WordPress plugins are what help WordPress to stand as a lone reed among the sands of other blogging platforms.
Most plugins are free, easy to use, and - for the most part - absolutely brilliant. They will eat your spam, send you e-mail, backup your content and feed your readers.
Here is my own list of some must haves, some highly recommended, and some personal favorite plugins for WordPress.
Must Have Plugins:
- XLM Sitemap generator - The first step in SEO. Make sure to tell Google where your sitemap is.
- Search All - This plugin makes the WordPress search index your comments as well as your posts.
- Akismet Spam Catcher - Don’t use this if you like comment spam.
- Contact Form - See mine in action here.
- Database Backup - Backs up your PHP database which contains all the content of your blog. Posts, comments, pages, etc… This plugin now comes standard with a WordPress download.
Super Helpful Plugins:
- Counterize II - Keeps track of your site visits, hits etc. Extremely simple to setup. A decent (and free) substitute for better site tracking programs such as Mint.
- WP Diagnosis - Tells you needed info about the server settings , PHP version of your WordPress database, database name, username and password. A helpful list to refer to when installing site extras that need access to your database.
- Feedburner Redirect - If you are getting my RSS feed from the site generated feed it’s actually being redirected through my feedburner feed.
- Subscribe to Comments - Allows commentors to receive email updates when new comments are posted on the same thread.
Plugins that make my blog more rockin’:
- No WWW - http://www.thefightspot.com doesn’t exist…
- Optimal Title - Makes the title of your blog be “Post Title - Blog Title” instead of the WordPress standard which is reversed. This helps with SEO and permalinks.
Technorati Tags: Rock Your Blog, WordPress
Phil Bowell said:
Very useful blog post. Thanks. I particularly like the pointer towards the feedburner one. Does this mean that using this plugin will mean that anyone who subscribes via live bookmarks in Safari or Firefox will be subscribing to my feedburner one? Only when I clicked on my RSS icon in safari it still said the wordpress feed in the title bar. Also does this cover anyone who is already subscribed redirecting them to the Feedburner one?
Posted on December 27, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Shawn said:
@ Phil - I’m glad you found some useful information.
Clicking on the blue RSS button in the safari navigation pane will give you my “http://thefightspot.com/feed/atom/” RSS feed.
However, it’s chanelled through feedburner first. So you are still getting my feedburner feed but not from feedburner.
Posted on December 27, 2006 at 9:21 pm
Ralph Dagza said:
Yay! i have them all!!!!
Posted on December 28, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Ronalfy said:
Thanks Shawn.
I installed the “Subscribe to Comments”, “Optimal Title”, and “Search All” plugins with success. We’ll see in time how they do. Take care.
Posted on January 1, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Shawn said:
@ Ron - Awesome. Feel free to keep us posted on pros and cons.
My next ‘to-do’ for the search aspect of this site is to get the searches (and categories) organized a bit better. Instead of just listing things in reverse chronological order like the posts hopefully display a chronological/relevant list with exerpts from the post.
Posted on January 1, 2007 at 10:23 pm
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Posted on March 18, 2007 at 4:30 am
FeeCOMSPU Boonsit said:
thank for good plug in for wordpress
Posted on March 24, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Tene said:
It’s good plug in.
Posted on August 23, 2007 at 1:57 pm
pap said:
Nice plug in
Posted on August 23, 2007 at 1:57 pm