(Yet Another) Top Wordpress Plugins
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In the midst of the series’ that I’m working on, I’m putting together some Circle Six Top (X) lists. Firefox Extensions, OS X shareware/freeware, etc. And I’m kicking it off with the plugins that we’re currently running on the blog and some that we use frequently on client sites that are based on Wordpress.
I know, I know. There have been a ton of these lists. But I’ve found every one of them useful, and often surprising. So I put this one together in the hopes that someone else would have the same reaction. I’m also including some advice that I can offer from my own experience with my own setup, for those that run into the same problems I did. I might not be a genius, but I do have a knack for problem solving.
Circle Six Design’s Top Wordpress Plugins
These are more or less in the order that I install them in…
This is often the first plugin I install. For most well-packaged plugins, it allows for easy, web-based uploading and automatic installation of zipped plugin files, with a better plugin management menu (with full uninstall option for plugins installed through its interface).
Admin Drop Menus/Tiger Style Administration
The Wordpress menus can always use some prettying up. I usually prefer the Admin Drop Menus for ease of use, but the Tiger Style Administration is really beautiful. Sometimes I switch back and forth just to keep things interesting. I’ve found them both to be simple drop-in, no-fuss plugins.
I find Bad Behavior to be very effective as a front line defense against comment spam and other nasties. In combination with a little blacklist work and Wordpress’ built in spam features, I only have to resort to plugins like Spam Karma on a few sites.
Since I edit most of my posts in TextMate now, I get built in spellchecking, but if you edit in Wordpress, this will give you an AJAX spellchecker. It’s pretty accurate and has a great dictionary, and the interface is really nice.
For the purposes of SEO, META descriptions can be fairly important to some crawlers. This plugin makes life really, really simple. It inserts an HTML META description tag with an excerpt/content brief for a post/Page, a description for categories, and the blog tagline for everything else.
Ultimate Tag Warrior (w/Autotag Mod)
What’s a blog without a good Folksonomy? Ultimate Tag Warrior is my favorite plugin for tagging my posts and creating tag clouds. It provides good template tags and a great options panel for maintaining your tag database. I also created an Autotag mod for the plugin that scans the text of the current post in the edit window and provides tag suggestions from your own database. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t write anything to the database, so it won’t hurt to try it if you know how to back up your plugin directory ;-). The mod also includes fixes for several bugs, including the superajax feature that lets you add tags to posts on the fly while viewing the front end of the blog when you’re logged in as admin, and fixes the Yahoo suggest tag. The Tagyu suggest feature won’t work for you, since there is no more Tagyu site.
If you’re expecting a fair amount of traffic, this plugin will speed up your site and sometimes save your butt. It caches pages and does a really good job of it. However, if you’re making changes to your site and want to see them right away, you’re going to want to disable this plugin. Don’t forget, or you’ll find yourself very confused.
If you’re using K2, you don’t need this, but for anyone else, it’s a great plugin that adds a little class to your comment mechanism. Not necessary, but it’s a nice touch and it’s low on javascript.
Adds the option to make posts “sticky” when you’re editing in Wordpress. If you have a theme with multiple posts on the homepage, you can keep one at the top of the pile for a while. If you have just one post on your homepage, like the current C6 theme, you can keep it there and add posts to other categories that will show up under “recent posts” but leave the homepage alone. I don’t use it often, but I find it especially useful for client sites where they have mostly static pages and use the blog features for news items.
Extended Live Archives (w/ a hack)
I really like this plugin. I don’t put it on client sites because of the load time and various other issues (see the hack link). But I take the chance on the blog. If you have problems with the plugin showing up, the hack can probably fix it for you. The plugin provides an AJAXy javascript interface to dig through your archives based on date, folksonomy or taxonomy. If nothing else, it’s a lot of fun. I usually borrow the CSS file from the K2 theme and modify that, because the one that comes with the plugin isn’t nearly as nice and Binary Bonsai got it right. Why reinvent the wheel?
This just lets you add your last 10 del.icio.us links to your sidebar. If you use del.icio.us for blogging purposes and actually want to share your links, this is a great plugin.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Generates a Sitemap for your site. Good for SEO, great for navigation. You can use it to build a custom 404 page, and provide users with a full map of your site when they can’t find what they’re looking for.
You can use this in combination with the above plugin, or on its own. It does pretty much what the title says…
The best plugin I’ve found for adding other people’s RSS feeds to my site. I’ve played around with a few but they always eventually crashed my site when any malformed XML came through. That hasn’t happened with this one, yet.
Kimili Flash Embed (modified)
In concept, this plugin is great. If you need to embed Flash, this is the way to do it. I use Flash to share videos in FLV format. This makes use of the SWFObject script, formerly known as FlashObject. It unobtrusively embeds Object and Embed tags when they’re supported, and leaves a div tag when they’re not. It keeps your site accessible and prevents problems for people without the Flash player. I have a modified version that uses an updated script and makes a few changes to the function of the plugin. I may share a homogenized version of the mod in the near future, but for now it’s very specific to this site and wouldn’t do you much good…
Wordpress does a great job with RSS feeds. But if you want to track them, you need to use Feedburner. This plugin automates the process of redirecting your feed to Feedburner without losing all of your current subscribers. This was a very simple setup and install. I had Feedburner up and running in 10 minutes.
Another simple install with a simple options panel. This does a surprisingly good job of picking up related posts and displaying them within your template. I think the Hemingway Wordpress theme comes with this functionality built in, but you still need the plugin.
Adds those little social bookmarking links to your posts. There’s a Digg This plugin out there, but I haven’t had much luck with it. I was going to give it another try, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
If you post a lot of code, you need a syntax highlighter. I don’t use this nearly as much as I should, but it’s one of the better ones that I’ve found. TextMate has the ability to output CSS/HTML highlighted code directly from the editor, so I may be using that more from now on. The nice thing about iG, though, is that you can click a button to switch to plain text mode for easy cut-and-paste.
WP lightbox 2 (modified)
I run this plugin. It’s a little cheesy, but I love it. However, I run a few scripts that all depend on prototype.js. So I comment out the line in the plugin that adds the .js to the head tag, and add it to the theme myself, using PHP conditional statements when possible. I use the JSView plugin for Firefox to help me determine if any scripts are being double-loaded and then track down the culprits manually.
I integrate Zenphoto with most of my sites. If you search for it on this blog, you can hear all my raving about it, so I won’t go into it now. But these plugins help incorporate the package into Wordpress more completely, adding random photos, an insertion interface in the editor, etc. Check them out. I use all three, but you may only need one or two depending on how you use Zenphoto in your site. 
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