My First Week With WordPress: 10 Plugins That I Can’t Live Without

I’ve been using WordPress for one week now and I’m really glad that I moved as it has exceeded my expectations. I think what WordPress does well is provide a platform that supports novice users, but also offers the flexibility to allow more advanced users to personalise their experience.

Although out of the box it doesn’t include some features that I would class as ‘must-haves’ like a spellchecker (I still haven’t managed to get one to work), most of the ‘omissions’ I think are deliberate in order to let users decide what they want themselves.

I’m amazed by how many WordPress Plugins there are – there must be well over a thousand. I’ve gone a bit crazy and installed about 50 plugins and here are my Top 10 so far:

• Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. Since I’ve installed this it has only made one false positive which I think is pretty good going and it has stopped 400 spam items. I have such faith in it now I wish it had a auto-delete option

• AutoMeta: This plugin automatically generates HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. This is great as it allows tags to be customised per post which will help with search engine listings.

• Popularity Contest: I love this plugin as it trys to calculate the true popularity of posts which can be displayed within posts or in the sidebar, based upon the number of views, comments and trackbacks each post receives. The weightings for each item can be changed, and I’m in two minds about changing mine as my post offering Windows Live Invites is skewing my results a bit as it has received five times more comments than any of my other posts.

• Translator: On my old Blogware blog I manually added a translation tool and I was amazed how much traffic I received because the translated pages were indexed by foreign search engines. I’m not sure if this is the case with this plugin which dynamically translates pages and posts into eight languages.

• Related Posts: I think this plugin is one of the reasons my traffic has gone up since the move. What it does is automatically create a list of related items based upon active/passive keyword matches. Before I used to have to do this manually.

• Sociable: This plugin has a great interface and adds to the bottom of all posts icons to bookmark posts with favourite bookmarking sites. Site owners have full control over how many and which icons are displayed

• wp-cache: I’m not sure why this plugin isn’t part of the default build as the difference it makes to page loading times is amazing. It’s a very fast cache module, that reduces the number of queries on the site database which can keep your host happy.

• WP-UserOnline: This plugin allows me to produce a snapshot of not only who’s online at the moment and how many, but also what they are currently looking at. I find this useful as it helps me get a better feel of what people like to read and what topics I should potentially focus on.

• Fold Category List: category lists can get out of control over time and this great plugin allows category lists to be folded to keep things nice and tidy.

• StatTraq: Although I now have access to my server logs, I find this stats plugin useful as the stats are created with WordPress in mind so provide an easier way to find popular categories, number of pages viewed, stickiness etc

Other than experimenting with plugins and tidying up my old posts, using WordPress has been a doddle. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to a novice user as its doesn’t have any official support. However, there is such a big community that in most cases finding someone to help you shouldn’t take too long if you want to take the plunge.

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