Blogging with Success: Part 1: List of Useful WordPress Plug-ins

Update: The most updated list of plugins I am using (as well as not using) can be found here! Thanks.

As you can tell from the title, this the first part of a series of posts on blogging I am going to make over the coming weeks.

This week, I spent most of my time in modifying and customizing the look and feel of my blog. Much work still needs to be done, but until now, I have added a lot of plug-ins and customized the theme of the blog to some extent, even though I am a technical dunce :)

First let me give you the list of plug-ins. There are hundreds of plug-ins available for WordPress and most of them are not required for any real 'business' purpose. Also, having too many plug-ins can increase the loading time of your blog. Just imagine how long the dial-up users will have to wait to take a view of your blog. Probably, most of them will fly away, never to visit your blog again! BIG LOSS!

So, below I give a list of the plug-ins I have installed on my blog. Depending on your business, not all plug-ins maybe required. Also, I will be updating this list as I come to know of more USEFUL plug-ins.

For now, here is the list of plug-ins I use:

For the theme, I used the free 'limited' version of the Semiologic theme:
http://www.semiologic.com/

Plug-ins:

1. Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

http://akismet.com/

2. Audio player (optional)

Highly configurable single track mp3 player

http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/

3. Auto-hyperlink URLs

Auto-hyperlink text URLs in post content and comment text to the URL they reference. Does NOT try to hyperlink already hyperlinked URLs. Improves WordPress’s default make_clickable function, along with adding some configuration options

http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#autohyperlinkurls

4. Blog Copyright (optional)

Display dated copyright mark. Post/Page (post date or custom field) and archive aware

http://guff.szub.net/2005/07/15/blog-copyright/

5. Buy Me a Beer (optional)

Allow your blog visitors to buy you a beer by sending you money through PayPal.

http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/buy-me-a-beer-paypal-donation-plugin/

6. Crawl Page

This generator will create a crawl page for your WordPress blog

http://soft9.info/cgi-bin/download.cgi?action=redirect&id=155

7. DashBar

Display a Enhanced WordPress.com-like navigation bar for logged users: direct acces to Dashboard, Write, Edit, Awaiting Moderation, Profile

http://z720.net/produits/wordpress/dashbar

8. Evermore

Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. Great for avoiding the so-called 'duplicate penalty', since at any given time, there would be only ONE place in your blog where the full post would appear.

http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/evermore-wordpress-plugin/

9. Exec-PHP

Allows <?php ?> tags inside the content or excerpt of your articles to be executed just as in usual PHP files

http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/

10. FireStats

Statistics plugin for WordPress

http://firestats.cc/?from=1.1.8-stable

11. Google Sitemaps

This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

12. HeadSpace2

Meta-data manager, allowing complete control over meta-data such as keywords/tags, title, description, stylesheets, and other goodies. The data inserted can be static text, or pulled dynamically from the details of the post.

http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/

13. No Duplicate Comments

Prevent visitors from leaving duplicate comments/pingbacks/trackbacks to a post

http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#noduplicatecomments

14. PodPress (optional; if you are podcaster)

The PodPress pluggin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting.

http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/

15. Safe Title

Allows you to use the_title() anywhere with impunity, even inside an HTML attribute, even if the title already has HTML in it. Allows you to use HTML in post titles in the default WordPress theme

http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/safe-title-wordpress-plugin/

16. Search Everything (optional)

Adds search functionality with little setup. Including options to search pages, tags (Jerome’s Keywords Plugin, UTW support coming soon), excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments and custom fields (metadata).

http://dancameron.org/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/search-everything-wordpress-plugin/

17. Search Meter

Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog.

http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/search-meter-wordpress-plugin/

18. Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites

http://push.cx/sociable

19. StatCounter

Adds the required code to allow StatCounter to monitor your traffic. After enabling this plugin visit the options page and enter your StatCounter UID and enable logging

http://blog.lucanos.com/category/programming/php/wordpress/

20. Subscribe me

Adds a widget with feed subscription buttons

http://www.semiologic.com/software/widgets/subscribe-me/

21. Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry

http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

22. Tagalize It (optional)

Create taged text by enclosing the text to be tagged in one of the following. [TAG-Tec] [Tag-Ice] and [Tag-self] also alternate tags can be inserted into the [Tag-tec “new tag”]

http://tagalizeit.com/

23. Viper's Video Quicktags (optional)

Allows you to embed various video types, including those hosted at YouTube and Google Video as well as videos you host yourself, into WordPress.

http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/

24. What Would Seth Godin Do

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors

http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do/

25. WordPress Database Backup

On-demand backup of your WordPress database

http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

26. WP-Ban

Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url trys to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too!

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

27. WP-EMail (optional; not needed if you are using the semiologic theme)

Allows people to recommand/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

28. WP-Post Secure

This plugin is from our very own John Delavera. A recommended plugin for those who want to host 'member's only' blogs. It abbreviates all posts and allows the full reading only to members of specific online memberships as assigned to Categories.

http://www.flexiblewriter.com/go/turbowppostsecure.html

The plugin might not be available to the market just as yet, but if you are on any of John's lists, you might have already got an email from him about the discounted price at which he is offering it to his subscribers.

Per my tests, this plugin is incompatible with the following plugins, so if you use any one of them, you will need to deactivate them in order for this plugin to work:

Static front

http://www.semiologic.com/software/publishing/static-front/

WP page navi

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

One another thing I have found is that the fewer number of widgets you install on your blog the better this plugin will work.

29. WP-Polls (optional; adds more interactivity to your blog)

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

30. WP-PostRatings

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

31. WP-Print (optional; not needed if you are using the semiologic theme)

Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

32. WP-RelativeDate

Displays relative date alongside with your post/comments actual date. Like ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘2 Days Ago’, ‘2 Weeks Ago’, ‘2 ‘Seconds Ago’, ‘2 Minutes Ago’, ‘2 Hours Ago’

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

33. WP-ShortStat

Tracks your blog stats

http://blog.happyarts.de/wp-shortstat/

34. WP-Sticky

Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

35. WP-UserOnline

Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).

http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

36. WPCandy

WPCandy inserts a snippet of text (”a candy”) into a pre-defined location. It can insert more than one candy in the same location. Possible locations are: between blog posts, before or after of article title.

http://serge.mankovski.com/wpcandy

37. WYSI-Wordpress (if you use WordPress's default WYSWYG editor, this is a far better plug-in to use!)

This plugin adds a more advanced WYSIWYG editor to the WordPress post editing screen. It includes advanced image handling, including on-the-fly thumbnail resizing and compression

http://mudbomb.com/archives/2005/02/02/wysiwyg-plugin-for-wordpress/

38. XSD Snapr

Snapr simply integrates WebSnapr-Script in your WordPress blog. Adds preview bubble to all external links

http://tagg.selfip.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-snapr/

Please note that if you are using the free trial version of the semiologic theme, you may not be able to configure a few plug-ins, particularly those which require some theme-editing on your part. Well, you CAN edit the theme the way you like but then if you want to upgrade the theme later, you stand to lose all your edits. Nevertheless, most of the plug-ins would work the way they should.

If there are any bad links please post a comment here. Thanks.

Feel free to distribute this article by adding my blog as the resource:

http://www.flexiblewriter.com