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?
Mr Lasik | December 29th, 2007 at 4:18 pm #
I’ve been looking for something like the maintenance mode plugin! Every time I upgrade WordPress I find a bunch of things that don’t work right. Nice find and thanks!
Katy | December 29th, 2007 at 5:16 pm #
A few that I hadn’t heard of. Looks as though I’ll be spending some time today playing with plug-ins. Thanks for sharing.
Pipedreamergrey | December 30th, 2007 at 12:22 am #
This seems like an awful short list? I kind of go overboard, my current blog template used thirty-two plug-ins, but I know that even you must be using more plug-ins than this on this site. You should consider using Viper’s Plugins Used plug-in to list everything you’re using. You can find it at:
http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/vipers-plugins-used/
Not a Niche | January 11th, 2008 at 3:44 pm #
Hey John,
nice list and great plugins, which I all tested or use. I would suggest MBL instead of WP Gravatar, since it also takes pictures from My Bloglog and you don’t need to edit anything in your theme.
Check it out http://code.google.com/p/mbla/
Hope you like it
Andy MacDonald | March 4th, 2008 at 6:44 pm #
What a great post. Ive downloaded and installed 4 of the plug-ins you have listed, i didnt know half of these existed, so thanks a lot
Hope to see similar posts in the future :):)
Rune | March 4th, 2008 at 7:13 pm #
@Not a Niche;
The WP-Gravatar plugin also support MyBlogLog avatars, and have done that since version 2.5.2 (it’s now version 2.6.4). Version 2.6.5 is just around the corner, and will be released when WordPress 2.5 is out.
–
RG
Alex | March 4th, 2008 at 9:59 pm #
Hey Rune,
thanks for the tip.
Because of WP 2.5 , I was reading Gravatar functionality might be already included in WP. Will the plugin still run in 2.5 then?
Thanks
Alex