The Don's Wordpress Plugins Round-Up!
I’ve got a few emails lately asking me what kind of plug-ins I use with my WordPress blog! I confess, I’m a lazy baastich, I use a lot of plugins which make writing posts and managing the blog easier. Why should I not?
In its raw form, WordPress provides everything one needs to start blogging immediately. That’s the biggest plus! I’ve tested a few blog and CMSs and a lot of them were either very bloated or had almost no customization available.
Check out the 22 plugins I’m using…
Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button (download):
Social media becomes increasingly popular and readers like to share what they read with their friends. To make it convenient for the reader, Add to Any provides a button with many popular social media sites. Sharing was never easier.
After The Deadline (download):
After The Deadline is an integrated spell/grammar/style-checker which operates externally. It uses a database with thousand of users linked to it. Think cloud and spell/grammar/style-checking.
All in One SEO Pack (download):
Optimizes your blog for Search Engines.
Configurable Tag Cloud (download):
The standard tag cloud provided by Wordpress.org was not satisfactory and I was too lazy fiddling in the PHP files to style and configure it to my liking. Configurable Tag Cloud is what I wanted. A customizable widget!
Contact Form 7 (download):
A highly customizable contact form. Check “contact” in the navigation bar to see it in action!
Cute Profiles (download):
I ran out of space when I was linking my social profiles in the navigation bar. Cute Profiles adds all your Social Profile icons vertically on left or right side of your pages, which will remain visible all the time though the page is scrolled and without consuming the sidebar space.
FancyBox for WordPress (download):
A fancy way to display images on your blog. Using jQuery it enables you to use animations for resized images. From thumbnail to full-image and back to thumbnail.
Fast Tube (download):
A fast and very easy way to embed YouTube videos into your blog.
GD Star Rating (download):
Giving the reader the ability to rate your posts, pages and/or comments via a very complex star-rating system. It takes some time to properly configure it. But default settings are good and ready to go.
Google XML Sitemaps (download):
Having XML Sitemaps is a must if you want your blog to be SOE friendly. Though the add-on says Google XML, it actually creates the XML Sitemaps for Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu (download):
I didn’t like how all the admin menu links were left in a bar, so I got this one. The admin menu links are organized in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu this way.
Quotes Collection (download):
A widget displaying your collected/favourite quotes.
Revision Control (download):
By default WordPress saves each post/page’s content each time you save as a revision, so you can go back to a specific revision. I don’t need it since I use external editors for that. Besides that it’s a waste of database space.
Search Everything (download):
WordPress default search is very limited, and I wanted to be able to search a lot more. Search Everything provides just that. I can search posts, tags, links, pages, comments, drafts, category names, and a lot more.
TinyMCE Advanced (download):
Wordpress’ default editor has too few options for me, and I often had to manually enter my desired HTML-tag via the “HTML” editor. TinyMCE Advanced take care of that by providing you more options.
WordPress.com Stats (download):
Statistics, statistics and more statistics. If you want a lot of statistics, this is the plug-in for you. Though there are better statistics tools, like Piwik.
WP-DBManager (download):
Manage your WordPress database. Optimize, repair, back-up and more.
WP-PageNavi (download):
A fancier way to display page navigation. See at the bottom of the blog. Highly customizable via CSS.
WP-PostViews (download):
Providing a way to show the count of post-views. You can exclude bots, and restrict the counting to everybody, registered users, or guests only.
WP-SpamFree (download):
Comment-Spam is a problem! And WP-SpamFree takes care of that, I mean REALLY takes care of that!
WP Security Scan (download):
Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (download):
I wanted to be able to link my posts to other related posts. This plug-in uses, in my opinion, a very good algorithm linking related posts and showing them at the end of each post. Algorithm is to some extend customizable by allowing, excluding, adding extras, considering with extra weight, etc.