Top Plugins

It’s always interesting to see what plugins people decide to use, and decide to use on each project. I’ve used a variety of plugins, probably not as many as some but more then a few. Time and time again I find myself using these.

Maintenance Mode: This plugin adds a splash page to your blog letting visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Administrators still get full access to the site while the notice is up allowing you to make changes without people seeing the inevitable fumbling around behind the curtain.

FeedBurner FeedSmith: Feedburner for your feeds is just a good idea for several reasons, and the best way to change your feeds over to feedburner feeds is FeedSmith. It does it all for you automagicly.

WP-Footnotes: If you’re a frequent editor on Wikipedia you’ll appreciate WP-Footnotes. Citing references is as easy as double brackets. It’s so intuitive it will group identical footnotes for you, and create the entries in a numbered list below the body of the post.

Wordpress Reports: Reports on your stats from Google Analytics and Feedburner in your Wordpress Admin. Beautiful for a quick overview of what your numbers are.

Ubernyms: I used a predecessor of this plugin in pre 2.3 Wordpress installs to replace acronyms for things like HTML, FFPC, and CSS in a few sites I worked on. Ubernyms takes it a bit further doing more then wrapping acronyms in the acronym tag automatically. It now adds descriptions to acronyms, links to more information, and has an easy to use interface to add more definitions to the plugin.

Quoter: Quoter allows users to quote a comment or a post in their comments, in a similar way to forums. It’s an easy way in lue of threaded comments to have a conversation.

WP-Gravatar: I like the idea of avatars to add a bit of personality. I’ve traditionally used Skippy’s Gravatar plugin, but on newer installs I’ve been using WP-Gravatars.

Event Calendar: This was a great plugin I discovered when working on a campaign website for the Mayor of Fort Frances in last Novembers elections. It allows you to have a calender with upcoming events listed in your sidebar, easily added to via the post menu.

Those are just a handful of plugins I keep in my arsenal. What plugins do you live by?

Written by John Leschinski from Leschinski Design
Posted on December 29th, 2007 and filed under WordPress Plugins
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