EliHorne

Over the past 3 years, I’ve become VERY well versed in the ways of WordPress. I’m not embarassed to admit that when I first began, I was heavily dependent on hacking up existing themes like Kubrick (Hell, this is how I learned about the great Michael Heileman), and I couldn’t make heads or tails of CSS, much less PHP. At this point in my career, I feel pretty confident that I can take a simple WordPress installation, and make it the efficient backbone of any site I’m commissioned to make.

With that established, there exists a set of plugins that I find myself installing time and time again. Some are well known, while others often don’t make the “Top 10 lists” of attention hungry bloggers.

Without any further ado, I present my list of WordPress plugins that I would not be able to live without.

1. Akismet. Quite simply put: IF YOU ARE GOING TO ALLOW COMMENTS, YOU NEED THIS PLUGIN. It is an easy one because it comes packaged with any new WordPress installation. The basic gist is that for almost as long as there have been comments, there has been comment spam. The more established you become in the blogosphere, the more persistent the spam attempts become. Akismet, an Automattic production from WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg scans all your incoming comments against their constantly growing list of known spam attempts. While it is not 100% perfect (a good blogger should always be training the filter, and on the lookout for false positives), I can confidently say it catches about 99% of the spam that passes through my blog. In order to get a non-commercial key, simply sign up for a WordPress.com account, and it will be emailed to you. Then activate the plugin and enjoy the service. See also: Simple Spam Filter by Joe Tan.

2. Subscribe to Comments. This goes hand in hand with Akismet for those allowing comments. Many pro-bloggers will tell you that they determine whether or not a topic is worth writing about by how many comments they expect to get. Comments are free content, giving visitors a reason to check back and re-read a post that you haven’t put any more time into yourself. The problem is that the blogosphere is vast and growing. Often times I find myself leaving a comment or asking a question at a new blog and then forgetting about it completely. Subscribe to Comments allows the visitor to check off a box asking to be notified by email if any new comments show up on a particular post. This is one of many plugins, although I think it is the strongest and has the most options including subscription management by the Admin as well as the visitor. See also: CoComment and Co.mments (hosted solutions).

3. WordPress Reports. One of many great plugins from Joe Tan, this plugin marries the oustanding data provided by Google Analytics with the WordPress admin panel. Any serious blogger will confess that they are completely addicted to their statistics, and that there is no such thing as too much. I personally use Google Analytics, Mint from Shaun Inman, AWStats, and (briefly) WordPress.com’s tracking software. While numbers tend to differentiate between these services (it seems people have a hard time agreeing what exactly defines a “unique visitor”), being able to see pretty graphs and easy to read lists of referrers from within WordPress is invaluable. Plus, it allows you to insert your FeedBurner URL for subscriber tracking. Hats off, Mr. Tan.

4. FeedSmith. Originally created by Steve Smith, this plugin became so popular that it was adopted officially by FeedBurner.com. Quite simply, it grabs all requests for RSS and redirects them through your FeedBurner URL so that you can track every single subscriber. If you don’t know about FeedBurner, I highly suggest you check them out. There are just too many services provided by them to list here.

5. Ultimate Tag Warrior. I was hesitant to list this plugin because as of version 2.3, WordPress will support tags natively. That said, I think most people will agree with me that one of the main reasons they are incorporating it is because of the popularity of this plugin. The ugly truth is that WordPress’s existing categories system only gets you so far. It just wasn’t built to be the sprawling collection of nomenclature that the modern blogger needs. This isn’t to say that it isn’t useful; I depend on categories to divide the sections of a site when I’m using WordPress as a CMS (content management system). But when you pair categories with tags, you get the best of both worlds. You can accurately label a post with all of its contents for maximum attention from sites like Technorati, and Del.icio.us, and provide a secondary navigation for your site.

6. The Excerpt Reloaded. WordPress provides a web designer with two main hooks for grabbing the contents of a post - the_content or the_excerpt. While the_content can be further modified with a littany of options, the_excerpt has no tricks up its sleeve. That’s where this plugin comes in. Thanks to Kaf Oseo, you can set the wordlimit, allow certain HTML tags to pass while screening others, choose sources like rss, excerpt or content, fix tags, and a ton of other super handy stuff. This is a MANDATORY plugin for anyone managing a review blog or anything where you want to hold back images or embedded media from a front page post and encourage readers to hit the “jump” for more, while filling your page with the appropriate amount of text.

7. Secure Form Mailer. This plugin provides the familiar “name//email//subject//message” text boxes you see on so many websites. Plus, it is highly configurable and lets you preset messages and deploy CAPTCHA. Although many people have caught on to the fact that publishing your email address on the web is just asking to be spammed, I have my doubts about the “spelling it out” trick. By using name [at] domain [dot] com (or any variation), you not only force your visitor to manually copy and paste the segments, but odds are, the spam bots already know how to decipher that (have you noticed how complicated CAPTCHA’s have become? what makes you think they can’t do plain text??). Now, an observant reader will call me out on this because I use that “trick” on my About page. Before you start scrolling down to the comment box to leave a pot/kettle/black remark, let me say this: I believe that it is always a good idea to provide more than one way for a visitor to get in contact with you. Should the plugin happen to fail, or your server’s mail feature goes on the fritz, having a fallback might mean you getting the job offer or not.

8. Flickr Photo Gallery. Yet ANOTHER plugin from Joe Tan, this plugin (once authorized) links up with your Flickr account and makes the photos accessible in the “Write post” screen of your admin panel. It provides options to embed thumbnail, small, medium, or original versions of your photo, and then will insert the code directly into the blog post with the click of a button. It also has the ability to create a “photo gallery” within your blog (for instance “yourdomain.com/photos”), and organize them in an attractive way; latest, groups, sets, etc. Pretty terrific, right? We so aren’t done. The cherry on top is that Flickr Photo Gallery is lightbox-ready. If you enable this feature, instead of bringing you to the flickr page, clicked-thumbnails will trigger the very popular javascript enabled lightbox effect. You know what I’m talking about: the screen dims and a shape-shifting box appears in the middle of your screen presenting the image in all its glory. With a little snooping in the code, you can use the included javascript libraries to enable lightbox effects for your entire site. Or you can just use Lightbox2 as a stand alone plugin.

9. Related Entries. It saddens me very much to say that this plugin hasn’t seen development in quite some time. The original site (http://w-a-s-a-b-i.com), which was nicely designed, now generates an error message, and you have to google “wasabi related entries” to get to the -new- pbwiki site. That disclosed, this plugin still works quite well. Once installed, (my understanding is that) it essentially compares the words in your post title to all other posts in the database. It will then generate a list with the formatting of your liking linking to those posts. It is a shame that there is so little development on this front because delivering context-related posts to an interested reader is a terrfic way to increase the “stickiness” of your website. If a curious visitor reads one post and then dissapears back into the wilderness, the site has failed. But, if that visitor reads a post, and then reads a related post, which leads to another post, you have snared their attention and possible scored a repeat visitor. Possible alternatives that I haven’t explored are Nice Related Posts (released in 2004!!), Aizatto’s Related Posts (released 2007, but looks a little rough).

10. WP-Cache: The mother of all “critical” plugins. WP-Cache takes the strain off of your MySQL server by caching selected sections or your entire site, and serving them as static pages. This speads up over-all load time, and (with any luck) can help you survive the Digg effect. Complete with more options than you can shake a stick at, this plugin is the first line of defense for a heavily trafficked site. That is, assuming you can get your shield up in time.

Honorable mention: Google Sitemaps Generator. WordPress does an excellent job of prepping a blog for Google inspection. Right off the bat, odds are you have an XHTML/CSS compliant site with tags wrapping all your important goodies. Still, one should always clean house a little before an esteemed guest comes by. This plugin generates a Google compliant XML file with detailed instructions on how to navigate your site. In all honesty, the Google bot is a freespirit and comes by when it feels like it, and as a result, it is a bit hard to prove that this plugin is really helping. Still, it never hurts to be prepared.

Know of a plugin that I missed? Leave me a comment below with the name and URL. I’ll check it out, and if it is up to snuff, I’ll include it in the next post, and possibly add it to my personal collection.