Top 15 WordPress Plugins

March 5, 2007 | Comments (19) | Filed under: Blogging

Now that our site has officially launched, I thought it would be good to give you guys an idea of just what exactly is running under the hood. For starters, Bookmark Bliss uses the latest version of WordPress (2.1.2) and runs on an Apache webserver. It also uses a wide variety of WordPress Plugins to enhance the user experience here. Some of them are visible in our posts and sidebars while others affect things behind the scenes. Here are the top 15 WordPress Plugins currently running on this blog, in alphabetical order:

Adsense-Deluxe

Adsense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin that offers advanced customization options for inserting Google Adsense ads into your Blog. This plugin is currently used to serve all our AdSense Ads and includes many features that allow you to fine tune it to match your theme and layout. For anyone using Google Adsense on their site, this is a must have plugin.

Akismet

For anyone who intends on building a large community around their blog, spam comments are an unfortunate guaranteed effect that comes with getting more and more popular. Akismet is a plugin that checks incoming comments on your blog against their online web service to prevent spammers from posting on your site. The Akismet plugin comes installed when you download the latest version of WordPress.

CForms

CForms is a convenient package that allows you to insert a contact form into your blog posts, pages, and sidebars. You can see it in action on our contact us page. The entire plugin comes with many configuration options and allows you to build forms on many pages, including multiple forms on the same page. Powered by AJAX, it is also convenient and easy to use for visitors of your website.

Executable PHP Widget

Like the plain text widget that comes pre-installed with the Sidebar Widgets plugin, the Executable PHP Widget allows you to write your own custom PHP code and load it into your sidebar with ease. Currently, this plugin is used to show the “Top Commentators” and “Article Tag Cloud” widgets on our green and black sidebars respectively.

Feedburner Feed Replacement

Do you want FeedBurner to handle your RSS feeds on your blog? If you do, then using the Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin is the easiest way to accomplish that goal. This plugin will direct all of your feed traffic through your feedburner feed, which allows you to use their powerful tools for tracking and monitoring your feed subscriptions. Highly recommended for anyone who intends to publish to their blog regularly and build up a readership.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics plugin is very simple, but allows you to easily incorporate Google Analytics tracking code onto every page of your blog. If you aren’t using Google Analytics, you are really missing out on one of the most powerful ways to get feedback on how your site is doing and which content is working and which is not. 

Google Sitemaps

The simplest way to generate a sitemap of your content, is to use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. For most sites, it is not always easy for Google to siphon through your content and find every single post you’ve ever made. It is much easier for you to tell Google what posts to look for. This plugin makes that job as easy as 1,2, activate…

Gregarious

Gregarious is the self proclaimed “ultimate social bookmarking plugin” and to be honest, that may not be an exaggeration. Gregarious allows your users to quickly and easily submit your posts to more than a dozen Social Bookmarking websites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. It also integrates features such as embedded Reddit and Digg buttons to make it easier for users to “Digg This” or “Reddit” your posts. You can see this plugin in action at the bottom of this post with the “Digg This” link and the “Share This” link.

MyBlogLog Widget

Ever since Yahoo bought out MyBlogLog, it seems like every site is tracking its user community via their system. The MyBlogLog Widget allows you to add a list of recent visitors to your blog. It’s an interesting addition to any site and allows you to see who has dropped by. You can see this plugin in action at the bottom of the green sidebar on our site under the heading “Recent Readers”.

Related Posts

One of the best ways to keep a new reader interested in your site on a first time visit is to easily make available a list of posts they might be interested in reading, besides the one that brought them to you. One way to do this is to use the Related Posts plugin, which compiles a list of posts similar to the one being read, and displays to the reader. We are currently using this plugin at the bottom of our posts (like at the bottom of this post) under the heading “Related Articles.”

Search Everything

One thing I’ve always disliked about WordPress sites is the lacking search functionality. Sure, it’s decent for searching posts on occasion, but searching comments or attachments is out of the question. The Search Everything plugin alleviates these issues and adds many more features as well. The plugin completely overrides the default search, so for users already familiar with your site, your search will not change at all (well except for in quality of results).

Show Top Commentators

While right now we really have no commentators, I hope that will change very soon. The Show Top Commentators plugin allowed me to embed a widget into our sidebar that shows the users who have contributed the most to our site over the last few weeks. Each user who does contribute and makes it into our top 10 (without spamming of course) is rewarded with a link on our main page to their own site.

Sidebar Widgets

This is hands down the most useful plugin we currently have installed. Sidebar Widgets transformed both our green and black sidebars into a plug and play resource that is as easy to modify and update as dragging and dropping new items. Where as with standard WordPress, you are responsible for hand implementing new additions to your sidebars, with Sidebar Widgets you can take many widgets developed by hundreds of other people and incorporate them into your site with ease. A must have for anyone who is serious about incorporating many tools and being able to maintain them with any reasonable expectation.

Subscribe to Comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin is simple in idea but powerful in usability. If a user makes a comment on our site, they can check a small box that says “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail.” This allows users to easily keep track of conversations and continue responding without having to worry about constantly checking our site. Of course, they could also subscribe to the comment RSS feed, but I think this option is much more user friendly.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior is, well, the ultimate tool for tagging your posts and providing a tag cloud for article navigation. UTW allows for customization of the tag cloud as well as embedding of the tags within your Technorati and FeedBurner feeds. A very handy plugin that improves the overall accessibility of your articles.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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