My Favorite Wordpress Plugins

Filed under Blogging

For those who are less familiar with Wordpress, plugins are addons that can enhance your blog’s functionnalities (read further for examples). The benefit of using (or developing) plugins is that you don’t have to modify Wordpress’ source code.

Installing a plugin for Wordpress is pretty easy:

Extract the files from the archive you’ve downloaded.
Upload the plugin file (when it’s made of a single PHP file) or the directory (when it’s made of multiple files) to your blog using a FTP client. The plugin file (or folder) must be uploaded into /wp-content/plugins.
Enable the plugin from Wordpress control panel (http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin). Select the “Plugins” tab and activate the plugin from the list.

Some plugins may require that you set some configuration values by editing them with your favorite text editor. Just look for a file named readme.txt, install.txt or any other text file that may contain the installation instructions for the plugin before you upload it.

My Favorite Wordpress Plugins

While their might be some better plugins out there, here are those I mainly use:

wp-cache: This plugin is great to help you improve your blog’s performance. It caches Wordpress’ pages in the database for some time. So instead of processing all the information each time a visitor comes to your blog, it serves the page (which has already been built) from the database.
Be careful when using this plugin as it can interfer with other plugins. Some plugins require to be executed every time a page is accessed in order to function properly. As this plugin caches your blog’s pages, some plugins may not be executed everytime and could cause unwanted behaviors.
Social Bookmarks: This plugin appends social bookmarks links to the end of your posts. You can choose from tens of social bookmarking sites to add to your blog.
Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. A social bookmarking system (like StumbleUpon.com) allows users to save links to their favorite webpages and share them with other users who can rate these bookmarks. Social bookmarking can account for a great deal of traffic if used efficiently.
Akismet: While this plugin comes with Wordpress, it’s still a very useful to block unwanted comments (spam) on your blog. This plugin requires that you get a Wordpress.com API key in order to function properly. To get your API key, just follow this link, signup for a Wordpress account and you’ll get the key in your welcome email.
Custom Query String UTW: This plugin allows you to specify how many posts per page are in shown in different parts of your site. For example, you could have 3 posts shown on the frontpage, 5 posts shown in category pages and 10 posts shown in the archive. Without this plugin, you’d have to use a single value for every part of your blog.
Feedburner FeedSmith: This plugin redirects your blog’s feed to Feedburner.
Full Text Feed: Allows you to display the full content of your posts in your RSS feed while displaying only a summary on your archive and category pages.
Get Recent Comments: Encourage your readers to comment your posts by displaying their comments on your blog’s sidebar.
Google Sitemaps: While this plugin doesn’t bring much to the visitor experience, this is a must have in my opinion. This plugins builds a sitemap file from your blog’s pages and pings Google automatically when a change is made to it.
A sitemap is a text file in XML format that contains links to all the pages from your website. This file is usually located at the root of your website and is usually named sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz. Although only Google and Yahoo allow sitemap submission, other search engines (like Live.com) will look for this file and pick it up automatically (if you’re lucky). When a search engine picks up your sitemap, it then knows the entire structure of your website, making it easier to crawl it and index it.
MyAvatars: Displays your visitor’s MyBlogLog picture next to comments they leave on your blog. I’ve already made a post about a bug in MyAvatars and how to solve it.
Related Posts: Propose other relevant posts to your readers and encourage them to stay longer on your blog with this plugin.
Show Top Commentators: Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment.
Subscribe To Comments: Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
Tiny MCE Advanced: Now this a plugin I really love. It adds lots of functionnalities to Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Read Wordpress Advanced WYSIWYG Editors.
Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure: Since some of your content may be appear in more than one place on your blog (i.e.: in categories, archives, etc.), you may get penalized by Google. To prevent duplicate content to being indexed by Google, this plugin adds the “nofollow” meta tags to duplicate pages. Another must have.