My current collection of WordPress plug-ins

Apologies for this blog having become “All WordPress! All the Time!” of late, but clearly it’s something I’m putting a lot of attention into lately.

I’m going to highlight here some of the plug-ins I’ve installed on my site — a much longer list than some folks will probably think wise. (Actually, there’s an argument that you should Never, Ever Tell what plug-ins you are using, since Black Hats will use that as a way to crack into your site. I don’t worry about that tooooo much, but there it is).

GOTTA HAVE

• Akismet: This came bundled with WP, and serves as a community anti-spam detector. With Akismet, I’ve had nary a spamlet show up on these pages. Huzzah!
• Redirection: Watches post renames and redirects folks to them (with a 301) when they go to the “old” permalink for a post. Tracks all sorts of 404 errors, and lets you create redirections to them. Works all internally to WP, rather than through .htaccess. Very clevery, very useful.
• WP-Print: Create a printer-friendly version of any page. Brilliant!

SHOULD HAVE

• Get Recent Comments: WP comes with a “Recent Comments” widget, but this adds all sorts of configurable bells and whistles, such that you can do what do and show the most recent posts commented upon, which is more informative than just the most recent comments to my mind.
• Twitter Tools: Turn tweets to posts and posts to tweets. Twitter from your sidebar. Etc. If nothing else, it lets you remote post to your blog from your cell phone (140 characters at a time).
• WP-reCAPTCHA: Adds a CAPTCHA to registration and comments … which also ends up assisting scanning old books for the Internet. Keen!

COULD HAVE

All in One SEO Pack: Gives you control over how page titles are formatted, META data, etc., all for the elusive High Page Rank and Search Engine Optimization. The WP community is apparently obsessed with this. The plug-in does no particular harm, and it does provide some nice controls over what it says it does.
• Creative Commons Configurator: Decide on a CC license you want to use, have it automatically (optionally) inserted into your page header, your RSS feed, your posts, etc. Used to create the CC “Legal Lingo” bit in the sidebar.
• Executable PHP widget: Lets you load PHP into a sidebar element, rather than just text or HTML. Also being used in the “Legal Lingo” sidebar.
• Google Analyticator: Lets you insert your Google Analytics code automatically into the your blog in the appropriate places. Saves you the trouble of doing it yourself.
• ShareThis: I remain mixed on this one. It provides the little “ShareThis” link with each post, letting someone forward a post to a number of social sites, readers, or email. Question is … does anyone actually want to do that?
• Top 10: Tallies post access. Let’s you put a “most popular posts” widget in your sidebar.
• WordPress.com Stats: Collects all sorts of stats regarding entries and linking and searches on your WP blog. Yes, other packages do this, but this one does it directly within WP.
• WP Security Scan: Does some basic security checking on configurations (WP, MySQL, file permissions), with recommendations. Good stuff, but it’s easy to go overboard.
• wunderground.com Weather Sticker: Rather than placing a Wunderground Weather Sticker in a text widget, this does it for you. Not terribly necessary, but since I already have it …
• XmasB Quotes: Lets you put a revolving quotation spot on your blog. Sort of like I have.

I still have several tabs of possible plug-ins that I haven’t evaluated yet, but I wanted to share what I have so far, in case folks have suggestions and/or mockery.