WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without
By Michael StelznerIf you haven’t noticed, this blog is powered by the awesome (and free) WordPress platform.
Here are some suggestions for excellent plugins for my fellow bloggers out there:
Subscribe to Comments: I have turned so many people onto this plugin. When someone adds a comment to your blog, it gives him or her the option to receive an email with any replies. Killer, must have!
Spam Karma 2: On the flip side, nothing is worse than the daily barrage of spam that comes in the form of comments. Spam Karma is your atomic spam zapper.
FireStats: Want to know who is linking to your blog or what posts are most popular? FireStats is an excellent plug in.
What WordPress plugins are on your “I can’t live without” list?
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July 25th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Subscribe to comments can be pretty hard on your shared host and may affect the blog performance. To me related posts and wp-cache are must have plugins. And yes, then there is the sitemaps plugin.
July 25th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Hey Guy;
That part about Subscribe to Comment is true if you have a very long list of comments (which most of us do not) and it only applies when people place a comment. Still a must have.
Can you give us the skinny on these two plugins and provide links??
Mike
July 25th, 2007 at 11:30 am
related posts - shows related posts on the post page. This is automatically created based on the text on post. Very useful for user experience.
wp-cache - This is a life saver when you have huge traffic. Otherwise when someone discovers you in digg/reddit, you are toast.
sitemaps - must have if you want your content to be crawled fast by google.
July 26th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Mike,
I love, love, love my Now Reading plug-in. My newsletter/blog guru found it. It allows me to post the books I’m currently reading, plus those I plan on reading. Then, I can post reviews. It has its own separate “library” which visitors can view if they’re so inclined.
Because I read so much, this plug-in is perfect for me.
I also love the Snaps — those little balloons that show the picture of the linked site. I originally saw them used on TechCrunch.
Where do I find the stars rating you use?
July 26th, 2007 at 5:56 am
WP PostRatings is the plugin that allows you to do the star ratings plug in DIanna. See http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php
July 26th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I’ve been using Blogger ever since I started my blog last year, because it is pretty easy to use and has most of the features I want. However, I do not believe it has these plug in everyone is referring to. Does anyone know if there are other differences between Word Press and Blogger that are significant enough for me to switch? If so, I probably will. I have to say that I started a word Press Blog briefly just to see how it went, and I found it way more confusing then Blogger, plus it took me over half and hour just to set up an account with a user name that hadn’t been taken!
July 26th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Carrie,
I use Blogger for a client and WP for my own blog. I don’t know if anyone has created plugins for Blogger. Blogger is very easy to use. WordPress is too, once it’s all set up. I did have to get a WP expert to set up my blog for me, do the template, and upload it to the Web hosting site.
It took me 10 minutes to get a Blogger blog up and running. It took a couple of weeks for my WP blog to be ready. It’s a more robust interface. I now have the WP expert make all the changes to my blog — I just find it’s very difficult, especially since I don’t know how the “backend” of WP works.
Anyway, you should be able to find Blogger plugins, if any exist, by typing “blogger plugins” into Google.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Great list of plugins, especially the last one. Although I have to ask; why not use Akismet to prevent spam? It works like a charm
July 28th, 2007 at 6:29 am
I’m looking for a plug in to display snips from Comments in my sidebar. When I changed themes, for some reason, Recent Comments List no longer works, even when all installation steps are taken.
My favorites are traffic builders: Share This, Subscribe Me, Subscribe Remind.
July 28th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Tom - I used to use that plugin. If you recall, there is some unique code you need to add to the sidebar.php file. If you go back to the source for the plugin, you will find the instructions. - Mike
July 28th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
i use related posts, so you can get more exposure in your blog, by the way, im using also top commentators, to get more comments on my blog, but many times people spam, so i delete those comments everyweek.
July 28th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Mike, thanks for your observations. I entered that code in the sidebar, as instructed, but still nothing shows up. Don’t understand why, as the plug-in worked fine until I switched themes 3 weeks ago. I thought I’d just let my system rest for awhile, search for an alternative [haven’t found one yet], and perhaps go back to the Recent_Comments_List plugin for another try if nothing else turns up. We’ll see.
July 31st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
anyone know how to use related post plugin? i dont know how to use it with my blog.
November 6th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Used it, works great. Thanks for sharing.
September 9th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Ciekawa strona, bede ja odwiedzal czesciej, pozdro