My Quest for WordPress Plugins
As part of Automattic’s acquisition of Intense Debate, I committed to convert all of my blogs over to WordPress. The process has begun and should be done soon. In the mean time, I’m on a quest for all the great WordPress plugins. I’ve already got the Lijit Search, FeedBurner, and MyBloglog plugins queued up. If you’ve got other recommendations, please leave them in the comments.
woopra, akismet, google xml sitemaps, and twitter tools (if you want to auto tweet your new blog posts)
Brad – I have found these to be useful – adsense manager, all-in-one-seo pack, backupwordpress, my (link, category, page) order, ubd-block-ad, addthis-social widget
I'm happily using Akismet, Popular Posts, Similar Posts (the last two require the Post-Plug-in Library), ShareThis, and Twitter Updater, and WP Super Cache over at The Noisy Channel (http://thenoisychannel.com/). I also found WP Easy Uploader to be a convenient way to install them.
Every WP blog should use the MiniMeta Widget.
WP-PageNavi is a strong bid and not yet mentioned – I first picked it up after reading smashingmagazine.com . Allows clean/beautiful page navigation. Agree with all other plugins listed.
all-in-one seo and xml sitemaps is all you need for SEO. the rest depend on what you are trying to do. I will come down and talk to Ross when he is ready…
I use the wordpress app now… pretty much the same thing.
Twitter Updater
[shameless plug]
Best way to make social sense of AdSense – see JuiceTorrent… a widget… not (yet) a WP plugin
[/shameless plug]
wp-cache: a must have. Wordpress uses the db pretty inefficiently. wp-cache seriously reduces db load and page load times (this will be super useful once ID comments are natively stored in the db – the ID page 1 comment counts take a long time to load).
Text Control: Text Control allows you to choose the markup syntax on a post-by-post basis. I use tables and bullets a lot, Textile2 makes writing posts easier.
WordPress Database Backup: It emails me full db backups every week. (yeah, I know there are better ways to handle db backup, but this is just so easy). I just filter them automatically and store them in case I need it.
WASABI Related Posts: A list of related posts at the end of every post. It boosted my PVs/Visit by 11%.
Also, make sure you handle the transition carefully. Get your URL redirects right. Screwing this up can be very, very painful.
I've got one for you. Me.dium hot search terms plug-in. I've got it on my blog, it's very shiny and new. Sending it over now (it's not in wide distribution yet). Enjoy!
I've been using NextGEN gallery to make photo galleries and slideshows – very handy. I've also recently started using Zemanta's plugin. It makes it easier to find photos and articles related to the post you're writing – without having to leave the admin panel. So far, I like it!
Hey Brad, thanks for all the great info for so long. Hopefully some of these will help (I'm no WP expert but these are what I use).
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade, TinyMCE Advanced, ShareThis,podPress, Plugin Updater, Google XML Sitemaps, Google Analyticator, FeedBurner FeedSmith, All in One SEO Pack, AdSense Manager.
Now it's time for me to peruse the comments for better plugins than I'm using.
I think I'll finally add your lijit guys plugin (you've been into them and written about them enough so that I should finally buckle down and just give them a go).
Brad, be careful- these things can impair the reader experience. Fred Wilson got so carried away with widgets and plugins that his blog sometimes wouldn't load. If you keep it simple it works better for us. It's easy to get carried away trying to use WP as an application platform rather than a content platform, especially for us techies. I'm starting to really appreciate simple templates that anticipate the reader's needs.
iWPhone styles you blog to an iphone friendly version…
WordPress Database Backup sends a backup to an email every night…
and yes, all of the above.
Use a Startuply widget to display jobs from the Foundry Group's portfolio companies
Go to http://www.startuply.com/apps and use the [investor:foundry] query in the keyword search…looks like 28 jobs at 6 Foundry companies right now. I'm happy to help, too.
Ha sorry for the gratuitous plug, but this is a big part of why we built them.
The TxtVox Plugin allows your readers to receive a free mobile version of your blog. Highly recommended.
Also WPhone — which let's you do mobile administration (and writing) pretty well.
In addition to the aforementioned: WP-CMS Post Control-Reduce clutter on the Write and Edit admin pages; Add to Any-Help readers share, save, bookmark content; ZenphotoPress-Insert Zenphoto images.
We also have a lot of pages, so we use Flexi Pages Widget and List Subpages to make the site easier to navigate.
To meet AdSense compliance, we use the Privacy Policy plugin.
Yep, just a preference thing.
Hi Brad,
As long as you're running MyBlogLog, you should check out MyBlogLog's Just for You plug-in which serves up content from your blog that matches the tags on your visitor's MBL profile.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mybloglog-jus...
I call it the poor man's behavioral targeting solution. You can read about it here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/personal_con...
Google Analyticator makes it easy to get Google Analytics for your blog. KB Advanced RSS Widget is useful if you want to show an RSS feed from somewhere, and Twitter Tools is great if you use Twitter.
I also agree with the aforementioned WordPress Database Backup — getting db backups emailed to my gmail account periodically is a perfect low-impact solution.
Of course, Akismet, and backup, but also:
Instant Upgrade (Must have 1-touch upgrade of your WP install): http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-...
Close Comment Tags: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/close-comment...
Friendfeed Comments: http://blog.slaven.net.au/wordpress-plugins/frien...
Pingpress.fm (ping multiple services in one shot) : http://www.soldoutactivist.com/project-pingpressf...
Subscribe to comments: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comme...