Thanks to Eric Blackwell for his contribution of Eric Blackwell’s Must Have WordPress Plugins . By the way Eric now has the distinction of the post with the highest number of comments at 22. (Talk about give a guy a complex, a single guest post gets the highest number of comments since starting the blog).
I’m going to provide additional plugins that I find useful. Some I use on all my blogs, some just on the RE blogs.
A Word About Plugins
Not all plugins are created equal. It is very easy to end up with a blog of plugins. Many times there is a trade off when adding a plugin to your blog and you have to ask yourself if it is worth it. I break most plugins down into three categories:
- Utility plugins (add functionality to your blogs infrastructure)
- Feature plugins (add functionality to your blogs user interface)
- Bling plugins (add bling : ) enough said)
There are no bling plugins in Eric’s or my list (well maybe gravatar). Bling plugins often carry the highest overhead for load times to your blog. There are a few bling plugins or links on this site for testing and some of these plugins are borderline between added functionality and pure bling.
Eric’s list of plugins falls into the top two categories. No bling from Eric.
Here is my additional list of Nice to have Plugins by category.
Utility Plugins
Contextual Related Posts 1.1 I like this plugin because it does a pretty good job of listing other posts that could be associated with the topic or category of the current post. It provides inner linking to other posts on your blog and might entice a reader to go beyond the current post. I’ve noticed one thing that should be “fixed” with this plugin. If comments are closed on the post. Contextual Related Posts don’t appear at the bottom of the post.
Wordpress Database Backup 1.8 Everybody hates to do backups. But we are all warned to back up our database before we upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress (which it seems is almost every month). This is a quick and simple plugin to make backing up your database easy. I’ll be honest, I have know way of knowing how to restore this backup should I need it, but I figure I’ll cross that bridge if I ever need to when the need arises.
Feedburner Replacement 2.2 This plugin consolidates your feeds to feedburner and provides some other nifty stuff. 2.2 seems to be the latest version and has made some changes which appear to be more stable than earlier versions of the plugin.
Google sitemap Plugin 2.7.1 This is one of my favorite plugins. Everytime I hit the publish button on a post it generates a new sitemap and saves it to the root directory of the blog then pings Google. I still log into my Google webmaster account and hand resubmit the sitemap, but I know it is generated. There are a host of options that can be set for this plugin in the options page. If your site is all blog and not a directory of a website this plugin works great.
Feature Plugins
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Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.Yeah Right !
