Email, Rate, Bookmark This

Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress. If you are hosting your own blog and want to have complete control over its appearance and functionality then plugins are for you.  They are generally very easy to install and what they will do make it easy for someone who can’t or don’t want to touch the code to create a site that really rocks.

The concept is very similar to plugins for applications like firefox, where you can download code that increase what they can do see The Top 50 Lightweight Firefox Add-Ons. Powerful plugins and extensions that will not kill your computer for information about other plugins that I find extremely useful.

I have noticed that it is hard to find what actual plugins people use on their blogs and how they actually look when they are installed.  Here is what I have currently installed on my blog and why I chose those plugins.  Note that currently the only code changes to Wordpress and my template that I have made, with the exception of plugins are just to implement the threaded comments (just overwriting a file) everything else is as a result of the theme that I am using and the configuration of the plugins I have installed.

In one sentence plugins let you do cool stuff that you can’t do with a default Wordpress install or by changing the code yourself.

The Plugins below are in no particular order and I am using all of them..

If you are using something else you think I should try -  please post below, also consider subscribing to my RSS feed (either in your newsreader or via email) and share this with others.

Akismet

Akismet checks all the comments that are made against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. This is normally part of a default install.  Although when first starting I thought that spam was not going to be an issue, I have already received over 2000 spam comments.  This will save you much time and frustration, you can review the much of the spam it catches under “Comments” in case it makes a mistake, which happens rarely. Plugin is Written By Matt Mullenweg.

All in One SEO Pack

 All in One SEO Pack is Out-of-the-box Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Wordpress blog. For those who are unaware SEO is the art of building a site that google and the like will be high in the rankings for given terms.  Sometimes this is a dark art but this plugin adds some fields that can be completed before publishing your posts.  It has great reviews, but as I do not appear highly (even for my own name) am not sure how effective it is.  The Plugin is Written By uberdose.

Brian’s Threaded Comments

 Brian’s Threaded Comments makes comments more like a forum.  My aim is to have as many people discuss things on my blog as possible.  If people are replying to a comment it is easier if you can see that comment below the next one.  This also lets readers collapse or expand trees of comments depending on their requirements.  You can see this in use on all of my comment forms.  The author refers this as a “wandering” comment form.  The Plugin is Written By Brian Meidell.

Code Snippet

 Code Snippet allows people who want to display code on their posts appear nicely colored and setout.  If you are not a programmer then this is probably not that exciting to you, but if you want code to stand out and not get hacked by wordpress then this is a great plugin for you.  The Plugin is Written By Roman Roan.

Contextual Related Posts

 Contextual Related Posts

In my research for getting bloggers to notice me and how to encourage people to stay on my site, a common theme occurred that showing relevant posts will encourage repeat visitors.  This will show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, and hopefully increase exposure.  As I am just starting out, not all its results are that relevant, however the more I post, the more relevant the posts it links to are.  The Plugin is Written By Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard).

Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress

 Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress

I do not particularly like the default Wordpress Post Editor I think it is a bit clunky.  For this reason I use oflline blog editing tools, however if I need to edit something on my blog, I want something I am rather familiar with.  This plugin gives me something very much akin to microsoft word by replacing the default Wordpress editor with FCKeditor 2.4.3.  The Plugin is Written By Dean Lee.

Democracy

 Democracy is a plugin that hopes to increase participation on your blog.  Polls are something that make people feel involved.  This poll plugin is easy to use, install, and manage. It uses AJAX to load data, making it quick and fun to use. The Plugin is Written By Andrew Sutherland.

Email Users

 Email Users Allows the administrator to send an e-mail to the blog users who have registered or subscribed to parts of the blog.  This is a useful time changer and can be used to great effect when required.  The Plugin is Written By Vincent Prat (email : vpratfr@yahoo.fr).

FeedBurner FeedSmith

 FeedBurner FeedSmith  Originally authored by Steve Smith, detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.  FeedBurner is a great alternative to hosting your own RSS feed as it has excellent statistics and may be more reliable than your own hosting solution (mine was down for 1.5 days last week).The Plugin is Written By FeedBurner.  Note however that the overall comment threads is hosted with FeedBurner but the RSS for a particular post are not independent and are actually still hosted on your blog.

Global Translator

 Global Translator

I do not know many languages, but should not be a reason to prevent people reading my content.  Although I speak fluent French, posting at all is a big time challenge.  This great plugin dynamically translates a blog in thirteen different languages (English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch) by wrapping the Google Translation Engine or the Babelfish Translation Engine.  The Plugin is Written By Davide Pozza.  Note however it does not incorporate a widget to display the actual translations.

Google Analyticator

 Google Analyticator is something I have only recently added.  This adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. Google Analytics is a service that allows you to track who is viting your site, where they have come from and where they are going to.  Previously I had to add code to my template to enable this functionality (and remember to do it again if I was changing themes).  After enabling this plugin if you enter your Google Analytics’ UID it will enable logging.  The Plugin is Written By Ronald Heft, Jr..

Gregarious

 Gregarious is a plugin that encourages emailing posts and spreading the word through social networking sites.   The majority of my visitors come from social networking sites and not via search engines.  Anything I can do to encourage people to spread the word about terabell is a great thing, this plugin gives you javascript and the words Email, Rate, Bookmark this and the digg buttons used on this page.  The Plugin is Written By Ankur Kothari.

Homepage Excerpts

 Homepage Excerpts

If you want a dynamic front page and you do not want to display the thousands of words from all your recent pots, Homepage Excerpts will give your readers a teaser about theh posts that they will hopefully click through to.  You can select a select number of words or a specifically defined extract to show.  The Plugin is Written By http://www.dailyblogtips.com.

KB Robots.txt

 KB Robots.txt

Manage your robots.txt file from within Wordpress. This means you can do things through your admin console and do not need to venture into ftp every time you wish to make a robots change.  The Plugin is Written By Adam R. Brown.

Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers

 Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers allows you to notify unconfirmed subscribers from FeedBurner email subscriptions and more that.  Feedburner requires users to confirm their email addresses, if they do not confirm they will not be notified of your posts.  This allows you to send a gentle reminder for them to confirm their emails with feedburner, so they can read what you have written.  The Plugin is Written By Keith Dsouza.

OpenID Registration

 OpenID Registration allows people to sign into your blog using Open ID.  Open ID is a great idea where you can have one signin for each site that subscribes to the concept.  Although I have enabled this, noone is using it to date.  The Plugin is Written By Alan J Castonguay, Hans Granqvist.

Optimal Title

 Optimal Title is another SEO tool that makes sure the title of the posts are moved to make them more easily recognized by the search engines.  The Plugin is Written By Aaron Schaefer.

Popularity Contest

 Popularity Contest

This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the popularity values and view reports.  This does not have any widgets to put its popular posts in your sidebar, however I have built one for this purpose.  The Plugin is Written By Alex King.

Quick Stats

 Quick Stats

Logs hits with referrer, ip, host, client and url information. RSS tracker feature lets you tracker your visitors in near realtime using an RSS reader software.  If you want to know if anyone is visiting and can not wait 24 hours to see what google has tracked for you, then you can use this to help you out.  The Plugin is Written By Jim Qode.

reCAPTCHA

 reCAPTCHA is a great project that I want to support, but Ok, You Got Me technically I lied above, This is one that I love but do not have activated.  If been on the web for a while you will have had to enter those CAPTCHA images on web pages where they want you to type a random series of letters and they are hard to read, so then the user can assume that there was a human entering the numbers.  Much of this is wasted energy and does no great good for anyone, if this plugin is enabled, then a central server gives you images that are taken from books that have been scanned and  the user’s effort to decipher the text will let the blog owner know they are people and old manuscripts will be available for the public.  As akismet works so well for me I do not need to sort the bots from the people, but I really like the concept and will turn it on if I get swamped by a bot army.  The Plugin is Written By Ben Maurer & Mike Crawford.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

 Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

This powerful yet easy-to-install contact form features exceptional accessibility and usability while still providing extensive anti-spam and anti-exploit security features. A marriage of communication and peace-of-mind.  If you use it I will get an email, so please give it a try. The Plugin is Written By Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley.

Sociable

 Sociable Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social networks and bookmarking sites. This is the images at the bottom of each of my posts. The Plugin is Written By Peter Harkins.

Subscribe To Comments

 Subscribe To Comments Allows readers to receive email notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. As I want people to be engaged in discussions on my site, any way I can (rss and this) will let people stay informed on what people are saying about their comments and the site itself.  The Plugin is Written By Mark Jaquith.

Upload +

 Upload+ helps rectify some of the annoying ways that Wordpress uploads files.  This plugin provides a more secure, cleaner uploading and customizes file names for uploaded files.  The Plugin is Written By Pixline.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

 Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to Wordpress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode.  The Plugin is Written By Keith Dsouza.  I blogged about this yesterday and would reccomend it to anyone who wants to keep their blog up to date but does not want to worry about editing, downloadning backing up, and managing plugins.  I would like it however if it checked the compatibility of plugins with the new version. 

WP-CACHE

 wp-cache is a very fast cache module. This is quick and easy to use, and means that the database that wordpress is built upon is not queries with each visitor, rather at regular intervals.  The Plugin is Written By Ricardo Galli Granada.

Users Online

 WP-UserOnline and WP-UserOnline Widget 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).  The Plugin is Written By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.

Other Plugins and Widgets

 I have built three of my own widgets for use in the sidebar that make implementing my blog easier, meaning I do not have to change the code of Wordpress or my template.  I plan on releasing the code for these blogs in a later post.  For everything else I am able to use text widgets (pasting html code into text) to get the desired effect.

Please feel free to comment on this thread, I look forward to hearing your discussion

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