I’ve always thought that if you can do it simply enough without a plugin then do! I’ve tried to avoid installing every plugin under the sun because I don’t want WordPress to get bloated and sluggish. However, these days when I navigate to my plugins page… woof! That is a long list!
Since so many people are publishing their essential plugins lists, I thought I’d join the club. Perhaps you can help me decide if any of them should be turfed?
cforms II
This is the plugin I use to create comment forms. By gum, it’s great! Forms are something I could have done with html, but it would have been a pure pain-in-the-backside.
Chunk URLs for WordPress
This one shortens URLs in comments (when people paste the whole thing in as text). It’s just nice to know that comments aren’t going to mess up the page layout.
Custom Smileys
These guys are just too cute! I think they help expression in this informal written medium. Plus, if I get rid of them now I’m going to have a bunch of random words between colons around the place.
Do Follow
This plugin removes the rel=”nofollow” tag from the commenter’s URL so that it’s picked up by search engines. It seemed like a nice idea to give something back to people making the effort to comment.
Having read a tiny bit more about SEO, I’m wondering if this decreases the general value of links on the page. Perhaps I shouldn’t use this plugin, so that when I link to pages in a post the search engine knows I really meant to link there. Perhaps it doesn’t matter since my PR went from 4 down to 0!
What do you think?
Enhanced Links
Show your blogrolls in lovely little dropdown menus. I tried for days to make something like this, I only got up to trying to make a widget appear in the sidebar, before I found this plugin. I use it in conjunction with…
Exec PHP
Just like a text widget, but it accepts PHP. Sweet!
FeedBurner FeedSmith
This is the reason I looked at my plugin list today – it redirects WP feeds to your FeedBurner feeds.
Full Text Feed
I think this is a must if you’re going to truncate your posts on the homepage. Don’t make your subscribers load your page if they weren’t going to anyway! It’s just good manners, they might not be connected to the internet (I’m often on the train when reading feeds), make it as easy for them as possible.
Google XML Sitemaps Generator
Well, apparently this is good for SEO. If you set things up properly you can tell Google to only index certain pages at certain time intervals. That means, it won’t be using up a whole lot of your bandwidth indexing things that it indexed yesterday or a few days ago. It also won’t index the same thing at different locations (if you tell it not to).
Don’t you hate it when you do a search and Google gives you a link to a homepage that has nothing to do with your search? You can prevent that on your site by telling it not to index your homepage, but rather the individual post pages. Brilliant!
Sociable
The cute little icons at the bottom of the post. I don’t know if anyone’s actually used them here, but given my browser woes with social bookmarking, I didn’t want to inhibit anyone who wanted to use them!
Spam Karma 2
I started using this long before Akismet came with WP installations. It took a little tweaking in the beginning and I adjusted some of the settings – for example, comments on older posts get treated more harshly because real people rarely want to comment on them. Since then it has worked almost flawlessly; it’s great.
Subscribe to Comments
I always subscribe to comments when I leave a comment on another blog. I love to see the discussion and any responses to my comments. This is a really useful plugin.
WordPress Database Backup
It’s really easy to use, it’s good to backup your database before updating WP. It’s comforting to know that if something goes awry I can restore things to the way they were before I broke everything! I won’t lose any posts or comments made since my last database backup.
Well, that’s the lot! What do you think? Too many? Are they all useful? Which ones do you use?
My dear, 14 plugins isn’t a lot. I use 31 plugins (http://chenpn.com/plugins-used/)! 😛
But then again, it depends on what you want to do with your blog and all that jazz. I review my active plugins once in a while, and I will delete whatever I don’t need (sometimes I install a plugin because I see another blogger does s0, hehehe).
Same here. My plugins have increased from zero to I don’t know how many! 🙂
Pelf, OMG, are you serious? Now that’s a lot of plugins!
P.S. Kristarella, is Spam Karma any better than Akismet. I am tired of Akismet. It marks legitimate comments as spam.
Moshin, I don’t have any experience with Akismet on here, but SK2 has worked really well. I don’t know how many options there are for Akismet, but SK2 has a lot of options that may help you target the kind of spam you get and be more lenient on non-spammers. I haven’t had a problem with it (except today when someone commented on year old post!).
Pelf, that is a lot! I kinda thought some of them WP could do by itself, e.g. comment timeout (looking now it seems I’m wrong, I can’t see that function) and Clean Archives – I think you just make an archive page template for that. Anywho, some look useful or fun too. 🙂
I am going to give SK a try.
Akismet doesn’t have any options. You just have to activate it and it starts working. I don’t know whether to call it Akismet’s plus or minus. :huh:
P.S. kristarella, I am getting weird PHP errors after submitting comments. You might want to look into that.
That’s something you might want to consider before using SK2 – a few people get weird php errors! Pelf was getting them as well – are you posting from a place with a really big network or something like that? It’s something to do with validating IPs I think. Pelf got them at the library, I used to get them at the hospital I worked at.
I contacted Dave, who wrote it, and he said it was WP’s fault, that updating should fix it and that he’d try to put a fix into the next version anyway. Well, updating didn’t help. I hope the next version does, and soon!
I guess that makes Akismet and SK2 a toss up. As far as I know not many people get these errors, but maybe it’s better for you to have the hassle of checking the spam filtering than readers getting errors?
Ugh… I forgot about that problem, thought it had gone away 😥
Kristen, you don’t need to create a page template for the Clean Archives page. Just install and activate the plugin, and copy and paste a line of code (available on the download site) into a “New Page” (WRITE > PAGE) and click Publish.
And your Archives will be listed! if you run into any problem, just drop Sean an email, and he will get back to you. He was very patient with me when I needed his help (as I didn’t know anything about creating a page template and I was confused and all), LOL.
*waves* Hello, Kristarella! I like your custom smilies. They stand out because they are not yellow. The Enhanced Links is really great too! Hadn’t heard of that one. It keeps things nice and clean on the side there.
I really love Edit Comments, as a reader and as an admin. I also just found Typogrify, which for me, a designer, is a must. It gets rid of nasty typography that seems to not be able to be helped on the web.
Hey LaurenMarie! Thanks for stopping by!
I used to have pink smilies that were very cute, but they clashed when my current theme was red. Grey seems to go with everything!
Typogrify looks cute. I’ll definitely look into Edit Comments, the first time I saw it it didn’t actually work, so I gave up on it and I haven’t used it as a reader. However, I tested it out on your blog just now and it worked! I’ll give it a shot. :up: