Wordpress is a mysterious animal to many many people. Prior to 2006 it was a 100% mystery to me. I’ve learned a lot since then, especially about crucial plugins. Most people when starting Wordpress are concerned with themes, colors, and graphics. To them I say this: Beauty is more than skin deep. Below is a photo of my daughter, with me in the background saying: “Don’t try to eat the guitar sweetheart … learn to play it first ;) and please don’t drop it on the porcelain tile.” Since I’ve written directions like this on plugins several times for friends and mentees through the years, I thought I’d start a post on this topic and tweak it as I need to along the way. Take these as suggestions only, but ones I always install first thing when I start a new blog. Last year I maintained 5 blogs. Currently I run 3. CRUCIAL PLUGINS YOU SHOULD START WITH (they remain unlinked because they’ve been linked to enough. Plus I’m lazy. If you want them you can show them your interest via copy/paste):
- All in One Adsense: http://www.linewbie.com/wordpress-plugins/
- Executable PhP: Important for putting some widgets in your sidebar http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/php-code-widget/
- Genki Announcements: This is helpful in many ways for ads, for updates, for sidebar, banners, etc. http://ericulous.com/2007/03/09/genki_announcement/
- Google Sitemaps: A little advanced to install, but well worth it in the long run for getting traffic from Google. http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/
- HeFo: Stands for – “Header/Footer” This is for lines of code for applications like Google Analytics and some tracking codes. You never have to add again with this plugin. Without, you have to add to every theme you try. http://kaloyan.info/blog/wp-hefo/
- MyBlogLog Widget: A networking tool that seems to hang around when others don’t. http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/com_widget_wp.php
- Subscribe to Comments: This is really thinking of your readers http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
- Popular Posts: I, personally, find it very helpful to track the popularity of my pages http://rauru.com/wordpress-popular-posts
- Post Views: This is a somewhat advanced plugin that I have grown absolutely dependent on. It tracks and displays the number of views for each post http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
I’ll tackle “crucial theme” issues at some point. Until then, happy hunting.
7 Comments
Let’s not forget akismet and wp-supercache which have done good things for my blog.
Xmlsitemap is another must have plugin to get a proper sitemap.xml generated
@Dragon Blogger: I left out Akismet because it comes standard. It is excellent spam relief though. supercache scares me for some reason. I like the page to reflect my current changes. I mentions Google sitemaps in the post. perhaps yours is a better incarnation? Let us know if so. Thanks for the comment Justin.
Some others that I use:
+ All In One SEO Pack
+ Broken Link Checker – If you have an older blog, you probably have a bunch of broken links…
+ Enforce www. Preference – Helps keep stats tracking more consistent
+ No Self Pings – Takes away those annoying pings whenever you link to your own posts
+ Revision Control – Especially useful for WP 2.6+
@Joel: Great ones mostly. SEO Pack is cool for keywords in the header but the native tag system and excerpt works just as well. I do run it though. Broken link checker … I can imagine usefulness but perhaps you could enlighten us. Possibly to create .htaccess 301 redirects? I will check that one out. Enforce www is included in WP native 2.7. You just make the blog domain in preferences with the www and it does all that automatically. Self pings is an excellent choice. Revision control is news to my ears. What does it do? Thanks for your comment.
PS @Joel: I got the broken link checker. Now I get it. It saves your readers going to broken or dead links. I thought it told you the 404 errors on your own pages that would be more up my alley! Still, this is a good plugin.
@ everyone: I had a few requests to make the urls clickable. Even though I explain in the post why I didn’t do that, I will try and get to that today. Thanks for your interest in the plugins. Again, I recommend all of them.
About the 404 thing, you might want to check out AskApache Google 404. Alex King’s 404 Notified plugin would send RSS updates every time there was a 404 error, but it doesn’t look like it’s still supported or works with WordPress 2.3+