My WordPress Top 10 … er … 18 Plugins
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Quite a few folks have asked me what I’m running ‘under the hood’ here on my blog. First, and foremost, I’m running WordPress. I am running it on my own hosting account. I do that so in the event that I decide to change packages, I can easily change and not inconvenience my readers. I’ve had some friends that have hosted on blogger, typepad, and wordpress (all worthy blogging interfaces), but when they wanted to do some customization that the apps didn’t support - they were stuck. They were also tied to the URL to get to their blog, something I’m free to change. Host your own blog so that you have full freedom.
I selected WordPress after using Blogger and Typepad, simply because I really liked the range of plugins I could add as well as how the software was written - even a PHP hack like me could go in and make a bunch of modifications! It also does a fantastic job of utilizing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to modify the reader’s interface. My single complaint with WordPress is that it has an admin interface that isn’t customizable. I’m working on a few sites for a few friends using WordPress and would like to simplify the administration, but I have to modify a ton of code to do that.
So here are the plugins that I’m running here or on another site:
| Plugin | Description |
|---|---|
| Advanced WYSIWYG Editor | I don’t personally use this plugin, I reside on editing good ‘ol HTML in my posts. However, I’ve used this plugin for some of my clients. |
| Akismet | This is a must have to try and stop the onslaught of spam. |
| Breadcrumb Trail Generator | I don’t use this on this site, but if you’ve got sub-categories, this is a must have. |
| Democracy | This is a fantastic polling and survey plugin built with Ajax. You can take my poll of the week on my homepage. |
| Geo Mashup | I would like to see map integration as an Admin function; however, this is a good plugin if you just want to tag your posts with a latitude and longitude and display it on a map. |
| Google Sitemaps | Simple and easy, the plugin creates a Google sitemap. I’ve seen some bogus claims that it hurts your search engine optimization - ignore them. This also republishes the sitemap on the fly and pings Google. The perfect complement to this is the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator which will publish your sitemap for you in a nice format. |
| Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam | This is a fun little plugin to stop comment spam by putting up your own challenge phrases. I’ve seen a lot of these on the net. One site even simply uses a “What is 4 + 4?” question where the answer is always the same. It doesn’t take much to stop these idiots. |
|
Posts by Author |
If you have multiple authors on your blog, this is a must-have. |
| Related Posts | This is a must have for any blog. Aside from keeping your readers interested, this plugin also allows for some great search engine optimization. I don’t understand the details (yet) but I’ve read a lot of positive reviews. |
| Sociable | Great plugin to automatically generate shortcuts through social bookmarketing sites. |
| Subscribe to Comments | This is a nice plugin for folks to subscribe to comments on a post. |
| Ultimate Tag Warrior | Tags are a great means of providing blog search engines with keywords for your posts, as well as a means for your readers to check the popularity of keywords within your blog. This is a great package! |
| WordPress Mobile Edition | Fantasic little plugin to make your blog readable on a PDA or other mobile browsing device. One setback is that you can’t log into your admin via a mobile device… but why would I? |
| WordPress Database Backup | This is a no-brainer! |
| WP-ContactForm | If you’re not proficient at programming but you want folks to be able to get a hold of you, pop this comment form into a page. It’s much better than leaving your email address out there for spammers to pick up! |
| WP-PageNavi | Great plugin which adds the nice paging feature down at the bottom of the page. |
| WP-PostRatings | If you’d like your readers to rate your posts, this is a great plugin, very well-written. |
| Themed Login Page | It’s a start! This allows you to move the login, register, and forgot your password pages right within your theme. I can’t wait until the Themed Admin plugin  |
If you’ve got some plugins you love, I’d like to hear about them. Please add them via comments! Thanks!
