5 Most Essential WordPress Plugins

July 29, 2010 at 2:15 pm — 0 Comments

Here are 5 plugins that I highly recommend. These can help enhance how you manage or share information from your WordPress blog.

Akismet

Among the plethora of plugins available to prevent spam on your blog, this one tops the list. Created by Automattic (the same team that created WordPress), Akismet works much like the Gmail spam filter: there’s no blacklist to maintain, and it learns as you get more comments and mark them as spam and not spam. The developers warn that if you use it to accompany other spam filters, “they may reduce the effectiveness of Akismet”. Akismet is also available for 20 other applications, including Drupal. There is no fee for a personal API key for those of us running personal blogs. However, if you’re not using Akismet for a personal blog, it’s recommended that you buy a license. The commercial API key is anywhere between $5 and $1,000 per month, depending on site commenting traffic and the type of website.

Advanced Category Excluder

If you’re too lazy to program this into your theme, don’t know how to, or just need a certain category to be hidden sitewide, then this plugin is for you. You can choose to hide categories from several different sections, including the homepage, the sidebar, the RSS feed, the comments RSS feed, search, pages, single posts, or from search engines (robots), with a click of your mouse. It also comes with it’s own Latest Posts and Archive widgets that have excluded your chosen categories.(Also, just to forewarn you, it shows up as ACE in your WordPress Dashboard sidebar.)

Add to Any

The best thing you can do with your blog these days is connect it to a social network—if you want traffic, that is. Add to Any is a sharing tool that allows people to connect from your blog and share an entry or a page with any of the listed social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Dig, Reddit, Deli.cio.us, MySpace and so on. You can choose which button to use on your posts (or use your own image or just use text), display them on posts, pages, or both, or even style the drop-down menu however you like it.

Google Analyticator

And how do you track that traffic? Connect your blog with your Google Analytics account using this plugin. You can track where your hits are coming from and invest more of your blog in that area. (That includes Google AdSense ads on your blog, if you use that too.) Google Analyticator allows you to view your traffic right in your WordPress Dashboard, and exclude logged in users from the statisitcs, if you prefer. It also give you the choice of showing it to certain roles, or just yourself.

Maintenance Mode

Even though maintenance mode isn’t built into WordPress, you can still get that effect with this plugin. Maintenance Mode locks out everyone except for administrators and whoever you think should have the privilege to view the website while it’s being worked on. You can theme the page to look however you want it to and even set a timer if you know exactly when you’ll be done working. If you want a certain page to still be accessible to everyone, you can change that in the settings too

Ellie