WordPress Plugins you shouldn’t not have
Let’s all agree that the wordpress plugin repository blows. The wordpress theme repository blows. I’m not flaming wordpress because I have found a good amount of plugins through their website but I hate when I search for something that’s very specific and I get the same results returned. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I dare you to go google “search engine optimization wordpress plugins” or anything of the like then google “huge dwarfs with tiny hands and feet” and get the same results. You’d be furious with this free search engine that you had nothing to do with nor made any attempt to improve. I’m just saying, it’s frustrating.
Over the past 4 months I’ve installed/uninstalled probably 100 wordpress plugins and kept a few, but I only want one plugin to do one thing. I’m not a big seventy-in-one plugin kind of guy.
WordPress Plugins
Below you’ll find the (up-to-date) plugins that I find most useful with wordpress in their respective category. This obviously isn’t every single awesome wordpress plugin but this list isn’t an end all be all. I also hate people that write 50 “top 10″ posts about wordpress plugins for the sake of traffic rather than resourcefulness and quality. Quality is what I aim for.
All of these wordpress plugins are FREE.
Spam protection
Akismet
Hands down the best in spam protection for your money (it’s completely free.)
Search Engine Optimzation (SEO)
All in One SEO Pack
Update posts with meta data specific to that post/page. This is invaluable if you want to SEO your blog properly for rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN et cetera.
Google XML Sitemaps
Generate your Google XML Sitemap with valid XML that’s always up to date. This helps tremendously if you want google to take your blog seriously.
Robots Meta
Manage your robots.txt file dynamically
Usability
Multi-page Toolkit
Write multi-page articles, tired of using the “kitchen sink”? this plugin will do all you need.
Aesthetics & Imagery
SyntaxHighlighter
If you write a lot of source code in your articles like I tend to do this helps a lot. What else are you going to do? Plaintext source code is extremely “web 1.0″
Social Marketing & Media
DiggZ-et
Put that sexy digg button on your articles/pages. Manage the icon as well as where to exclude/include it. Very useful.
ShareThis
On all of my posts I have a “ShareThis” link at the bottom. I personally hate reading an article on a blog with 900 buttons to click, this encompasses more than just social media, you can send to a friend and various other functions through one javascript window.
WordPress Specific Plugins
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Upgrade your wordpress to the latest installation (Note: This plugin will probably be rendered useless in future releases of wordpress as I’m sure they’ll build this functionality into the core more effectively, but for now it’s helpful.)
WordPress Related Posts
Show posts related to tags in specific posts.
WP Super Cache
If you get the digg effect through one of your articles at random, you don’t want to be caught naked. This will cache high traffic pages saving your server the beating that digg undoubtedly would have delivered had you not been the wiser.
WordPress.com Popular Posts
Display your most popular posts (related by # of comments from your wordpress.com stats)
Search & Replace
Sometimes you want to replace every “apple” with an “orange” or the like. This comes in handy at random times but when you need it, it really comes in handy. Replace any string with a string over all your posts pages, or anything.
That should get you started. There are tons of useful wordpress plugins so know that this is just a few that I picked. I will be updating this article weekly most likely so be sure to check back.
Be about it,
Bryan
