Best plug in list? There’s been a few of these plugin recommendation lists over the years. I started off a friend’s photo-rich blog with with one provided by Aaron Brazell at Technosailor with a whole lotta photography ones – WordPress Plugin Pack: Photography. It provided a very good start too.
On this blog of late though, I’ve been having issues and the whole WordPress shabang grinding to a halt and booting me out at regular intervals. I suspect, in fact I strongly suspect it’s a plugin issue. So what I’ve done is I’ve stripped my installation right down to the bare essentials (not a pretty sight). This has left me with a core list of WP plugins I’d rather not do without. This I thought might be useful info to share, so here goes.
If my blog caught fire, here’s my “last to leave the burning blog plugin list” (can you hear the sirens?)…
Askimet – OK it doesn’t catch all spam, but it snaffles enough to give it house room and causes no problems.
All in one SEO pack – provides a neat way to add all the search guff (not that it helps with a duffer’s blog, but hey ho, one lives in hope and traffic is indeed increasing)
Audit Trail – this one is industrial knicker elastic and saves bacon. It backs up and makes revs of individual posts so if you make a mistake it can restore to last copy. essential.
Enforce Preference – I keep this one as I had an argument with a pal once about whether ‘www’ was needed and this enforces the preference either way.
Feedsmith Burner – this was nearly thrown out but I think I still need it to sort out the mess made by Google when they acquired Feedburner
Google XML Sitemaps makes a site map, in XML, for Google. Nuff said.
No Self Pings – this stops me having to approve my own comments if I cite my own blog. Handy. (No I’m not that vain, it’s handy).
Robots Meta – chats up bots
SEO Slugs -sorts out some SEO items
SI CAPTCHA – Adds a fuzzy letter question to a blog entry submit. A follower on Twitter says this doesn’t work. When it doesn’t, I’ll replace it.
WordPress.com Stats – essential stats plugin. I’ve added others that are much more sophisticated, this one I’ve kept.
WP Calais Auto Tagger – I’m still suspicious of this one, but I buy into the Calais project. I need to re-check Tagaroo.
WP tags to Technorati – there were delays with my blog updates being seen in Technorati, despite pings. This seems to have fixed it.
