Darren Rowse from problogger has asked for feedback on his very popular blog. He wants to know everyone’s favourite wordpress plugins. With over 11,000 available from the wordpress plugin directory, it should be interesting to find out the collective top 10 list. Darren hasn’t published it yet, he’s still collecting the data from his readers, but to kick things off, here are my favourite plugins.
Akismet – this has saved me from comment spam hell. Akismet does an awesome job of blocking automated comment spam. When I started my blog I was bombarded with thousands of comments from drugs to enhancement products. But not any more.
Backupwordpress – it does what it says. I’ve configured it to perform a full weekly backup to my webhost. I could save it elsewhere if I wanted. Should my blog crash, I know my content isn’t lost. It’s peace of mind.
Efficient related posts - at the end of each article is the heading ‘related posts’ and hyperlinked titles of up to 10 related posts. If you tag the post with the category name, it lists more posts from that category. A simple but effective way to give your readers more.
Feedburner feedsmith – most bloggers have a feedburner account (now owned by google) and this plugin redirects the RSS feed to your account. This means you can track your statistics, such as subscriber count.
Google XML sitemap – every time you add new content a new sitemap is created, which helps google to crawl your site and index all your pages. It just works tirelessly in the backgound helping you to get ranked.
MaxblogPress ping optimizer – being able to ping many sites is a great feature of wordpress, but not every time you save a draft of your new post. This plugin ensures you ping every site once your post is published.
Recommended reading – I read lots of blogs and like to share excellent articles with everyone. Recommended reading provides a neat summary of the articles I am sharing from google reader, in the sidebar.
WordPress gravatar – If you’ve created a gravatar profile, which is a globally recognised avatar, this plugin will display it when you are posting comments. It just makes blog conversations a little more personal.
Sharethis – by the far the best and neatest social sharing plugin. It appears at the bottom of every post and if you hover over it, it will display a configurable list of social sites you can share with your friends.
Twitter tools – most bloggers have a twitter profile and twitter tools is a great time saver. When you publish a post it will send out a tweet. But it can also summarise your tweets and create a post. So it works both ways.
Tweet blender - an excellent plugin, which you can see in the sidebar. It takes twitter streams from whoever you choose and displays the latest tweets. It’s configurable and it just looks good.
Topsy retweet button – a must-have plugin if you want your readers to retweet your articles.It just sits at the beginning of every post, waiting for that grateful click.
This isn’t a full list, but they are my favourites.
