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Our Top WordPress Plugins

Posted on January 17, 2008 
Filed Under Blog Promotion, Google Site Maps, Keyword Tools, Search Engine Traffic, Software, Spam, Technology and Web 2.0

I’ve been meaning to write up about the WordPress plugins I use for my blogs for some time now. Well this is another task from ‘things to do’ that I can mark off for today.

AdRotator

AdRotator wil rotate any size banners to display one at a time each time page is loaded. Currently used in our header file.

AdSense Deluxe

AdSense Deluxe allows you to insert code into your posts from a drop down menu button on the edit post page conveniently positioned below the default WordPress edit buttons. Use the ‘Options’ in your admin panel to cut and paste your own collection of AdSense Codes, giving them a name and description for easy reference. Once this is set up you can use the drop down menu to insert AdSense ads anywhere you desire in your posts.

Askimet

To use Askimet you just need an API key which you can get free from WordPress.com. This captures the time almost all incoming Spam message dead in its track. On a few occasions REAL comments may accidentally end up in the Spam list, however you can ‘Select’ and click on the ‘De-spam marked comments’ button to send misdirected valid comments to your moderated comments list. Life would be another thousand more clicks a week or more of manually deleting Spam WITHOUT Askimet!

Bumpzee

Adds the Bumpzee widget to your blog with your unique Bumpzee code. You can see mine located at the footer/end of this blog. [BUMPZEE WIDGET IS NOW GONE WITH THE WIND ]

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Now managed by Google and originally created by Steve Smith. This plugin will automatically redirect your default RSS feeds to your FeedBurner feed URL. So you will not lose any of your valuable subscribers. This is another gem of a plugin I don’t think I could live without.

Get Recent Comments

With this plugin you can display the most recent comments or trackbacks on you blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

A simple and practical way to build a ’search engine friendly’ sitemap for your blog. Currently supports Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Updates automatically after new posts are published.

Got Banners

Got Banners is a simple plugin for rotating banners such as the popular 125 x 125 pixel banners on your site displaying a series of banners that make random changes in display order with each page view. Helps to combat ad blindness as the ads appear in different places and grab your attention in the process.

Jerome’s Keywords

Easily add essential keywords to each blog post. You can also use this plugin to create tag clouds, meta tags, site tags or make create Technorati tags.

ShareThis

An easy way for your visitors to ‘share‘ your posts with others by posting to social bookmarking sites and sends your post to a friend via email.

Simple Yearly Archive

As the title suggests the Simple Yearly Archive plugin will lists your archives by year. Ideally I would prefer to use Compact Monthly Archive for its ergonomic user-friendly format which looks so INCREDIBLY well organized down at ProBlogger. Hat’s off to the programmer for creating such a cool streamlined plugin.

Sociable

Adds social bookmarking icons below each post for people to share with others.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows one click subscription to comments on any particular post by sending you an email announcement whenever additional comments are made. Once installed and activates you don’t have to do anything. Very good for people who do not want to subscribe to comments through a feed and can access exact posts that are of personal interest to them.

What Would Seth Godin Do

Built on the principles of Seth Godin’s ideas to use cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site. A customized welcome message is shown to new visitors based on their cookie inviting them to subscribe to your RSS feed an email updates. A great way to get a High Profile A-List Blogger to check you out!

WP Grins

Adds fun smilies to your post with just one click. After activating this plugin you’ll find a variety of smilies in a row just under your edit screen. Smilies also appear on the comments section for your use by your visitors who leave a comment.

OnlyWire AutoSubmitter

I’ve saved the best for last!

I regularly use OnlyWire to submit to Social Bookmarking sites and wondered if there was a better way. So I did a quick search and found this genius plugin which will automatically login and submit to my OnlyWire account for each post I publish. OnlyWire Auto Submitter should save me a lot of time posting to 22 social bookmarking sites. This is a new addition to my currently plugin inventory so I need to personally test it out to check if it really does submit to OnlyWire with little or no problems. If anyone else has used this plugin your feedback would be appreciated.

WordPress 2.0+ Benefits

WordPress has grown up and finally taken into account the changing face of the Web 2.0 and widget mania. With an abundance of widget themes being designed and the amazing value all for free from programmers and the help from people at the WordPress Community Forums who provide mostly lightening fast responses to any problems you may come across.

Many blogger’s have revamped their blogs with a huge preference for wider layout, wigtized sidebars making adding images, link etc a breeze. No more searching through code to edit your template anymore which is the surest ways to screw things up if you forget to save the original unedited PHP files.

Arggggh no more!

WordPress have developed the 2.0+ series to incorporate ‘tags’ into the default script which they have taken from Jerome’s Keywords .

And at long last there is a DEFAULT spellchecker. Why in the world this obvious feature took so long to implement into the basic WordPress blogging platform is a complete mystery to me.Some plugin developers have moved away from WordPress due to the random upgrades and pressures of hours more recoding and testing couldn’t have helped.

Remember they do not get paid per download unless on the rare occasion the plugin requires pre-purchase. Whereas the majority of WordPress plugins are completely free to use. Donations and tips are present on the download sites but I wonder how many of us have given a contribution to express our appreciation for the benefits they have given us through their hard work!

I have noted that some plugins once installed display a ‘Reward the Author’ link when you go to view or edit from the admin panel.

WordPress Plugins I No Longer Use

Anti Spam Image

Thanks to the brilliant performance of Askimet I have decided to ‘Deactivate’ this plugin which inserts a Captcha images below in a field within the comments web form.

Redirect
Urban Giraffe’s Redirection plugin’ aided WordPress bloggers who wanted to change their Permalink structure without the risk of losing EVERY indexed page in the search engine listings! Anyone who linked to your posts or clicked on a link would be sent to your 404 error pages. The main problem with this method is that you must change every link manually to set up you 301 redirects.

Yikes!

This would be just as difficult and cumbersome as going into admin and manually changing every post to a redirect in my HTACCESS file. The result of which would seriously slow down my sites page load times. Imagine making just one typo error, my whole domain would go down. For those who don’t know, just one mistake or missed typed url (htp:// instead of http://) URL or character in a HTACCESS file can bring your whole site OFFLINE.

Now with WordPress version 2.2+ redirection of changed Permalinks is BUILT-IN to the blogging software.

Phew!

This new feature came just in time as not too long ago I changed my Permalink structure (during November 2007) from the default setting to POSTID and POSTNAME.

Default settings => http://www.miriadz.com/blog/?p=39

Using the default Permalinks structure your potential web site visitors have absolutely no clue as to what the article content would entail so after considerable thought I elected the postname and post number.

I know many people have opted to use “Postname” only Permalinks for their WordPress blogs but after reading the literature from the codex:

Using only %postname%

“If you use postname as the only element in your permalinks to create a structure such as example.com/post-title, the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet (which has a similar format) or the /wp-admin/ folder [is this true in Wordpress 2.0+ versions?]. It’s best to include some numeric data (e.g. the post ID or date) in the permalink to prevent this from happening. Additionally, WordPress v1.2.x requires the use of a date structure in order for some features, such as the calendar, to function properly. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ is always a good start.”

Source: WordPress Codex

I just didn’t want to tempt fate. Best to be safe than sorry in a few months time or so!

WordPress Database BackUp

I just log into my web hosting account to use cPanel and quickly back up all of my databases for WordPress and other scripts now so I am not going to install this plugin. I know that after Skippy moved away from WordPress to other venture there has is a new plugin, BackUpWordPress.

Conclusion

Overall I’m glad I chose WordPress as a blogging platform but this hasn’t always been the case. With past upgrade issues and having to remove so many plugins due to compatibility issues or the authors leaving ship as they have had enough from the barrage of upgrades, theme break issues to name a few. Well I’ve done my fair share of cursing the day I installed a blog let alone several blogs I and my family use. However I do appreciate the automatic updates that appear in admin to let you know about the latest version of any plugin.

Top Tip

If you find that after an upgrade your theme does not display correctly an idea I got from reading a comment somewhere is to revert back to the default WordPress theme BEFORE starting your upgrade. One you’ve completed the process you can switch back to your theme.

I haven’t personally tried this yet but I will for the next upgrade. At least that way there shouldn’t be too much disruption to site visitors. But as you already know with upgrading you never know what may happen!!

Take good note of the few listed plugins that are compatible with each other, in other words, when they are both activated there will be problems. Deleted old files that are no longer compatible or I don’t any more. It has been known that old or obsolete version of WordPress could make your blog or site vulnerable open to hacker attacks.

Recomended Resources:

WordPress Plugins Directory

Unrestricted License PLR Articles

Using WordPress Permalinks

WordPress Themes Directory

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