Jure Cuhalev

18 Nov, 2008

10 Wordpress plugins I can’t blog without

Posted by: Jure Cuhalev In: Tech

After getting hacked, I moved the host and started over. I only transfered my posts to not loose a few years of content. In the process I had to go out and decide which plugins to reinstall.

It turns out it’s about 10 of them:

Easy Tube - Plugin to easliy place YouTube objects in Wordpress Content By Paul Bain.
FeedBurner FeedSmith - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
Flickr Manager - Handles uploading, modifying images on Flickr, and insertion into posts. By Trent Gardner.
flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. By Dave Kellam.
Future Calendar - A simple plugin that utalizes a modified get_calendar function that shows what dates have a future post scheduled in a calendar format, and makes it easy to change the current timestamp. Temperature Functionality and some tweaks by Flavio Jarabeck (www.InternetDrops.com.br) By Aaron Harun.
Google Analytics for WordPress - This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog. By Joost de Valk.
IntenseDebate - IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. (it used to be DISQUS Comment System but we’ll see which one works better).
TypePad AntiSpam - TypePad AntiSpam is a free service from Six Apart that helps protect your blog from spam. (I know that previous commenting systems should protect me from spam, but in practice it helps to have a second line of protection)
Twitter Tools - A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. By Alex King.
Zemanta - Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging fun again.
(bonus one) - Lijit Search - Search Powered Web Applications for Publishers (I’m not using it at the moment as I have to modify my new theme a bit to add support for Lijit). It’s supposed to hijack my search, but as you can see, that part of their functionality doesn’t work for some reason with this theme.

Some of plugins like Easy Tube, flickrRSS are more of a legacy thing as they’re required by my older blog posts and my theme.
Google Analytics is there because it’s much easier to use a plugin then to always hack the footer of WP theme.

Is there a plugin that you find invaluable and you think I should try?

Tags: wordpress plugins

Nelit

Great list!

Jernej

Thnx for this! or now I'm on Blogger platform but I think I'll need this in the future:)

Barney Moran

Part of allowed Search on blogs should also be the revenue the company is sharing with you, for the revenue driven ones the next step is getting transparency from companies like Lijit on their actual revenue vs. the % the Publisher may or may not get, and use of our content when we decide to use either. P.U.B. has a F.A.Q. on the Lijit issue on our
http://www.lijit.blogspot.com .

tarable

Barney, we've been nothing but transparent with our motivations.

You can read about our revenue-sharing program here: http://tinyurl.com/4ppygu

Or you can read about how we use your content here: http://tinyurl.com/56r7cz

But how about you, Barney? Why don't you provide some transparency about your continued attacks on Lijit? Does everyone know about your past history with Lijit?

If they don't, they can read our side of the story here: http://tinyurl.com/5pdc9j

(Sorry about this Jure, but I like to make sure that our publishers know the truth.)

ghosttie

Did you switch back to Disqus? Make up your mind! :p

Jure Cuhalev

Sadly yes. IntenseDebate had even more problems :(

ghosttie

More spam or something else?

Jure Cuhalev

More spam and broken reply-by-email functionality. Afterwards, I didn't
even bother with investing more time in it.

ghosttie

Apparently Disqus is working on the spam problem...

tarable

Jure, great list and thanks for adding Lijit as the bonus. Let me know if you'd like some help in tweaking the plugin to make sure it works with your theme. We'd be more than happy to make sure you can actually use Lijit on your blog.

BTW, I saw Andraz Tori speak recently at Defrag and he did a great job. Hope all is well with you and Zemanta.

Barney Moran

Hey Tara and the Lijit team,

When we started the Blogger’s Union in 2008, we thought P.U.B.’s role would be simply working for fairness and transparency for Publishers, but with Lijit’s focus on personal attacks instead of addressing questions of revenue and content use, P.U.B. is also the place to take the heat for asking the important questions of Publisher vendors.

The feedback P.U.B. gets from other union presidents is all the same: “Welcome to running a Union”, and they advise this is exactly the role P.U.B. now also serves: Protect the individual Publisher from exactly this type of personal assassination.

In the interests of letting Publishers and their readers make their own informed decision, P.U.B. will post the link to Lijit’s personal attack on the Bloggers Union Website, and ask Lijit to waive its current censorship of P.U.B.’s comments on the Lijit Blog after our initial comment. If Lijit needs us to repost we can, just let P.U.B. know.

Sound fair?

PS: Thank you Jure for having this thread on your blog, transparency is everything.

Andy

Some great plugins listed here. I tried Lijit Search and it didn't work for a time, but I left it be, came back to it, and now it seems to be working well. Although I do wonder how site visitors react to it... The way it takes over the screen and shows all those causal relationships in a graphical web-tree format might alarm folks a little!

P.U.B.

Hey Jure,

Checking in, looks like fair representation by Lijit is still not an option for Publishers. Will check back to see if this changes,

P.U.B.

Jure Cuhalev

As far as I am concerned, Lijit is an opt-in and since there's a fair
amount of competition in any startup market, publishers can decide for
themselves.

Revenue sharing is not something that is option for me, so as far as
I'm concerned, Lijit is doing great job and I'm happy to let them keep
pennies from my blog. For more serious publishers, I'm sure they can
negotiate with Lijit directly and don't need any unions in this free
market.

10 Wordpress plugins I can’t blog without

Search

Flickr PhotoStream

About