Every couple of months, I update you with a list of plugins I use on my self-hosted Wordpress blog. (I profiled 15 plugins in December 2008 and 23 plugins in March 2009.) Looking back six months, many plugins remain the same but I deactivated some and installed some more.
- Akismet protects my blog from spam. Pre-installed with Wordpress, new users need to follow directions on the Plugins page to sign up for a Wordpress.com account, and copy the API code into the plugin management page.
- Apture makes it easy to add contextual images, videos, reference guides, links, maps, music, news, documents and books to my blog to create a fuller media experience to hopefully keep you engaged. The above photo was added by Apture, and this link to Danny Brown’s twitter feed is another. (Danny introduced me to Apture in a recent blog comment of his.)
- BackType Connect enables me to show you related conversations (from other blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, and other social media connections) in line with your comments. I’ve disabled tweets from appearing, but other items occasionally appear. For instance, the eighth comment here is via Backtype.
- Better Comments Manager is an administrative tool, viewable only by me, that allows me to manipulate comments much easier than the default comment manager. With this plugin, I can edit, reply, view all comments from a single post, and other bulk actions with a single click.
- CommentLuv is the reason why if you write a comment and include your blog in the appropriate box, your most-recent blog post will appear under your text after you hit the “submit” button. I recognize that everyone doesn’t have a blog; but for those that do, developer Andy Bailey and I want you to share your content with everyone else. This plugin enables that love.
- Contact Form 7 is a simple form to enable you to contact me. (You’ll note, in comparison to March’s plugin list, I removed cforms which required frequent updates and caused sluggish performance.)
- DoFollow is a piece of genius from Semiologic that removes the “nofollow” attribute that Wordpress adds to comment links by default. In other words, if you do not have this (or similar plugins) installed, then every time a comment includes a link, search engines won’t follow it. The reason for this has been hashed over the years, but the end result is I want search engines to follow your links so I tell the robots to do follow you.
- Feed Pauser, from the folks at Techie Buzz (who also developed the Better Comments Manager), is a clever plugin that allows me to publish a post but pause its feed publication up to 20 minutes. If you are like me and usually make some typos, or don’t like how the final content is displayed, pausing feed publication is useful. (And on that note, if you’re not currently subscribed to my blog feed by RSS or email, here’s your chance.)
- Google XML Sitemaps is something else that runs behind the scenes. The plugin creates a sitemaps.org-compatible layout of my blog for search engine robots to “see” the landscape. Want to see the map?
- KeywordLuv works like CommentLuv; but while the latter provides a link to your last blog post, the former enables you to separate your name from keywords describing your website. If used properly, this will reward you with improved anchor text. For example, leaving “Stephen @ Custom WordPress Plugins” in the name field results in Stephen from Custom WordPress Plugins. If you want to use this plugin, you must enable the DoFollow plugin.
- My BlogLog Recent Readers displays names and faces of recent website readers who clicked over from the My BlogLog social networking site. Check it out in the right sidebar of this page. If you mouse over their faces, you can click to their profiles.
- Page Links To is used to redirect certain older posts or pages to newer posts or pages. I use this for a few pages, though you’d never see it as everything happens behind the scenes.
- Popularity Contest which ranks my posts by, say it kids!, popularity! It’s more for behind-the-scenes statistics, so I can see on a single page what posts are most popular in terms of comments and trackbacks. This helps me ascertain what topics and titles to use next time.
- Sitemap Generator from Dagon Design works like the XML generator above, but whereas the XML sitemap is intended for search engine robots, this map is for people. That said, I haven’t placed it into action yet due to some coding conflicts I need to resolve.
- Subscribe to Comments is one of my favorite plugins, and one that I wish every Wordpress blogger activates immediately; whether you have a WP.com or WP.org blog, you can activate it. This is the beef of why I hate Typepad. This plugin creates the opt-in box below the “submit” button, where, if you check it, you will receive email messages for new comments. I check the box all the time on other blogs.
- TweetMeme is a trending plugin that enables you to click a button and send a tweet about this post to your Twitter friends. You can also see how many people tweeted it already. Go on; scroll to the top of this page to see the running statistics and click the button.
- What Would Seth Godin Do (named after the permissive marketing maven who inspired me) shows all of my blog visitors (not RSS or email) a block of text. (Here’s an image of the current look.)
- Wordpress Mobile Edition shows you an easy-to-read mobile version of my blog, whether you’re accessing this from an iPhone, BlackBerry, or some other device. The EPA’s blog, Greenversations, also uses this plugin, for what it’s worth. It’s simple to set up (with the ability to physically tweak the PHP code if you choose, as I did) and I highly recommend this. Alex King, the developer of this and the above Popularity Contest plugin, rocks!
- WordTwit allows my Twitter stream to automatically generate an update about a new blog post and use my domain instead of a URL shortener. For instance, this blog post you’re reading is viewable via WordTwit at http://ariwriter.com/qa. Want to read why I like WordTwit?
- WP Ajax Edit Comments allows you to edit your comment, should you make a typo or want to change it.
- WPBook was conceived by my Newburyport friend John Eckman and enables you to duplicate your blog as a Facebook application. To see this in action, click to apps.facebook.com/ariwriter and you will see the same content as here, photos and all. The killer is you can comment on the Facebook page, and it will echo here! It takes some time to set up, and there’s some back and forth coding involved, but otherwise, this helps bridge the gap between Wordpress and Facebook.
- WP Twitip ID, brought to you by Andy Bailey, also responsible for CommentLuv, collaborated with Roger Byrne to enable you to add your Twitter username when adding a comment. It’s further customized to work with the Thesis template.
There are other scripts running behind the scenes, not to mention plugin-like functions of the Thesis theme, but the above are plugins alone.
Are there plugins not listed above you’d like to share with other readers?
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Well done Ari. Pretty good list you’ve put together here. A few thoughts:
I personally use the MyBlogLog widget on a private page to give myself a visual overview of who’s visiting my blog without using up any sidebar space.
I would have added YARPP to this list (altho the most recent version seems to be having some issues)
I am definitely going to download Apture … I had seen it before up on Danny Brown’s blog but never really looked into it until now, thanks for that.
New from Jon Bishop: Why Should College Students Care About Twitter?
Why don’t you think other people want to see who visits your site? That’s how MyBlogLog works…
This is an impressive post. For someone using Blogger, I have been tempted in the last few months to make the switch. Should I wait any longer?
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The wait is up to you; if you click into my blog archives and scroll through the wordpress tags, you’ll see some posts I wrote last fall about my migration from Blogger to Wordpress–both why and how I did it.
Thanks for these great tips. I love it when blog post are so helpful.
Jeff Ragan
New from Jeffrey Ragan: Aug 24, Email Marketing, Low Cost With High Results!
It doesn’t matter how many of these lists I see, there’s always something new there. The problem is, with so many plug-ins to choose from, it’s easy to get carried away.
Luckily, Ari, you show that a careful choice can be successful. But I’m still going to double check my own plug-ins, just in case.
Many thanks
Helpful post, Ari. One more Wordpress plugin you may want to consider is Martin Hawksey ‘s excellent Make Tabbloid, ( http://tr.im/z8FQ) which works – not surprisingly – with HP’s free Tabbloid.com service.
What’s it do? Nothing less than creating a portable, printable, .pdf version of your blog from your RSS feed.
New from Michael Russell: If you register your site for free at
PDF versions of feeds, or PDF versions of individual posts? Is there a need for that; why? I once had a plugin for a printer-friendly version, but later tossed it.
Make Tabbloid creates .pdf versions of entire feeds. Would have even greater value if it offered .pdf versions of individual posts. Others plugins that work with the HP Tabbloid API may.
I’d suggest that wanting/needing a .pdf version of online blog content is as at least as much about *portability,* as printability. Read offline, markup, forwarding where needed, as well.
New from Michael Russell:
Ari, the blog-to-.pdf capability is as much about *portability* as printability, IMO. There’s absolutely a time and a place for wanting to either read stuff offline and/or even apply annotations and comments to a .pdf, and then forward it on to someone else, for any number of reasons.
Me? I periodically need to print out content to hardcopy for either someone else’s or my own reference. The need is real, otherwise HP most likely wouldn’t have hitched its wagon to http://www.Tabbloid.com.
That said, the Make Tabbloid V 0.9x WP plugin only lets you make .pdfs of an RSS feed, rather than individual posts. While you can always use print preview and then choose page #’s to print, it would be nice if you cold do so by post. There may be other WP plugins using the Tabbloid API that support this.
New from Michael Russell: If you register your site for free at
Nice list Ari – glad to see you’re enjoying Apture, I agree, really does offer a great and fuller interactive experience (and they seem to be good at updating features too).
The Pagelinks one looks interesting, I’ll have to check it out. I’m also about to test In-Series (for connected posts). Have it installed but not quite sure best way to present it so that should be fun.
New from Danny Brown: Do Bloggers Make Good Authors?
I await your discoveries…
Great list Ari, can’t wait to get home from Starbucks and install some of them. Thanks for putting together this list and sharing it with us! How do you have the “Follow Me” icon for Twitter displayed on the side of your blog?
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Jim, the roving Twitter badge is via this script which is easy to set up.
Thanks, that was easy to set up!
New from Jim Hayes: Firefox Plugins I love: IE Tabs & Xmarks
Nice post! Found some new ones that I haven’t used, but using most of these myself… You should maybe look into “All in One SEO Pack”, and maybe “Twitter Tools”, these are also awesome plug-ins !
Henry@Who Is Henry
I like your list Ari. Good timing on reading this as we are just updating our set of plugins for my own site and those of clients that we build for. I just forwarded your link to my guy Jayson to look over this post as he amends our current list.
What are your thoughts on where to host videos that you put on your blog? We use Amazon S3 to save on server space and load.
Henry
New from Henry Griner: 4TH Annual Midwest Internet Marketing Super Conference Starts September 11th
Amazon S3 is server space and I’ve heard good things of it but haven’t tried yet. Marc Amos uses that too. But for video hosting I use Tube Mogul to upload to Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, and sometimes Facebook too — for I never know which site someone prefers. I’d rather host a video on a video sharing site than on a closed system like Amazon S3.
I also like to use Tube Mogel to upload my videos to the primary hosting sites however, with Youtube and others I have no control over how the content is presented when people click the video link back to the hosting site. I know of two marketer friends who both used Google video for hosting and had their accounts shutdown and all the files were gone from their sites in a day.
Amazon is simply a great place to store and host from as they do not “run” the videos from S3 on their sites. We just take the embed code and place it on our sites.
I still upload to Tube Mogel to get “SEO juice” from them and about half the time embed a video from one of the sites to my blog(s).
Henry
New from Henry Griner: 4TH Annual Midwest Internet Marketing Super Conference Starts September 11th
Thanks Ari for suck a cool list I use most of them but will be checking out that Apture for sure
it's for the lazy blogger that likes to just on click tags,post, previous posts etc 
Hey google Zemanta <that's money
stumbled thanks
New from John Sullivan: Do follow comment backlinks BLAST
Yeah, I’ve played with Zemanta in the past–but for various reasons including the amount of code it inserts into blog posts, don’t use it anymore.
Great post, I definitely found a couple new plugins. I was surprised to not see the All in One SEO Pack on your list. Any reason?
Evan
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The Thesis theme for Wordpress is both pre- and customizable configured for SEO elements, making that plugin moot.
This is a new list of plugins to me, because there are many of them that aren’t found in Top 10 wordpress plugins.
Of course, some of them seems good only for some bloggers, but others should be included in any blog (like contact form).
New from Marius: Concurs LG
The usability and sheer number of plugins to fit any type of blog is probably the number one reason why I love Wordpress more than any other blogger platform out there.
Great list of components Ari, I think pretty soon I need to create my own personal blog – because I this it would be fun posting about the day to day life.
Thanks for the plugin list, I have a blog that has a really high bounce rate 80%. I have only just realised this since I installed google analytics.
I think most of the trouble is I have no pictures, I shall be trying the apture plugin. Is this where all your pictures come from, your blog is easier to look at.
I think I need to do a bit of a site redesign.
Came in via Kikolani’s Fetching Friday resource list, and I have to thank you for this plug-in list: there are lot of plug-ins you use that I wouldn’t even have conceived of, but might help me out enormously. That WPBook thing looks very, very interesting: I have a fairly developed presence on other sites, but getting traffic from those sites to the blog has always been a challenge, and I wonder about apps that can just duplicate the blog elsewhere.
Thanks again!
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A great list; I have some but I’m so new to blogging I haven’t had need or understanding to add them all. I have an interior design advice blog and really need a contact or comment form that allows readers to upload pictures. Does anyone know of such a plugin or app?
Thanks for the help.
Terrie,
You might look at adding a membership plugin to your WordPress blog where you can have free or paid members. If you are giving away your interior design advice you should look at using the free info to lead people deeper to a paid area. Several membership programs offer the ability to post photos to the blog. MemberWing has a free installation and you can order the premium installation later if you like it.
http://www.memberwing.com/
New from Henry Griner: Setup Google Analytics For Your Websites
First off I’d like to say thanks for all the hard work on this list. I find myself constantly looking for new plugins and have wasted many hours on it. I’m often searching and reading blogs to find the best ones. Typically, the blog posts I end up coming across are simple lists or a copy of the plugin description. Your personal notes plus references in each entry are fantastic. Good quality post and you’ve saved me some precious time, thanks again.
New from Shane@Glee Fansite: Preggers (1.04)
I am really seconding Shane’s comments. Clearly a lot of work gone into this and writing the blog post was just the tip of the iceberg for sure. I particularly appreciate the simple, no-nonsense but hugely informative style. Also look forward to the next in 6 months time.
Hi Ari,
I tried something new in the name field to see how KeywordLuv works. From your list, I’ve installed Apture, but haven’t gotten around to playing with it yet. I implemented (and luv) Contact Form 7, Twitip ID and the Follow My Links plug-ins. I’m already using some of the others on your list (commentluv rocks). Plug-ins are like Christmas presents!
Thank you for the list,
Cheryl
New from Cheryl @ thatgirlisfunny: Administering The Eye Gouging Thumb Strike
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