Here’s a little survey/question for WordPress users out there. What are your favorite plugins? I’m regularly asked how I do certian aspects of this site and the answers are usually pointing at a plugin of one kind or another – so I thought I’d let you know what I’m using – but only on the condition that you show me yours (I feel a little dirty saying that). Here are my active plugins:
- Spam Karma 2 – Reloaded – picks up 99% of comment spam
- Page Navigation 1.5 – puts the page numbers at the bottom of the main and category pages to help with navigation
- Related Posts 1.3.3 – at the bottom of each individual post page are 5 related article to encourage readers to stick around
- Subscribe To Comments 2.0.2 – a recent feature to help readers keep track of older conversations (not sure if anyone’s using it?)
- WP-ContactForm 1.1 – Contact form plugin
- WordPress Email Notification Plugin v2.1 – the plugin behind my weekly newsletter – basic but good
Now I’ve shown you mine – time to show me yours.
Update – I’ve collated the list so far here.
On my new blog I have kept it pretty light on the plugins – in fact I am only using two – and they work together:
StatTraq: http://www.randypeterman.com/StatTraq/ (stat tracking system)
Most Wanted: http://boakes.org/most-wanted (most popular posts on homepage – by unique visits)
I picked up most wanted after you recommended keeping readers up to date on popular posts – and it works very well. StatTraq does a great job of collecting data too. A nice package of plugins if you ask me!
I currently have the following plugins:
– Spam Karma 2 – Reloaded: Yup! Definitely got to control those comment spam.
– Adsense-Deluxe: Makes it easy for me to add adsense ads to my posts.
– Google Sitemaps: Thought this might come in handy at getting all my pages listed with Google.
– Feedburner Feed Replacement: So I can use Feedburner to track my feed stats.
And a few others that I think I won’t mention, in an effort not to look like a plugin addict. ;-)
awww come on Bina! :-) hehe….
Adsense Deluxe, very handy for inserting Adsense into posts, and has a lot of flexibility (basically, you give it your Adsense code for an ad style, name it, it stores it, and then a button click inserts it at the cursor while editing..any stored ad layout can be selected by adding the name after the default.. line.
WP-Amazon…also very handy, for doing Amazon product lookups via a small popup window, and then generating/inserting the html into your post body while editing.
Autometa..automatically generates Technorati tags based on your post content, and/or you can manually edit the tags. These are hidden tags, which I prefer.
Quicktags, which lets me do things like add drop shadows to pictures and text, set alignment, etc.
Subscribe-me for feed buttons…one php call to rule them all.
Since I’m running WP 2.0 beta, Akismet spam blocking is built into it.
Mine have already been mentioned here, but there you go:
Page Navigation – this one is OK, it could be a lot better.
Google Sitemaps – very very useful!
Stattraq – don’t use this much after Google Analytics came on.
WP-ContactForm – nice.
Ok who is going to let the cat out of the bag?
There is one specific plugin that makes your pages get ranked highly in Google searches that I can see a few of you including Darren are using.
The plugin is great but I am keeping my mouth shut.
Damn it Darren why did you have to bring this up.
I use a lot more plugins than here, but they are all public on my blog:
* WP Adsense: Adds an adsense tag and block into a post if I want on there.
* Auto-hyperlink URLs: Everyone should be doing this…
* Blogs Of The Day: It’s a little bit fun, and generates some nice backlinks for you
* Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter: Not really sure why I do this because people rip off my feeds anyway?
* CSS Compress: Gzip everything–seriously, my bandwidth bills suck.
* Del.icio.us – Bookmark this!
* Flickr Gallery: Powers the gallery section of my site
* Get RSS: I use this custom plugin to pull content automatically from other sources to add value to posts and pages
* Heavyweight Categories: For the archives
* IImage Browser: For admin panels
* Live Comment Preview
* Plugins Used
* Relative Dates
* RunPHP
* Extract Terms
* Terms2tags
* Google Sitemaps
* Force Word Wrapping
* Wp-cache
* WordPress From/Where
* WP Hardened Trackback
* WordPress Hashcash
So, quite a long laundry list…
I’m using :
– Adsense Logger : track who’s clicking on which ad. And I just never check stats :P
– Akismet : anti spam measures for submitted comments
– Bad Behavior : anti spam measures for page requests
– Cat 2 Tag : generate new categories on the fly, just like creating new tags in del.icio.us for example
– Code Auto Escape : paste code that won’t get screwed by WP’s formatting
– Paged Comment Editing : in the admin area, comments are paged so that you don’t see just the 20 latest
– eMiniMall GotGoodList edition : handy way to add chitika ads into posts
– Feedburner Feed Replacement : forwards feed request to your feedburner feed
– Optimal Title : title posts the way they should be
– Google Sitemaps : generate sitemaps
– Better Feed : add footer, (c) mention, “del.icio.us this” or related posts title right in every feed item
– Click Counter : tracks how many clicks you get on links you posts
– IP 2 Nation : converts an IP into its originating country
– Random Words : manage random lists, words, quotes, etc… for inserting in posts or anywhere
Batch Categories – For batch editing categories
Chitika Keywords – Dynamic substitution of Chitika keywords
Enhanced Post List – Adds features to the Mangae posts page in the Admin
Feedburner Feed Replacement – Integrates Feedburner
PXS Mail Form – Contact form
Popularity Contest – Ranks popularity of posts
SH-Autolink – Creates URLs for words or phrases automatically
Search Meter – Reports on what people have been searching for on your site
Search Reloaded – Improved search function
Smart Update Pinger – Only pings original posting, not updates
Spam Karma 2 – Reloaded – Excellent spam intervention
Taggerati – My main reason for using this is it automatically creates the related posts links
Viper’s Plugins Used – List all plugins used to a page on your site
WP-Googlestats – Reports googlebot visits
x-Dashboard – Improved Dashboard in admin area
Links can be found on my site’s plugin page. Otherwise search the WP plugin archives
The only one I’ve put on so far is IImage, which delivers an image browser on the Write page.
I’d like to get Adsense Deluxe (mentioned above), though. Anyone got a link for that?
Where can I find a complete directory or listing of WordPress plugins ?
Eric – start here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins
As with most things WordPress, the Codex is just an excellent resource and should be your first stop with any question.
My plugins…
Spam Karma – Set to normal or “kinda mean”.
CG-Powerpack – this is a whole set of plugins and I use different parts on different blogs. One that I use on every blog is CG-Referrers which is a stats and referrers package. Shows how many unique visitors, where from and what search terms led them there. I use CG-Feedread to display RSS feeds. I use CG-Antispam on lower traffic sites, but for the higher traffic sites I went to Spam Karma and set it to “Kinda Mean”.
PhotoPress – for uploading photos and inserting them into posts. Easy to use.
Google Sitemaps
Subscribe Me (Makes the neat little box of subscription buttons) – I modified the core to make the HTML validate and to add the Google Reader, Pluck and eNewsblog.
WP-Amazon – makes it super easy to add Amazon products to a post.
WordPress Database Backup. Use it and keep my fingers crossed that it will be unneeded.
[…] Darren’s started his very own meme (well its looks and smells like a meme, if you like these sorts of Web 2.0 words) and its on a really good topic: what WordPress plugins do you use (presuming you use WordPress). So rather than just post a comment there I’ll share my list here at The Blog Herald. I’d note to most of these plugins (but not all) are also standard installs for most of the b5media blogs as well. […]
[…] […]
ChrisH
have you got a URL for the Chitika Keywords plugin?
Just on two of the plugins:
Adsense Logger: great plugin, but the most resource intensive plugin I’ve ever used, it creates an entry in your SQL database for EVERY page visit, it nearly destroyed my server, although the stats were fun for the couple of weeks I used it
Blogsoftheday: also resource intensive, because the send a ping/ message out every time you get a visit. I really like the idea but I found that it was using too many resources and stopped using it.
What about the scheduled posting thing you are using, Is that a plug-in to WordPress or something else?
you mean how I post ahead of time?
If so it’s just a built in feature of WP – just set the time you want it to go live and it does.
Mine are:
Google Sitemaps Generator. Good for generating those ugly sitemaps very quickly.
Ak-Bookmark/ak-subscribe explains for itself.
Adsense DeLuxe Good for tweaking adsense and experimenting strategies without retouching templates.
Ahh thanks, I did not know it could be used like that, I thought it only was to change the date shown on the post. Great.
I like to keep things simple…. and conflict free. :)
Related Posts
SecureImage – captcha for posting comments.
Google Sitemaps
And one custom plugin for rotating AdSense, YPN, and Chitika as well as managing custom chitika queries per post, hiding the chitika query list, and tracking clicks.
Thanks for the Codex link Tom Hanna
Favorites are:
Ultimate Tag Warrior
AJAX Spell Checker (It really saves me!!)
Akismet I never even have to look at spam
Recent Comments which has the added bonus of grouping comments by conversation
I’m waiting for the plugin that cleans my house, cooks my dinner and does my laundry… but then I’ve had a wife once before so I’m not sure if the quality would be up to snuff. :-)
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Audio Player (http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/)
Rate My Stuff (http://www.deadcantrant.com/blog/rate/)
ViewLevel2 (http://blog.firetree.net/2005/08/25/viewlevel-20/)
WP-Amazon (http://manalang.com/wp-amazon)
WP-Contact Form (http://ryanduff.net/projects/wp-contactform/)
I can’t emphasize enough how important Spam Karma 2 is. It (the spam posts) seem to come in waves, but that one plugin has cleaned thousands of spam posts automatically for me.
Adsense-Deluxe seemed to be a cool plugin, but I haven’t been able to get it to work for me yet.
I also use the tags plugins for meta and technocrati tags. What I would REALLY love is a plugin that generated appropriate tags for me and inserted them, but I have no idea how accurate that would be.
Thanks to everyone else who posted! Now I have to go play with some more plugins…thanks for that. 8)
Bank, I’m intregued. What is this plugin of which you speak?
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a perfectionist. If things aren’t just right, I generally go nuts.
That said, my plugin list looks like this. I’m running each of these on at least one blog.
» Ultimate Tag Warrior (which I’ve had to hack mercilessly to fix numerous bugs in and add Atom support to).
» AdSense Logger (which doesn’t seem to be logging anymore, and I don’t know why).
» Akismet (stops spam without you thinking about it, but still has false positives, so go look at what it caught; you’ll probably find a legitimate comment in there). Disclaimer: I wrote portions of Akismet.
» Bad Behavior (stops automated spam before the spammer has any idea what happened, using fingerprinting techniques). Disclaimer: I wrote Bad Behavior.
» Blogs of the Day.
» Draft Notifier (sends me an email when another blog author saves a draft)
» In Series (lets you tag related posts as a series and display all the series members on each post)
» Links Page (output links onto a Page)
» Moose Candy (a plugin you won’t find anymore)
» More Moose (a plugin you won’t find anymore)
» Dofollow (which strips out the annoying nofollow tags)
» Google Sitemaps
» WP-Amazon (obviously, for inserting Amazon code into posts)
» wp-cache (fast server-side document caching)
» WP-CC (shows a Creative Commons license on your blog)
» WP-Cron (periodic execution of actions; yes it is what you think)
» Live Preview (shows a comment preview as the commenter types)
» Permalink Redirect (if a user requests a post using anything other than its permalink, serve a 301 with the URL for the permalink)
That’s about it for my plugins. I have one other that I run, which just contains some template functions which support my “Updated:” times, so the blog shows the time that a post was updated. These functions have since been added to WordPress 2.0.
Yeah Bank, What is it?
Optimal Title
Adhesive: for sticky posts (I’ve only used it once or twice, though)
Countdown: shows important dates that you’ve entered
Follow URL: for stripping the rel=”nofollow” from comment links
PXS Mail Form: for my contact form
Auto Moderate Comments: turns moderation on for old posts, which is perfect for dealing with the relatively small amount of spam I get
SRG Clean Archives: for simple, clean archives
My most current set includes:
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Adsense-Deluxe (also handy for Chitika, Yahoo, etc.)
Akismet (seems to be working far better than Spam Karma 2 did)
Bad Behavior
CG-Feedread
Customizable Post Listings
Drop Down Categories
Paged Comments
Popularity Contest
Related Posts
Search Pages
Google Sitemaps
WP-ContactForm (watch out for old versions; pre 1.3 are being hijacked to send spam)
WP-Cron
Wordpress Database Backup
WP-Googlestats
Thanks for the pointer on Optimal Title — I tend to just hack wp_title() every time a new version comes out to do much the same thing; a plugin would be easier.
Darren, this is a brilliant post for Christmas. Santa has just delivered a big bunch of great plugins. It’s truly transformed my WordPress experience. Well done, mate. :-D
Yah .. hard to add to these list but – to further what Elliot (#7) mentioned .. I looked at your “related blog posts” but instead chose the ones instead from Denis de Bernardy – which basically searches from your blog suitable Yahoo! keywords and then allows you to find them in your blog .. Feel free to test any entry in my pet blog: http://PetLvr.com/blog/ to see what I mean … on the individual permanent link pages, at the bottom …
This is the copy/paste text from my plug-ins page:
Extract Terms/ Queries Yahoo! Terms and returns an array of terms for use in other plugins. You need to set up a cache folder for this plugin to work.
Terms2posts/ Requires the Extract terms plugin and the Search reloaded plugin. Returns Yahoo! terms as related posts. To use, call sem_terms2posts(); where you want the related posts to appear.
Terms2Search/ Requires the Extract terms plugin. Returns Yahoo! terms as search queries. To use, call sem_terms2search(); where you want the terms to appear.
Terms2tags .. Requires the Extract terms plugin. Returns Yahoo! terms as technorati tags. To use, call sem_terms2tags(); where you want the terms to appear.
~~~~~~~~
Another one I rely on for all my blogs not listed above… for my link pages and my archive library pages – i need this plugin:
PHP Exec … which basically allows you to embed php and even javascripts directly on a wordpress page
Todd Brill– email me about your plugin request. aaron [at] technosailor [dot] com
[…] It’s always a pleasant surprise when a plugin you’ve released makes the “short list” list of plugins used by one of the more visible bloggers out there. (If you’ve cruised the “emergent church” blog realm or other techie type blogs, you’ve probably ran across Darren Rowse at some point). Darren, thanks for the link to Watershed Studio. […]
OptimalTitle follows one of the principles to keyword placement that really packs a punch. I’ve been calling it the “keyword pyramid” and posted about it yesterday:
The Power of the Keyword Pyramid
The plugin I’m most *excited* about is one that I’m nearly finished writing myself. It gives me a single, aggregated calendar (via PHPiCalendar) of all of my posts, shows when content will go live (I use the “post later” functionality asked about earlier a LOT) and moves it around if you do so in any of the WordPress blogs. You can see a screenshot of the current testing version that shows 3 blogs and the posts that will go up over the next few days. I’ll be doing a much more lengthy writeup of it in a couple of days, but figure I’d leak a preview here. It’s already changed some of my habits as I was bunching posts together more than I thought. Suddenly, when it’s right there on a calendar, it’s obvious.
Transpose e-mail
Auto-hyperlink URLs
Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter
No Duplicate Comments
Polite-ifier
Google Sitemaps
WP-ContactForm
Wow, this list is impressive. I do not have anything to add to this list ;) As most of you already pointed it out.
PS: thanks for those of you with LIVE links :-)
I was wondering: I’m also using evermore which …. makes all posts behave as if there is a `“”` after the first paragraph.
Does anybody know a plugin that allows you to change that to the 2nd or 3rd or 4th paragraph for site-wide adjustments? (versus individual entry breaks)
… behave as if there is a `“”` after the first paragraph.
(!–more–) // didn’t like the code I guess.
I actually have a similar article over at http://jakob.thusgaard.com/?p=15 including the plugins I use. They are:
FAlbum: GREAT plugin by Elijah Cornell for integration between Flickr.com and WordPress. Today I just needed to find out how to post a random picture instead of the most recent one, and that was solved with an upgrade.
del.icio.us integrator: This plugin by Eric Anderson helps you post all your del.icio.us links in the sidebar and on a seperate page. Very helpful to show what you’ve been surfing!
StatTraq: Solid statistics plugin by Randy Peterman that shows all you’d ever want to know about your visitors.
Subscribe2: Skippy’s plugin which lets you create an e-mail news alert that goes out to subscribers to news from your blog!
WP Flickr Post Bar: If the posting feature on Flickr.com doesn’t quite do it for you, this plugin by Joe Tan gives you the ability to post Flickr.com photos straight from your WordPress Write Post page.
WordPress Database Backup: Skippy finally delivered yet another plugin. When you’ve set it all up and it’s all running, what should not happen? That it all disappears without a recent backup being available. This plugin allows you to do a full backup of your database in order to make sure that you can upload it all again if things go wrong.
Thank you Darren for starting this discussion. At this moment I am switching for 2-3 blogs to WP. This post and these comments will help me a lot in choosing some good plug-ins. Thanks again for your reply on my email about the WP-ContactForm 1.1 – Contact form plugin a few days a go.
I already show my PlugIns, I even have an WP Page to this:
http://www.espartha.com/blog/?page_id=85
links for 2005-12-01
‘Shorthand’ tips for handwritten notes? I’m wondering if anyone has any ‘shorthand’ tips they’d care to pass on for taking handwritten notes? (tags: Writing lifehacks Productivity notes) The Muppets Are Podcasting Movie Reviews The Muppets have …
[…] The Hottest Post on ProBlogger right now is I’ll Show you Mine if You Show me Yours – a post asking people to share their favorite WordPress Plugins. […]
Gotta be post of the week this one – you’ve hit a home run with this one Darren.
Now I know how I’ll spend a good few hours this weekend – going over the list and trying quite a few out.
Here’s some of what I use and can;t do without…
WordPress Database Backup
Subscribe to Comments
SRG Clean Archives
X-Dashboard
Dofollow
HART, are you talking about <!–more–> ?
Looks like there are some plugins I will have to check out!
If the lists here are complete though, then I must be a plugin addict. My plugin page lists all the ones I use and links to them – generated by the plugin “Plugins Used”. Here are the ones I depend upon:
Add Title To Comment RSS – This plugin will include the post title in your comment RSS feed. Modification: changed the last line to print ‘Re:’ instead of ‘on’ for my personal preference
Bad Behavior – Stop comment spam before it starts by trapping and blocking spambots before they have a chance to post comments.
PHP Markdown Extra – Markdown syntax allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format.
Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer – Bounce referer spammers back to their own sites. The plugin comes with a list of default sites.
PHP Exec – Execute PHP Code inside a post. Allows you to set the user level required for the php code to work.
Plugins Used Plugin – This plugin will give you a function to display what plugins you are using.
Post Updated – Display notice/date/time of when a post was last updated. I display this date rather than the date ‘originally posted’.
Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches.
Fuzzy Recent Comments – Lists a fuzzy number of recent comments, grouped by post. I added ‘more…’ at the end of the list to link to ‘50 Most Recent Comments’
Fuzzy Recent Updates – Lists a fuzzy number of recent updates. I added ‘more…’ at the end of the list to link to ‘50 Most Recent Updates’
Smart Link – Lets you write links as link text (explicit link), or as link text (implicit link).
WP Flickr DHTML Badge – Displays a rotating set of images from your Flickr account. Mine shows 8 pictures up in the header.
WP-Cron Moderation – Sends hourly emails notification if pending moderation requests
Heat Map – Template tags for a heat map of category links, archive links and author links.
Wow, so many plugins. Like GaryP, i’m a bit of a plugin fanatic, experimenting with them, because I’m not yet wise to the evils of too much :).
Here’s my Plugin List Page, which has the following (although, I’ve been finding more each time I look):
* K2 Options Panel
* Ultimate Tag Warrior: Tag Archive
* Ultimate Tag Warrior
* Adsense-Deluxe
* Extended Live Archives
* Blogs Of The Day
* Brian’s Latest Comments
* del.icio.us – Bookmark this!
* Fold Page List
* Get Recent Comments
* Google Analyticator
* Multi-Topic Icon
* Feedburner Feed Replacement
* Plugins Used Plugin
* Recent Pages
* Recent Posts
* Related Posts
* RunPHP
* Subscribe To Comments
* Text Control
* Dunstan’s Time Since
* Tiger Style Administration
* WP-ContactForm
* Threaded / Nested Comments