Bill Masson 
August 17, 2009, 3:00 pm|
17th of August 2009
This is my latest updated WordPress Plugin list, as you can see there have been a few changes, most notably the use of WP Auto Tagger, and as WP has upgraded there is less need for as many plugins. Other plugins like HeadSpace2 do a lot more SEO tasks. Overall I am heading towards a theme that has many built in functions thus cutting down on the plugin count.
- Akismet
- All in one Adsense and YPN
- Apture (Excellent addition to Zementa)
- Backtype Connect (useful extra twitter count)
- Canonical URLs (Does it realy matter?)
- Clean Slugs
- Comment Luv
- Easy Contact (keep it simple)
- Excerpt Editor
- Feedburner Feedsmith
- FriendConnect Login (Google integration)
- G-Lock Double Opt-in Manager
- Google XML
- HeadSpace2
- Maintenance Mode
- MaxBanner Ads
- MaxBlogPress Favicon
- NextGen Gallery
- Page Link Manager
- Permalink Manager
- Post Plugin Library
- ReviewAZON (Don’t use a lot on this blog but do on others)
- RSS Footer
- Similarity (Great for linking up your posts)
- SimplePie Core
- SRG Clean Archives
- Subscribe to comments
- Tell a friend Widget (simple, looks neat and tidy)
- Thank me later
- Top Commentators Widget (come on guys and gals)
- TweetMeme Button (Twitter Daft i am)
- WordPress Popular Posts (Nice Touch and useful)
- WordPress Thread Comment
- WP-DBManager ( A must if your lazy)
- WP Auto Tagger ( Handy auto tag option)
- All in one SEO (You can never have enough SEO)
Any suggestions? Thanks’ for reading
So that’s my updated WordPress Plugins for the next few months or so. Please let me know what you think, I would love to hear any suggestions you may have, I will include a mention in my next post.
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Old List January 9th 2009
This post is an update of “My Top 20 WordPress Plugins” which I posted back in September 2008; the post was getting a bit messy due to all the
changes so anyway here’s the new updated list. Since September my main purpose for WordPress Plugins was for search engine optimization so there are a few important changes here and of course monetization. Also with W.P 2.7 the whole look and feel of the admin has changed quite dramatically for the better. I will still try to stick to 20 core WP Plugins starting from SEO to Monetization, so let’s start again from the most important plugins from 1st to last.
1. Headspace This plugin replaces the All in one SEO for the bulk of my seo; I have found it to be more than capable of handling the sites search engine needs. What I like about this plugin most is the added tags input which gathers keywords from your content or gives you the choice to pull results from Yahoo, tags are increasingly popular with the search engines.
2. Clean Slugs Simplifies the default W.P attribute and strips out all of your “stop” words like .. a – the – and. This is good for seo; just activate the plugin, no need to mess about.
3. Google XML Sitemaps another seo plugin that delivers your sitemap to Google, MSN, Yahoo (needs a Yahoo developer Key) and Ask.com. The admin page is fairly extensive for analytical resources and personal preferences, but once setup just leave.
4. Robots Meta Yet another optimization plugin which does an efficient job of setting up your preferences to allow or not to allow the search engine bots to follow or not to follow your links. This plugin can be very useful in stemming the linkjuice leakage from your blog; it has quite an extensive admin page where you can tweak your settings. Once you have set up your main preferences in admin you can change your settings on individual posts and pages as required.
5. All in One Adsense and YPN still using this plugin, although the Flexibility theme has a built in interface to place Google Adsense throughout my blog, I haven’t quite got round to it yet, and this plugin is so easy to use to place Adsense and Yahoo. I will eventually ditch this plugin and use Flexibility.
6. Max Banner Ads: will continue to use this plugin on the sidebar; the plugin effectively rotates your ads to help your visitors from ad blindness. At the moment I have five ads rotating, it handles a variety of ad sizes. I might consider using this plugin for the whole of my blog as you can position the rotating ads just about everywhere from blog posts to pages, time will tell.
7. SGR Clean Archives: Very useful plugin that allows you to setup a dedicated archives page with some pretty neat dropdown menu effects. Been looking for this everywhere, you can still have the sidebar archive widget if you prefer, just needs a little tweeking.It would be great if all blogs had this plugin being a lot easier to find if it’s on the navigation tabs. You can also customize the css to style it to your own liking.
8. Custom Query String: definitely expands the default W.P settings for how many posts you want to show on any given command, with W.P you can only set one parameter which is your home page, this plugin allows you to set whatever amount of posts to show on any given choice like archives, categories, month, year, search ect ect so it gives you visitors less hassle in finding more posts.
9. Akismet This is still a no brainer, checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.
10. Best posts Summary Very useful plugin that generates summary’s of your posts daily, weekly or monthly and then makes a condensed summarised post. This is a great way to highlight your blogs previous posts, and i am thinking of using this to include in my up and coming Newsletter. The plugin is simple to setup and has many other criteria’s and tag changes.
11. CommentLuv from Andy Bailey is still my preferred plugin to share linkjuice and commenter’s previous post. Andy has a lively blog which spreads the linkjuice and highlights user’s posts, he has a new site up and running called Fiddyp.co.uk. With this plugin you can also track stats with your CommentLuv ID.
12. FeedBurner: this is the plugins default description; This plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original WordPress feed. A must have plugin I think you will agree!
13. TDO Mini Forms: Another new plugin for me to get feedback, the default description is as follows: This plugin allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts. The posts are kept in “draft” until an admin can publish them (also configurable). It can optionally use Akismet to check if submissions are spam. TDO Mini Forms can be used to create “outside-the-box” uses for Wordpress, from Contact Managers, Ad Managers, Collaborate Image Sites, Submit Links, etc.i Early days yet but I hope to have it up and running shortly.
14. W.P Super Edit: I really like this plugin it gives you more control over your publishing and editing, it has a hell of a lot more tools than id care to mention but suffice to say it delivers a much more useful editing interface which can be fine tuned to your liking.
15. Referrer Detector: This plugin replaces What Seth Godin….. for new and returning visitors, it’s still under test and I would love to get some feedback. It effectively greets visitors that come to your blog from the social networking sites and has the appropriate badges and welcome which invites them to bookmark your views on the social networks. It has all the most popular bookmarking sites with options to add other networks or custom URLs. Let’s you see your stats over different time ranges too, very revealing numbers from Google, Search Live, Search Yahoo, StumleUpon, and twitter.
16. RSS Footer An absolute must to tap into your reader’s thoughts and suggestions, also a good way to update subscribers of up and coming events. You can place any link or message to the foot of your RSS feed.
17. W.P Thread Comment Good for letting your visitors or commenter’s reply to each other and hopefully extends the thread with more comments. The admin allows further configuration to extend it even more.
18. W.P Super Cache Speaks for itself really, keeps a lid on your memory cache, allows lots of customization. If you have a really busy blog with a lot of visitors then this plugin will help to keep your blog turning over.
19. Suscribe2 Just started using this plugin so it’s under review at the moment, basically allows your visitor to subscribe in a format that suits them; also the subscriber can login and pick out categories to subscribe to and edit their details. You can modify and edit your email templates in admin and whole lot more; it has a useful instructional PDF for your subscribers. I will update my findings on this plugin in the near future. If any of you are already using it, then let me know what you think and any tips you may have.
20. Flexibility Theme I just had to include a mention about my new preferred blogging theme, now although it’s not a plugin as per say it does include a lot of configuration settings including Adsense placement. It also allows you to upload any number of headers, RSS Icons, search Boxes, Backgrounds and header spans. I won’t go in to all the details here, there are just too many to mention, but I will be doing a post in the next week or so about the up and coming version 2, so stay tuned.
If you are looking for WordPress Resources then check out this blog for the Ultimate Resource List
20 WordPress Tricks To Improve Your Blog
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First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading here today. I will make sure i visit this site more often so I can learn more.
Make your long Urls shorter – Free Url redirection – Hide your affilate URLS
Hi Josh, well thanks’ for the comment and i’m glad you enjoyed the read, looks like you have a useful service yourself. I will give it a try and have a look at your free tracking account.
Cheers
Josh, Just a quick heads up! I tried a couple of my affiliate URLs on your service and guess what? they didn’t work, but some others did work, so I don’t know why, normal URLs seem to be OK but affiliate id numbers are a bit more problematic.
I found your site and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good articles. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you!
Cindy Logan’s last blog post..Low Carohydrate Diets
Hi Cindy,
Cheers for the compliment, I do try (-: Will take a look at your pride & joy, am always on the lookout for fresh new ideas.
Thanks’ for visiting
Bill
This indeed a great list for anyone running a blog. I personally use some of them already hope to check out some others. I just keep peeping in here cos you’ve some good tips and articles. Good work, keep it up.
Home Business Marketing’s last blog post..Which Do You Go For – Free Blogging Web Site Or Self Hosted Blog?
Hi and welcome back,
I am glad that you have found some useful information, as you know with WordPress plugins its an ever changing picture. This list is already changing, lol. I see we are in the same business, if you ever want to do a guessed post then just enter your details by registering under the SUBMIT POST, i had to take the wp register link off the side bar because of all the spam.
Thank’s for the comment
Bill Masson (WWAH)’s last blog post..G-Lock Double Opt In for your Blog Newsletter
all this plugin make wordpress more effective for the affiliate marking site owners. Some of them I am using some of the plugin and I can say they are very much useful for us.
Great post, I am often overwhelmed by so many plugins. I realize this post is a few months old, are you still using these or have you found others that you prefer?
Savory Tv´s last blog post..Delizioso! Italian Salmon Carpaccio
Hello,
Well where do I start, I have had a busy time of late building other WP blogs and so I have come across some more plugins. I think my methods are changing towards cutting down on the use of so many; this blog has about 44 plugins which is way too much. I usually test out plugins on other less developed blogs and a couple I have started using are “simple tags” which is pretty cool for grabbing tags from Yahoo & Tag the net amongst others. Other plugins include RSS Doodle & Twitter Doodle. What I would really like is a plugin that notifies you by email when they need upgraded, there nothing worse than having to constantly login to all of your blogs to upgrade plugins. Wouldn’t it be great if they were all self updating!
Thanks for the comment. I love your header and colors at your blog
@Bill Masson, you might consider setting up WPMU, even if it is just for your own blogs. You can stilluse separate domains with some domain mapping plugins.
The new version (currently 2.7.1) has easy plugin updates and you only need to install the plugin once for all your sites.
Cheers,
Harry
Hi Harry,
I have recently set up an account with blogs.mu and am giving it a trial month with a single license. I am a little unsure what you mean by “domain mapping plugins” but I will do some research and check it out. I have at the moment 16 blogs, all WordPress and I would love to link them all together. My main problem at the moment is as you say easy plugin updates for all of my domains. I try to keep the bulk of my blogs all streamlined with the same plugins but it is a pain in the butt when i have to log in to all 16 blogs and update plugins.
Do you have any suggestions on plugins for this issue?
Thanks’ for your comment
@Bill Masson, Hi Bill. I am not sure how much blogs.mu limits the MU functionality, but you can just set up your own mu system (http://mu.wordpress.org), which is free, but needs some skills to set up.
Standard in the MU install is one page where you control all plugins (for all blogs, they use the same files). You will see a small notification if there are updates (in the Wordpress repository) which can be installed automatically (about 3 clicks
. makes life a lot easier.
You can tranfer all your blogs to the MU system. To keep their domain names (blog1.com & blog2.com instead of blog1.domain.com, blog2.domain.com), you can use this http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/.
It is fun to learn and use, enjoy!
Cheers,
Harry
That’s great Harry thanks for your help, I will take my time and go through the tutorials step by step
Cheers
Bill
@Harry, BikeTravellers.com,
Having problems installing wp.mu on my server. I keep getting these error messages.
(There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file. I need this before we can get started.)
(Problem in wp-config.php – $base is set to BASE when it should be the path like “/” or “/blogs/”! Please fix it!)
Is it to do with htacces file permissions? I have opened a ticket with Hostgator to fix the issue, they are usually pretty good at sorting out things.
I followed the installation guide and set up on a sub-domain but no joy.
Will post back to update on my progress
Bill
@Bill Masson, Hi Bill. It looks like you edited wp-config by hand, which you shouldn’t. It will be created automatically when installing. You can simply delete it and install again.
If the problem persists, you can edit (after the install) and change the base path as indicated.
Check http://wpmututorials.com/ , where there is a lot of info from people who are a lot more knowledgeable than me, you can also download a free ebook explaining the setup.
Else make a post on the wpmu forums, explaining the errors. I think this has been reported many times already, so search there first.
Note that WPMU takes quite some resources, so make sure your hostgator plan supports this and that they will change the httpd.conf file for you.
Good luck
Cheers,
Harry
OK Harry, Thanks for your input your a gem!
Bill
Thanks Bill for the blog compliment and for the fast reply, much appreciated!!
Savory Tv´s last blog post..Delizioso! Italian Salmon Carpaccio
Your most welcome, I will be stealing some of your recipies, i just love all kinds of food! Glorious food ….
i use wordpress in my blog and i think it is best platform og blogging and easiest the plugins are really nice and a good description is given ….. great post …
High quality article but you must added all in one SEO plugin, can create wp blog without that plugin.
Just For Laugh´s last blog ..The Yellow Ranger was a Scientologist?
As i said i swapped all in one seo for headspace 2, since this post i have changed a lot of my plugins. I will update this today sometime.
Thanks’ for your input
[...] My Top 20 WordPress Plugins revisited (web-workathome.com) [...]
Great site, thanks for all the useful info
First of all: I think it`s kinda incredible that people make their blog nofollow. Off course, if you`re site is good enough it will draw people anyway, but you will get heaps of traffic if you give the people something for visiting – like a link. And the comments you get doesn`t have to have poor quality just because of this. I would know, I have dofollow and commentluv on all my sites. Works like a charm. Man, I just luuuv commentluv and keywordluv!
Thank you, it’s very inspiring article about this post it might be very helpful for students.
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