wordpress

When I left off last week, we had just covered my “must-have” WordPress plugins and I promised a list of favorites for adding more functionality to your website.

The following are presented in alphabetical order as I look at what is installed on this site but I’ll add a few niche plugins at the end for special circumstances.

Easy Gravatars – Ever wonder how you get those little avatars by your blog comments? They are Gravatars and this plug-in is the easiest way to add them. For more advanced users, the classic Gravatars plugin from Automatic might be more your speed. I’ve used them both and they work great.

Event Calendar – Have events that you want to post to your blog? This is the best of what is out there for integration although I’ve been embedding Google Calendars directly into some blogs for those who have more than just a couple events. Since the current version requires a hack to work properly in WordPress 2.5, I’ve posted an archive here to save you the work of extracting from SVN.

Executable PHP widget – There are times when you will want to run PHP scripts on your sidebar. This adds a widget that will let you do so.

iWPhone – One of the first themes for iPhone formatting is still the best from my experience. All it does is turns your blog into an iPhone web application.

My Category Order – The first of three handy plugins for controlling the order of categories in your sidebar.

My Link Order – This one controls the order of your blogroll links. Handy if you don’t want alphabetical order.

My Page Order – This plugin controls the order of your pages. I use this all the time to reorder site navigation.

Page Links To – Ever want to link a menu item to someplace outside your WordPress installation? This handy plugin lets you do this on any page.

PHP Speedy WP – A performance tweaking plugin that I only use when necessary. A bit geeky to setup but improves blog performance quite a bit.

Postalicious – This plugin allows me to post my del.icio.us links every so often very quickly here. I recommend you set this to post to drafts so you can make sure everything looks OK before posting live. Also posts links from Google Reader, ma.gnolia, Reddit and Yahoo! Pipes.

Redirection – After blogging for a number of years you will probably have several redirected links to deal with. Instead of wrangling with your .htaccess file, just use this plugin to manage redirects.

Search Regex – Adds search and replace across your WordPress posts, pages, comments and meta-data. Very handy for making global changes quickly.

Subscribe To Comments – Gives your readers email notification of new comments since they posted theirs. One of the best ways to encourage reader engagement in your comments.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – Although the standard tools built into WordPress are pretty good for handling media, I still use this plug-in for embedding YouTube and Google Video files. Just click on the icon in the post toolbar and add your link to embed.

WeatherIcon – Want to put your weather on your blog? This is the plugin to use to add this but make sure you click over to the version 3 beta.

WordPress.com Stats – Adds basic stats to your WordPress dashboard. Requires a WordPress API key but you already got one when you activated Akismet.

WPhone – A lightweight interface built for smartphones like Apple’s iPhone. Also works with other mobile browsers to allow for blog access on the go.

Plugins for Special Occasions

BDP RSS Aggregator – There are times when you will want to aggregate RSS feeds on your sidebar. This plugin is the best for such when you want more than what the standard RSS widget offers.

Democracy – Handy for posting simple polls to your blog sidebar or in a post.

Global Translator – Is your blog of interest to those who don’t speak English? Then add language translation via this plugin.

Members Only – Want to protect parts of your site? This plugin will let you lock down pages, posts and even your RSS feed requiring a user login to view.

NextGEN Gallery – The easiest and best photo gallery for WordPress integration I’ve found.

podPress – If you have a podcast, you’ll want to use this plugin. Handles Flash players in posts and all your iTunes tags in your feed.

Video commenting plugin | powered by Viddler – If you want to take your comments to the next level, this is the plugin for you. Allows for readers to leave video comments but I’d suggest you moderate all of them before they appear on your blog.

Next week I’ll cover WordPress themes to control your site’s look and feel.

Related Links

Part 1 of this series

Part 2 of this series

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