Current Crop of Plugins
Posted on July 11, 2007
14 Comments
I think I might have a somewhat painful addiction to plugins — whenever I see one that looks interesting and I just can’t resist giving it a try. Many come and many go, but here’s the current crop.
Warning: I have a ton!
- Show Top Commentators — I added this one just today. Since I’m no longer a big “do follow” proponent, this seems like a nice way to give folks a “real” link if they’ve commented a few times here. I’ve got it setup to show a rolling 30 day list of the top folks.
- Hotlink Protection — Another one re-enabled today. I happened to see a handful of splogs using my posts with my images hotlinked back to me. Grrr…
- Brians Latest Comments — I like this one as it shows what posts recently received comments — and who left them. I’ve yet to determine if I’m the only one who actually uses it here.
- Bad Behavior — First prong of a multi-faceted spam defense system. I love this thing.
- Spam Karma 2 — the next prong in the spam defense system.
- Spam Karma 2 Akismet Plugin — This plugin enables SK2 to submit spam to the Akismet system. Best of both worlds, really.
- Subscribe to Comments — I’m pleasantly surprised at how often this is used. It adds a checkbox to the comment form and, if checked, sends you an email each time someone else comments on the same post. A simple way to stay in the loop of a discussion.
- WP Wetfloor — Gives that nifty reflection (aka “wetfloor”) effect to images.
- Dagon Design Secure Form Mailer — This is used on my Contact page. Dramatically reduced the amount of “form spam” that I was receiving.
- Download Manager — Helps count the downloads of my plugins and such.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith — The easy way of doing FeedBurner feeds with a WordPress blog.
- Full Text Feed — The “modern” versions of WordPress truncate the feed if the more tag is used in the post. So far, I’m not a fan of that and this plugin clobbers it.
- Head META Description — My nod to SEO, adds a bit of a meta description tag to the various blog pages.
- iG:Syntax Hiliter — Great for handling code posts. Just have to remember to turn off the WYSIWYG editor when using it.
- Popularity Contest — Generates that list of Popular Posts in the sidebar. It has some other interesting uses that I might enable someday.
- Sphere Related Content Widget — I find it fascinating as heck, but not sure if anyone else ever clicks it.
- SRG Clean Archives — Powers my Archives page.
- ST Add Related Posts to Feed — Well yeah, of course I use my own plugins! Shows related posts in your RSS feed.
- ST Visualize Advanced Features — (see above) This one is nifty if you use the WYSIWYG. It just adds one more button to the editor. Click that button and get a bunch more features.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior — THE tagging plugin imho. I’ve had so much fun playing with this thing over the past few years. Word is tagging will be built-in soon. I’m a bit nervous to see how that works out.
- WordPress Database Backup — I have it run once a week and email the backup to me. Simple peace of mind.
- WP-Zeitgeist — Gotta love it just for the Teutonic-ness. How often can you write zeitgeist?!? This one is the headliner of my Zeitgeist page and shows recent searches in a cloud format. Fun (for me) to watch change from week to week.
- WP Ajax Edit Comments — With a bit of nudging last week (Hi Rich) I just recently added this one. Pretty slick though and a great way to fix that typo you noticed after submitting the comment.
Dang, that is a ton of plugins! And hey, if you ask me next week to list them all? It’ll probably be a different list. 
I should probably do a “top x favorites” version soon. What are your favorite plugins? Any great ones that I should be looking at?
Tags: blog, dofollow, plugin, spam, WordPress
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14 Responses to “Current Crop of Plugins”
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I use a whole bunch of plugins on my blog too, but instead of giving you the huge list, I’ll just recommend you to check Better Comment Manager, Extended Live Archive and Advanced Search Plugin…those 3 are worth their weight in gold, IMNSHO
Thanks for including Sphere Related Content on your list and even more fun to see it on your blog.
Seems like lots of people are clicking on it, especially as they see it show up more often in a broad range of sites. Last month we displayed over 1 billion icons, while generating 230 million clickable links and 27+ million results :).
Thanks again for including us - I really like your blog, great format and good posts.
Best,
I have over 75 plugins installed, and counting. I think I might have gone a little overboard though.
@Vox - I used ELA for the longest time, but switched to SRG Clean Archives just a couple months ago. Don’t recall why either.
I’ll have to check out the other two though.
@Tony - thanks for dropping by and the nice words. 27 million results! Nice.
@Lincoln - Holy crap — 75?!?
The thing I always have to be careful of is making sure I don’t get too carried away with the plugins and bring my blog down to a crawl. (I’ve done that a few times). Right now, I have a few plugins going that don’t work (well) with WP-Cache… so I have to be doubly careful.
That’s MORE than 75.
There’s a couple of reasons why I think I’m able to get away with this:
One, most of my plugins are very small, just several lines of code to enhance a feature (like cleaning up my excerpts so they actually look nice.)
Two, most of my plugins only get called on my index page, where I have two sidebars, but on the rest of my site I have no sidebars at all, so they never get called. Ironically enough I’ve gone with this setup initially because my footer wouldn’t stay in place and kept clashing with my sidebars due to using absolute positioning. Now I’m happy I did because there’s FAR less noise and distractions on my post pages, and it loads nice and fast too. My index pages are permanently cached by WP-Cache so they load quickly as well. There are still downsides to having this kind of setup (including no sidebar space for ads), but the upside I think outweighs it all.
Interesting timing — I was just pondering the idea of disabling some of my sidebar contents when not on the main page!
Oh, and I’m back on wp-cache too. I think my main conflict was with Popularity Contest and I happened to find a good article on getting Popularity and Wp-Cache to make nice. Testing now.
Really? I never had a problem with Popularity Contest with WP-Cache. The only thing I noticed is that view counts won’t go up when the post pages are cached, which is to be expected. Since I don’t cache the single posts unless I’m expecting serious traffic, it hasn’t been a problem. I’m not expecting pinpoint accuracy here anyway, just a good guesstimate as to what pages are most popular.
As for sidebars, I noticed I’ve been developing sidebar blindness too, if that’s even possible. To me it’s just too much noise detracting from the main content (and ads that cry out for clickthroughs). I know there’s the loss of real estate for ads, directional links and widgets to help improve the stickiness of the site, but I use a nice wide navigational bar on top to partly make up for that. There’s something to be said for simplicity.
Aroo? I thought of doing something like that with exclusion URLs, but couldn’t quite nail it down. Is there an easier way?
Since dates are included in my permalinks, I simply add the string “/2007/” in the list of exclusion URLs and that prevents any permalink with that string from getting cached. I do the same for 2006 as well. When I expect (or futilely hope) that I’ll get Dugg or Reddited, I simply remove those strings and the pages get cached again. That it works flawlessly has been a prime reason why I haven’t upgraded past 2.0.10 I upgrade to 2.2 and I have no doubt at all that my blog will completely implode as a result. :X
What a nice and usefull list! Thank you very much, I will use a lot of these plugins…
@Lincoln - clever!
@Thomas - glad you like the list.
Great list - hold on to your britches, I’ve got one for you: http://www.seo-expert-blog.com/blog/ultimate-collection-of-free-seo-tools
I’ve also run across a few other sites that list tons of stuff. Let me know if you’ve had enough. Take care.