Essential WordPress Plugins
Last month I started using WordPress as my blogging software, after moving away from Movable Type. I love it. I’ve recently upgraded to version 1.5.1 (over top of 1.5, of course), and with that took a look at just how many plugins I had installed for WP. There were so many, in fact, that I had to go though and purge my list for plugins I would just never use; who really cares what’s playing in my WinAmp or if I can change my themes on a whim? So after weeding out all the useless plugins I had, here’s a list of my Essential WordPress Plugins! Let’s begin.
Spam Karma 2 (for WP 1.5.1 only, thanks IO ERROR)
This is one of the craziest anti-spam plugins I’ve seen for WP. There are so many options available for you to customize, it’s almost overwhelming; good thing the defaults are just fine for most blogs.
An Excerpt from the Spam Karma website:
Spam Karma works by running every new comment through a battery of filters and checks. Each of which increase or decrease the comment’s ‘Karma’ value. Depending on the final score, the comment is either:
* Approved
* Discarded silently as spam (no email is sent to you, unless you specifically require it, but a digest is sent to you every X spams deleted).
* Placed in Moderation mode. With the possibility for the commenter to auto-moderate his own comment by proving he’s not a spammer (by filling a Captcha or checking a confirmation email).
This defiantely an essential plugin, blog spam is getting out of hand these days. Check it out!
This is a plugin for automatic generation of a Creative Commons license. It can output a text or image link to your license in all pages. It also adds machine-readable metadata in the document
. No template editing is required.Why is this important? It lays out certain copyright conditions for any of your creations, weblog or otherwise. For more information, this comic explains it best.
This is a little plugin that gives your readers an easy way to get in touch with you while keeping your email away from those nasty email harvesting spam bots. By inserting a small tag into any page on your blog, you instantly have a form that readers can fill out and submit directly to an email address of your choosing. The users are never aware of which email it’s being sent to, and you never have to worry about obsfucating your email address to ward away spam bots again.
A small plugin which allows you to quickly add a photo (which has already been uploaded to the webserver) to any post. It does the formatting and everything for you!
Under Development:
WordPress Gallery 2 Intergration
This is a plugin that is under development at the time, and is still in beta. It makes use of Gallery2’s embedding capabilities to integrate an image gallery into your blog, wrapping it in your current theme. Check out the development forum, as well!
I’ll add more “essential” plugins as I find them, but this is it for now. You can find more plugins at:
WordPress Wiki Plugin Directory
WordPress Plugin DB
Or just Google it.
7 Comments
So when you going to upgrade to the latest WPG2 plug-in (About to go gold 1.0 in the next two weeks (in RC right now) :-)
I think you like the changes!!
Great list of plug-ins!
Well, I fully agree with your comment. :-)
BTW: I visited your blog earlier today and I just wanted to congratulate you on a well presented, and informative resource.
It’s not often that I come across a web site that offers a wealth of quality. ;-)
Martin (aka POS Software Man)
Terrific Blog you have. Peace Out.
TreeFrog
Kewl blog you got goin on up here.
Peace, JiggyWittit
Ironic indeed Kae, but of course the ideal is support for all major browsers, even if they are flawed.
If you’re running 1.5.1, you should really be looking at Spam Karma 2 instead of Spam Karma. It’ll give you better coverage, especially for trackback spam.
It isn’t perfect, and it runs too late in the process, which is why there’s Bad Behavior, which stops spammers up-front, before they have a chance to eat up your bandwidth and waste your time on managing spam.