Plugin Heaven

Posted on 10. Jun, 2008 by Rob in All, Older, Review

With so many options for WordPress blogs out there I thought I would make a list of the plugins I use. Now I have to admit, I’m a plugin junkie. I use a lot of add-ons with Firefox, I love enabling extra features and plugins in Windows Live Writer and try to customize everything to the utmost. WordPress has an extensive community and plugins galore. Some of these are incredibly important to have installed, while many others are simply to make my blog all the better for my readers.

Akismet - Akismet is an important plugin for all blogs. This spam filter service helps block the hundreds of spam comments so common with WordPress blogs. All you do is set it up, insert your WordPress key and away it goes. Akismet has stopped 967 spam comments from being posted since this blog was started (all without my intervention).
All in One SEO Pack - A great way to optimize your blog for search engines. A lot of this plugin is automated and easy. It’s not necessary but it helps get you found.
Contact Form ][ - Contact Form is a simple data/email form you can easily place in entries so readers can contact you (or fill out a form) without your email address being exposed.
Easy Tube - Just as it sounds, this plugin makes it easy to embed YouTube videos into articles. It keeps the framing, ads, autoplay, and colors constant throughout your blog.
FeedBurner FeedSmith - I have sung the praises of FeedBurner to others before. Having your RSS feeds set up through FeedBurner makes it easy and versatile for readers to subscribe. It also helps if you move your blog since the feed remains the same. This plugin overrides the default feed of your blog with your FeedBurner feed.
flickrRSS - This one is pretty obvious as well. It allows a feed of your latest Flicker images in your sidebar.
Get Recent Comments - This plugin lets you display your most recent comments in your sidebar (with your own formatting).
Gravatar - Gravatar is a service that lets you set up an avatar and profile that connects to your email address. With this plugin whenever someone who has a Gravatar account leaves a comment their information and avatar is used.
Last.fm for WordPress - Puts a list of your most recent scrobbled Last.fm songs into your sidebar.
Maintenance Mode - This simple plugin displays a splash screen for readers when you set your blog into maintenance mode. Admins still see the blog as normal so editing and testing is easy.
Most Commented - Retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments to put in your sidebar. Easy enough.
Popularity Contest - This enables posts to be ranked by readers actions. It’s nice to know what’s being read most.
Simple Tags - This plugin adds extra options to WordPress tags. It makes my life a lot easier when having to edit tags later on. There are also options for auto-tagging as well.
Sociable - Social bookmarking is a pretty big thing right now. Sites like Digg and Technorati have incredible sway. This plugin adds social bookmarking buttons to each post for readers to submit. There are a ton of optional sites you can list (50+ I think).
SRG Clean Archives - Keeping your archive list clean is a great tool for readers. SRG Clean Archives does a great job at doing just that.
Twitter Tools - Twitter Tools adds your latest Tweets to your sidebar. It also has options to post a tweet when a blog post is made or create a blog post when a tweet is made.
WordPress.com Stats - Knowing where your traffic comes from, who it is, and where it’s going help a lot. WordPress.com Stats monitors everything for you so you can keep up with how everything is working.
WordPress Mobile Edition - This plugin forces a simplified theme when visiting the site through a mobile browser. This is especially useful for older WAP browsers.
wp-cache - Speed, speed, speed. wp-cache is the best cache tool I have seen yet.