WordPress Plugins

December 5th, 2008

A few days ago I mentioned I upgraded wordpress and picked a new theme. Today I am reporting the last piece – getting the latest and greatest plugins. I scanned some of the most popular ones and did some digging on my own. I must say i’m disappointed in the wordpress guys for making it so hard to find plugins. You can only search for plugins based on tags, but when there’s thousands of plugins to review, I would want to be able sort different ways. For example, I would love to see plugins in the top 10% in number of downloads, that have been updated in the last year, have at least 3 stars, at least 20 reviews, and match xxx tag. That would be great.

These are the plugins I found and liked.

  • Akismet comment spam – comes by default, keeps spammers out of comments.  Great.
  • Add To Any – lets people bookmark, email, digg, or do something with your post in a good way.
  • flickrRSS – puts thumbnails of my flickr pics tagged “best of” on my sidebar.  Who doesn’t like pictures?
  • Viper’s Video Quicktags – make it easy to embed video in a blog post, supports youtube, vimeo, flickr video, google video, dailymotion, metacafe, etc.
  • Ultimate Google Analytics – This puts the GA code on every page, a must for detailed info on your site.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – creates a sitemap.xml file to help search engines, scripts, and what nots find everything on the site.
  • All In One SEO Pack – make it easier for people using google to find your posts and web pages.
  • Search Everything – like it says, covers everything when user does a search from your site
  • WP-Cumulus – makes a cool sphere of words, which are my categories on my site.  just fun
  • WP-PageNavi – makes a nice page navigation at bottom.  For example, if somebody searches for iPhone and there 10 pages of results (about 10 per page), this lets users jump to page 10 right away.
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – Best of the “related posts” plugins.  Intelligent algorithm and more configurable than most.  Basically lists similar posts at the end of a post page.
  • PageMash – reorder pages as they appear at the top of the blog, including parents (My Page Order doesn’t do parents)
  • Search Results Summary – OK, not a plugin, but code I wrote to simply list results at top so you don’t have to scroll down to see what the results are. Works well with PageNavi.

There’s a few more I’m evaluating (like statpress vs statpress-reloaded vs wassuplast.fm .. podpress, etc) so expect an update in a week or two.

A few I tried but deactivated

  • Slimbox – cool javascript that lets user see a nice big picture when a thumbnail on your blog is clicked.  Problem is when user clicks a thumbnail, I think it should act like a link and goto picture page.
  • Twitter Tools -Doesn’t allow you display tweets from certain people, this mainly lets you update your own twitter account
  • WordPress Gravatars – My theme, Inove, does avatars better (matches theme)
  • WordPress Related Posts – Not as intelligent or as configurable as YARPP above.
  • WPVideo, Youtube Favorites – Not as good as Viper’s Video Quicktags (Vipers does youtube and more).