Evening All,
A few friends have recently asked me what WordPress plugins I use, so I thought that I might list them here for them all to see! I know that I am not the most exhaustive user of WordPress plugins, but I do have a few that I like.
Akismet
Akismet comes pre-installed with most WordPress installations, it is the standard WordPress spam filter. It checks each in coming comment against an ever evolving list of spam criteria. I strongly recommend turning it on.
Add this social bookmarking widget
We have all seen this on someones page, either a news site or a blog. It is a simple widget that allows people to fire off posts to their favorite social bookmarking or networking site if they like what they are reading. When it all boils down to it, the more advertising your blog gets the better!!
All in one SEO Pack
It seams to be one of the most discussed topics on the web, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of ensuring your site is at the top of the search engine results. It was once as simple as setting a few meta tags and keywords, and many think that this is still the case, however Google (admit it, they are the one that matters) uses a complex and rather secret algorithm to determine its search rankings. SEO is all about trying to guess and then beat the algorithm. All in one SEO Pack takes your posts and pages and creates new meta keywords, titles and descriptions for them, whilst trying to encourage you to create extra information for the page properties. The overall aim is to promote your site to the search engines.
Google XML Sitemaps
Along with some SEO, it always helps if Google knows where all your pages are and how they link together. Google XML Sitemaps creates a “map” (surprisingly!!) of your site and submits it to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. That way their spiders know where to look to find your all important content.
IMDB Link Transformer
Not one that I use alot, but one that I like the idea of. It takes any film names that you type (wraped in an IMDB tag) and creates a nice flashy jscript interface to the IMDB data regarding that film.
WP-reCaptcha
We have all seen the lovely captchas on sites, it seams that we now have to fill one out for everything that we do! Some are really horrible noise generated backgrounds with some words. reCaptcha is slightly different, firstly it looks nice, and can be themed to match with your site. For the hard of sight it provides an audio prompt for the user to enter. The special thing about reCaptcha is that it actually helps to digitize books! Each two word set that is provided to your user, contains one word that reCaptcha know, and one word from their scanned archive that they do not know. If your user answers the one that they know correctly, the presume that they also know the other word that was entered. Over time enough people answer the same word correctly that reCaptcha can add it to the list of the ones that they know for sure. That way every-time someone comments or signs up on your site, they are helping to digitize out of print works!!
And many more……. (updated 06/03/2010)
