Recommend WordPress Plugins
The following plugins are highly recommended and are added immediately after setting up a fresh WordPress installation.
- Akismet provides protection against comment and trackback spam.
- All in One SEO Pack improves WordPress’ already strong SEO performance.
- Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress makes integrating Google Analytics stats tracking into your WordPress site very easy. It also automates tracking of outbound links.
- Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress generates standards-compliant sitemaps for your WordPress site. The sitemaps are customizable to fit your site’s content and update frequency.
- Login LockDown blocks specific IPs from logging into the site if they reach a specific number of failures within a certain period of time. This helps protect your site from brute-force attacks.
- Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger improves on WordPress’ built-in pinging functionality. Much of the benefit that this plugin offers is protecting your site from being blocked by pinging services.
Interesting WordPress Plugins
We often stumble upon very interesting plugins that may or may not be needed at some point in the future. In order to prevent the “what was that plugin called and where did I find it” scenarios, we decided to make a page to archive notable plugins.
- One Widget Per Page creates a widget for each page that exists on your site. Once you add one of the page widgets to an area, you can give it an optional title and a description. The information entered for that widget will only show on that widget’s page. This plugin is useful if you want to have descriptions in the sidebar for specific pages.
- HTML Templates allows for creation of templates that can speed posting of data in specific formats. These templates support dynamic fields that prompt for information to replace the field with when the template is filled out. I thought of building a similar plugin some time ago, but the developer at Pirex had me beat. Based on the comments it may have some problems and the author commented that it needs some improvements, so maybe I’ll redesign when it comes time for me to need it.
- Page Category Plus enables you to associate categories with pages.
- Shutter Reloaded is similar to Lightbox and Thickbox but has a focus on being extremely lean and fast. It currently is a mere 10KB in size and doesn’t require external libraries.
- Role Manager gives precise control over user permissions. Want to hide the dashboard from specific user groups, remove some privileges from people with Editor privileges, or create custom privilege levels? Role Manage has all those angles covered. This could be a great help to blogs with a large number of contributers with different levels of responsibility.
- BuddyPress expands on the functionality of WordPress MU and turns it into a “social network platform.” Just a few of the features are extended profiles for members, private messaging, and grouping via a “friend” capability.
- Custom Query String – UTW Edition allows for customizing the query used to decide the posts that appear in “the loop.”
- TinyMCE Paste Options enables two options that are turned off by default in the TinyMCE editor: paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste and paste_convert_headers_to_strong. These two options help automate cleanup of content pasted from Word into WordPress.
- Sidebars allows for assigning a custom set of widgets for specific pages’ or posts’ sidebars.
