Tag Archives: plugin

Best WordPress Plugins for a new site..

Tips 3 Comments

For a site I’m finishing up right now, I went through my list of WordPress Plugins that are really nice “must haves” for a new website.  Since I  was documenting what I was recommending for the client, I figured I’d share it with you guys as well.  There are tons of great plugins out there, but these are a few that provide some great value…

Simple Trackback Validation Eliminates spam trackbacks by (1) checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and (2) by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog.

Version 2.1 | By Michael Woehrer | Visit plugin site

(This one solved my Trackback Spam problems)
Shadowbox JS A javascript media viewer similar to Lightbox and Thickbox. Supports all types of media, not just images.

Version 3.0.0.3 | By Matt Martz | Visit plugin site

(I like this particular viewer best out of the ones I’ve tried)
FD

Feedburner

Plugin

 Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed

Version 1.41 | By John Watson | Visit plugin site

(Recommended for integrating feedburner)
Microkid’s

Related Posts

 Display a set of manually selected related items with your posts

Version 2.4 | By Microkid | Visit plugin site

(I like that it lets you choose the posts that are ACTUALLY related!)
Twitter for WordPress Displays your public Twitter messages for all to read. Based on Pownce for WordPress by Cavemonkey50.

Version 1.9.7 | By Ricardo González | Visit plugin site

(Good basic integration.)
Ultimate Google Analytics Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site. Check http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/#versions for version updates

Version 1.6.0 | By Wilfred van der Deijl | Visit plugin site

(I like that it gives you a GA Dashboard on your WP Dashboard)

WP

Captcha

Free

 Block comment spam without captcha.

Version 0.7 | By iDope | Visit plugin site

(Simple and effective)
WP-

PageNavi

 Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

Version 2.50 | By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan | Visit plugin site

(Very nice feature)
Sociable Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Version 3.4.4 | By Joost de Valk | Visit plugin site
Exclude Pages from Navigation Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

Version 1.51 | By Simon Wheatley | Visit plugin site

(Not useful for all site, but really nice for the more complex ones.)

Got others?  Let me know!

2 More Useful WordPress Plugins

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An update on some of the new (or at least new to me!) wordpress plug-ins I’ve just found.

WP Greet Box – This is a great idea, though I’ve just installed it on my Arts/Crafts site, Dabbled.org, to try it out. I’ll keep you posted on how I find it to work. Thus far, I’m liking it. It determines where your visitor is visiting from, and displays a greeting message to either point them in the direction of more related posts (in the case of a Google search) or (in the case of Twitter) suggests they re-tweet and offers up how to follow you on twitter. In general it will remind them to follow your RSS feed. Which is pretty nifty.

Tweetsuite – I installed this on on Dabbled.org today, because I use Twitter a great deal with that site, and I was interested in displaying ‘tweetbacks’ (ie where other users had tweeted my posts). It appears to still have a few bugs (I got an error message when I tried to install some of it’s widget capability) but the core functionality seems fine. It’s a great idea, so I’m hoping it works well!

Update:  Neither of these I’m keeping… both didn’t quite work as I’d hoped.

Favorite WordPress Plugins for Controlling Spam

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Spam is such a fact of life on the web these days, but there is a myriad of ways to combat it too. And while not much will stop a dedicated human spammer, there are some good tools out there for at least minimizing the hassle.

What do I typically use/recommend?

Comment Spam:

  • WP Captcha Free – A non-captcha solution, so no irritating box for your readers to fill out prior to commenting.  Simple to use/install.

Trackback Spam:

  • Simple Trackback Validation – Stops trackback spam either by sending suspicious trackbacks to moderation, or deleting them altogether.  Personally, I like to set it to just delete suspicious trackbacks, so I don’t have to deal with them, but log the deletions so I can check occasionally and make sure that it’s not being overzealous.

More Resources

There are some good lists of anti-spam tools for WordPress out there, so if you want more ideas, try: