the air

It seems like everyone who has a blog powered by WordPress has a list of their best plugins which they are running. I figured that this was high time for me to join in and make my own list. I’m not going to say that you should run these plugins, but I do feel that without these plugins, my blog just wouldn’t work. WordPress is a powerful platform that is extremely easy to use. In fact, many of the plugins listed below require little to know editing of php files. Without further adieu, I proudly present my top 15 WordPress Plugin List (in alphabetical order)

Akismet

This plugin is part of the WordPress installation (assuming you are using 2.0.0 and above). In my opinion, this plugin is a must for any blogger and you have absolutely no reason to turn this plugin off. Although my blog is not extremely popular, I still end up with almost 5 to 10 spam messages to deal with every morning. Luckily, Aksimet is able to capture all of them and I simply have to check all and delete all. If this plugin was not around, you would be seeing dozens of non-relevant comments and a cranky me. To use the Akismet plugin, go to the Plugins section of your Wordpress control panel and click on “activate it”. The plugin requires an API key which you can get for free by signing up for a Wordpress.com account. It really is a painless operation and it will save you so much time and headache.

Brian’s Threaded Comments

Brian’s Threaded Comments is more of an aesthetic plugin that transforms the comments for your posts into a more conversational approach. This plugin pretty much adds a “Reply to” button at the end of every post. Thus, your readers can reply directly to the comment rather than posting a comment and then scrolling down to find if a question or point was answered. I really don’t think this plugin is essential, however, if your readers do like to discuss your posts, you may wish to consider this plugin.

Challenge

The Challenge plugin simply adds a question that the comment poster will have to answer before their comment is posted. This prevents bots and spammers from automatically leaving you non-relevant posts. The plugin allows you to supply your own question or use a random mathematical question. Either way, you don’t want to make your question too hard otherwise legitimate comment posters will be unable to post anything. This plugin is part of my ongoing War Against Spam - which I will write about more in another post. The only gripe I have about this plugin is that if you forget to answer the question or you answered the question incorrectly, then you will be taken to another page that simply points out your fault. However, if you hit the BACK button on your browser, your entire comment has now been erased and it can be extremely frustrating if you had written a lengthy comment. Apparently, John Chow - who is also using this plugin - has developed a fix. I am simply waiting for him to write about the fix and I will implement it as well.

Contact Form ][

The Contact Form ][ (the ][ is supposed to a fancy way of writing the roman numerals for the number 2, II) was one of my first plugins and I use it as the basis for the contact form that is available on this blog. It gives you an abundant list of options to set. You can have all contact mail sent to a particular email address with a custom subject line that you could use to filter using your favorite email client. You can have custom success or error messages once the user has typed up their message and attempts to send it to you. I think it really is a nifty plugin and worth implementing on your own site.

Executable PHP Widget

Since updgrading to a newer version of this theme, I added the execPHP plugin to able to execute php commands from my sidebar widgets. Without it, I would have a tough time ensuring that all my sidebar “boxes” would stay in order and I would spend an insane amount of time doing trivial tasks. This plugin is really for those who know what they are doing in terms of php and stuff. If you are completely unsure of what exactly php is or have absolutely no clue what I am talking about, you may want to stay away from this plugin since it may not really help you out. However, for everyone else, you may wish to consider this plugin if you are using the Sidebar Widgets plugin.

Feedburner Feed Replacement

The Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin ensures that 100% of your feed traffic will go through Feedburner and will give you more accurate readership stats. The nice thing about this plugin is that it will automatically convert all of your existing subscribers from the old feed to the FeedBurner feed. I think this is a great plugin for every blog since it will help you understand how many readers you have and it will consolidate some statistics that you may find useful.

Google Sitemaps

The Google Sitemaps plugin will generate a sitemap for you automatically once you install it. It even creates a sitemap on demand. This plugin helps you to feed this information to Google Webmasters and will help get your blog indexed faster as well. This is a must for any blog that wishes to increase their presence online. Once I had submitted my sitemaps to Google, it took about 6 days before Google indexed my blog. It probably would have taken much longer had I not installed this plugin.

Optimal Title

The Optimal Title plugin is a great SEO tool to include in your blog. If you have noticed, at the very top of your browser you will see your blog title. By default, WordPress shows your blog title followed by the post title. This plugin reverses the order and shows the post title first then the blog title. In other words, instead of The Air << Title Of The Blog Post, it will show Title Of The Blog Post << The Air. I have made a few changes to this code so my title will appear differently. The change I made is available on the plugin author’s homepage. This helps out greatly once your posts are being indexed by Google. I think this plugin is handy for those who want to use SEO tools to help get their blog noticed more and with rankings.

Related Posts

The Related Posts plugin will list other posts by you that are relevant to the current post. You can specify how many posts it will list and how to display them. This is a great way for you to allow your readers to read up on other past posts and expose more of your writings. To see it in action, just look below the dancing penguin. You should see the other two parts I have written so far listed along with some other posts. I think this plugin is also another SEO tool that you can implement on your own blog as well.

Sidebar Widgets

When I first started my blog, I had absolutely no idea what widgets were and I had shown little interest in them. After updating the theme for this blog, I decided to give widgets a try and I installed the Sidebar Widgets plugin. This plugin is made available by the same people who made WordPress and the only requirement is that the theme you are using is widget ready. This plugin allows you to rearrange your sidebar elements to your liking. It literally becomes a drag and drop operation. You don’t have to edit any php file or write any kind of code, thus, making it one of the easiest plugins to use. My blog cannot live without this plugin since it has really allowed me to alter the sidebar layout without spending any time to code.

Smart Update Pinger

The Smart Update Pinger plugin automatically pings the various blog pinging services once you make a new post. There are times when I write posts that I want published on a future date. Once I click the publish button, my blog automatically would ping all the different services. This wasn’t a good idea because I did not have new content posted yet, but the pinging services would think that I added new content and they would update accordingly. This plugin rectifies that error and only sends a ping once I have a new post actually posted. Again, this is a plugin that is great for those who write whenever they have time but publish at a different date. If you ping the services too many times, they will block you because they may think you are “spamming” them. Sometimes I also have to edit posts for clarity or to fix errors. Before, whenever I edited the post and saved, it would ping the services; not a good idea. Now, it only pings when I create new posts not when I edit already posted posts.

Subscribe to Comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It basically adds a “subscribe to comments via email” checkbox in the comments area. You can simply subscribe to the comments and be kept up to date. I don’t really have a need for this plugin, but I do know that there are times when readers would like to be kept up to date on certain posts’ comments. I mostly added this plugin for readers’ convenience.

Time Zone

Since I live in Chicago, it is imperative that I am aware of Daylight Savings Time. The Time Zone plugin allows my blog to be “aware” of DST and automatically adjust the internal clock once DST occurs. Although I don’t post the actual time I made an entry on my blog, this plugin does allow me to keep track of when I posted my blog by date and time. I use this mostly for internal reasons and it literally is transparent to the reader.

WordPress Database Backup

The WordPress Database Backup plugin is part of the WordPress installation and is an extremely critical plugin. Since starting my blog, I have changed hosting providers and have updated this blog numerous times. Throughout all that, this plugin has proven to be extremely useful since it backups my posts. Once the backup is complete, you can either email the file to yourself or download it. The plugin is very easy to use; just activate and then select “Backup” under “Manage” in your WordPress control panel. John Chow recommends “for security reasons, you should turn off the Plugin after you backed up your database.” I’m not sure what the security risks are, but I figure that if he’s saying it, you should turn it off once you’re done backing up your blog. I usually backup my site once a week and make two copies of the actual backup. One copy I keep on my computer and the other copy I keep on my email server so that it is easily accessible from anywhere in the world.

YouTube Brackets

The YouTube Brackets plugin allows me to embed YouTube videos into my blog. To date, I think I have only posted maybe one or two YouTube videos and I am not a big fan of posting videos on my blog. Honestly, the video quality of many YouTube videos is horrendous and not even worth blogging about. With that said, I use this plugin very rarely, but it does come in handy if the need to post a YouTube video is required.

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