My Favourite WordPress Plugins

It’s been some time since my last post. I am ready to resume blogging again after a long break. I got rid of a lot of “bad investments” to pave the way for a better year ahead. About one year ago, I updated my blog template and plugins. This year, my blog just got better with some really useful plugins I recently discovered.

1. Similar Posts

There was an older version of this plugin created by someone else. The author of “Similar Posts” upgraded the older version and it is much better and easier to install than the previous one. You will see a list of similar posts on every one of my blog posts.

2. Subscribe To Comments

Sometimes a particular blog post can become a popular talking point for a lot of people. This plugin makes it easy for someone to keep updated on all the latest follow up comments via email.

3. Math Comment Spam Protection

I get loads of comment spam every week. The default anti spam plugin “Akismet” does a fairly good job of filtering comment spam but sometimes a few of them manage to sneak through the filters. This plugin forces the spammer to enter a simple math sum into a text field before his comment will be posted. This isn’t perfect but it surely will stop most “auto spam” software.

4. Simple Trackback Validation

Previously I did not receive a lot of trackback spam. I don’t even know how it works but this plugin makes sure the person blogging about something on your blog does include a link back to the exact post or your web site.

5. Social Bookmark Creator

I used to have a row of cute little icons after each blog post for people to add my posts to their social bookmark accouts. I found this plugin neater because it displays the bookmark urls in a drop down menu instead. I don’t like the loading times of the icons and not everyone recognizes the logos of the social bookmarks sites they use. This one is simpler and more functional in my opinion.

6. Ultimate Tag Warrior

I looked high and low and this is the best tagging plugin I could find on the internet. What I have implemented on my blog is only a fraction of what this plugin can do. You may also display “tag clouds” and “tag pages” for your blog.

7. Another WordPress Meta Plugin

I think the name of this plugin sounds rather silly but it works very well. I discovered that this plugin conflicts with the old “Adhesive 3.2″ plugin so if you plan to use this plugin, you need to disable “Adhesive 3.2″. Now I can add a default meta keyword and description tag for my entire blog or tags specific to each blog post only.

8. Feedburner Feed Replacement

If I could restart me blog with what I now know, I would have used FeedBurner from the start. I redirect my WordPress feed to FeedBurner. I even turn off the ping URLs in my WordPress settings because I use FeedBurner’s “PingShot” pinging service now.

9. Feed Control

My blog feed now includes my WordPress pages thanks to this plugin. I personally make use of WordPress pages in my blog. Not many people do that but I think it is necessary to separate blog content and non-blog content.

10. Filosofo Home-Page Control

This plugin lets you select a WordPress page to replace the default blog post front page. Great for turning WordPress into a regular web site instead of a blog.

11. My Page Order

This is must have plugin if you use pages and you want them to be sorted by ID. The default interface is not very good for mass updating your page IDs. You can edit your template code to sort by page titles too but this ones let’s you sort your pages by IDs in your customized order.

12. Google Sitemaps

No WordPress blog should go without this plugin. It does not make sense to use a WordPress blog and use another script or software to generate the XML sitemap for your blog. There is also a free Yahoo sitemap script that lets you generate a Yahoo-friendly text file with all the links in your blog for their new “Site Explorer” service. Remember to rename the text file to “urllist.txt” to get it to work with Yahoo.

13. Smart Archives

This plugin builds on the WordPress tag functions to create a better archive of your blog posts. Check out my archives to see how it looks like.

14. monthchunks

This plugin displays the links to the monthly blog archives of your blogs. The default list by WordPress displays them in a long list with one month per line. This one shortens it to a neat and compact list instead. Great for blogs that have a few years worth of posts.

15. wordTube

Not too long ago some internet marketing gurus were selling these video products like hotcakes. Did you know there are free video players you could use for your web site? I should cover this in greater detail in the future. You will need to download the recommended mp3 and flash video player for this to work. It even includes “Media Center” area to store all your media files.

16. WP-ContactForm

When I started this blog, I simply displayed my email on a contact page with a “spam proof” script. It did not work very well. My original email vincent at vincentrich.com was infested with spam so I had to delete it to stop wasting time deleting them. With this plugin, you will only know my email address if I reply. It makes the sorting of emails easier because you may edit the subject line to whatever you want.

These are all the plugins I use at the moment. If you have a plugin that you find very useful for WordPress, leave a comment and let us know. It would be a great time to test these plugins on my blog to see if you would like them on your blog.