I have boasted about some of the plugins I run to several friends and coworkers who also have been using Wordpress. I figured a quick post to just mention them and what they do would be in order.
- Akismit – This is probably by far the most usful plugin I run! Akismet detects spam comments and pingbacks and places them into a quarantine so that they do not appear on the site unless you manually approve them. “Akismet has caught 10,530 spam for you since you first installed it.” I check through every once and a while to see if there have been any false positives and have not found any. Currently I only see about 1 spam comment make it through every month or two. Highly Recommended
- Adsense Deluxe – Not really a big deal, it just makes inserting Google adsense code in the blog templates a little easier.
- Dean’s Code Highlighter
– I haven’t gone back through and tried this with all my code, but it allows you to add a few lines of css to your template and then use a <pre lang=”language”> tag to get a nice syntax highlighted code box. -
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Example = Class.create();
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Example.prototype = {
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initialize: function(elem) {
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this.elem = elem;
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}
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…
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};
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- Feedburner Feed Replacement – Steve Smith over at Ordered List wrote this as well as another plugin(below) that I really like. This one detects traffic coming in to the possible wordpress rss feeds and looks at their user agent. Feedburner is allowed access while everyone else is redirected to the Feedburner URL. Pretty handy for making sure all your RSS traffic is going through the right place
- Smart Update Pinger – This one is pretty simple, and was probably more useful pre Wordpress 2. Anyway it sends pings to various services such as technorati when new posts are created. Smart pinger replaces the built in pinger so that you’re not sending pings if you just go back into a post and make a quick adjustment.
- Socibable – This is probably the most noticeable one for readers and is responsible for all the nice little social network links found below each post. There are quite a few different plugins that offer this sort of functionality, I really liked Sociables easy configuration and out of the way presentation for readers. On a side note there are a HUGE number of sites supported by this plugin, you should probably jump into the configuration page and pick out only the ones you want to display for your readers.
- Tiger Style Administration – This is the other plugin from Steve Smith. It totally changes the layout for the administration pages and in my opinion is a huge improvement over the stock layout. Check out the site for some more details and some example screenshots of the new layout.
That’s pretty much it… Most of the plugins are just for my purposes to make things function how I would like them to (sending pings, redirecting to feedburner, improving admin layout, stopping spam). Give them a try, I couldn’t imagine running this blog without them anymore
- Heavily moderated, SPAM will be dealt with.
Google analytics plugin works nice if you want to see some stats for your website.
I like the ones you have listed I use most of them.
Brett Evans
May 7th, 2007
Good list of plugins although I found your comment about Adsense Deluxe a bit curious. “Not a big deal”? I actually find it quite useful and it saves me digging around for sections of Adsense code with the use of a quick tag. I imagine folks who use a variety of ad sizes would find it even more useful. I was also wondering if you were still using Smart Update Pinger and if there were any other reasons to use it other than to avoid unnecessary pinging of services from a post edit.
Robert Irizarry
June 1st, 2007
Well, since I’ve really limited the ads and I only have one bit of adsense code in a single template file its not hard to find… It doesn’t serve much purpose other than to shorten the code that I enter into the template…
Rich Waters
June 8th, 2007