve used Akismet for spam, but WP-Spam free really solved my problems with bot spam, which were pretty much my only spam problems.