What tweaks & plugins for Wordpress do I suggest?

I got asked a long while ago to note my Plug-ins used and why I used them. So go click and open my “plug-ins used” page and I’ll note some of what I have installed.

• The Two Anti-Spam tools I’m using are Akismet (Advanced Edition) and BadBehavior. They both have their place.
• BadBehavior takes all attempts to make Comment Pasts and verifies that they are real people by checking browser strings and other suspicious style behavior.
• Akismet takes every comment and compares them to a database of known spam. What the Advanced feature does it group the comments that it catches as spam by IP or Worse Offenders… so that if a spammer does more then 4 spams on the same IP it makes it simpler to go through. DElete those first and then verify the rest.
• Next I have the Plugin BF2 Stats. This queries the bf2s.com server for your ingame stats. Those who play BF2 would enjoy that. Those that play other games will look for plug-ins for their game.
• The Blogs of the day plugin takes a number of privately hosted blogs and allows tem to be rated on how much traffic they get and are commented in. The plug-in got enough publicity that Wordpress implimented it for their own hosted system.
• Blogtimes is just a simple little plug-in I use in conjunction to the Clean Archives Reloaded plugin on this page.
• While Clean Archive Reloaded makes nice and pretty the Archives of the site and groups them by month with the ability to drop the view by month.
• Blogtimes goes ahead and makes a graphic that shows what time of the day I make posts. Isn’t incredibly useful but a neat toy to have.
• I have three different tools for Images. sorta four.
• CoppermineSC is a Coppermine plugin that allows one to easily embed images from Coppermine in your Wordpress install. Updating it a bit lately it’s been the most powerful and easiest to use of the Coppermin Plug-ins.
• The WPG2 Plug-in embeds my Gallery2 gallery into my Wordpress plugin. Very easy to use I’m not totally happy with the way it’s embedded and links images.
• The Falbum plugin allows one to embed images from you flickr album… but I don’t use flickr enough to use for my images… and if I want to embed someone elses Flickr album I use this code: How to Embed a Flickr Slideshow
• The last isn’t totally Gallery related but I use with as many images as possible. And that’s the Lightbox Plug-in Plus. It embeds the Lightbox script in nice and easy so all you have to do is add the line re=:lightbox” to a linked image to get it in a lightbox.
• The Feedburner Feed Replacement takes all my feeds and redirects through Feedburner which allows better tracking and a nice pretty feed for those who use readers.
• The Google sitemaps plug-in automagically creates Sitemaps that Google can use for it’s analytics and adsense tools.
• The Landing Sites Plug-in kicks in when someone does a Search and lands on one of my articles. It suggests other related stories in a box at the top of the page.
• The Related Posts Plug-in is similar to Landing Sites in that it sugegsts articles… but with previews and related to the story at hand rather then what the person was searching for.
• Postie is a simple plug-in that allows me to post via my cell phone or by email. I very much doubt it’d post by email… if I have email access I can reach the blog and use it’s tools… But the Cell phone is nice and if you have a camera phone will include images you’ve attached to the message.
• When Commenting I have a few plugins coming into play:
• The Gravatar plug-in is more for pretty purposes. It allows me and other commenters who have a Gravatar account an ability to have a icon next to their post.
• The Quote Comments Plug-in fills a blank that for some reason Wordpress never put in. The Ability to quote a comment.
• The Subscribe to comments allows you to Subscribe to comments if you make one. This one annoys me when other blogs don’t have it… since I never no if someone answered a question or the like.
• The Seasonal Holiday Styling plug-in allows me to change my header (or entire site if and when I do a complete remodel) by swapping in a CSS file last in the sequence according to the date.
• For Media I actually have 3 plug-ins that I plan to wittle down to one:
• The Extreme Video Plugin Allows for easily embedding Google Video, YouTube and Quicktime Videos as well as Flash (FLV) Videos
• As for just Flash of different types I have the Kimili Flash Embed plug-in instaleld bt not used.
• Viper Video Quicktags Plugin is really nice elegant Video Embed plugin currently for YouTube and Google Video which I’ve been using lately. With plans to support Quicktime, WMV and other video sites in the future, it has the most promise. Niceest feature is the emdeding into the WYSIWYG editor.
• I haven’t added a whole lot to the Admin Side:
• The Tiger Style Admin is very clean and I have to say nicer way to the admin interface.
• The Admin bar is a bar that sits at the top of the web page (for those that log in) and allows for easy admining and links to the most often used functions
• The Reports Plugin combines Analytics and Feedburner info into clean and simple reports for you in your admin interface.
• WP-Cache that I have is the latest and greatest… and though activated isn’t in use since it’s still buggy. I need to refresh the browser at times to bring upa page… which got annoying… but I figured to install because Wordpress is known for not surving interest in Slashdot, Digg or other sites very well.
• This last I can’t believe I forgot to add earlier. And that’s the Plugs-used plugin. That supplies the nicely formated page you saw at the beginning of the post.
• The WeatherIcon Plugin posts the weather for whatever place I give it which I like… but I wouldn’t consider the most important plugin.
• The bdp-Comments plug-in I use only for it’s ability to list the recent posts in the sidebar.
• The WP-OnlineCounter was one fo the first plug-ins I installed and all it does is keep count how many visitors I have and how many at one time.
• The WP-Amazon Plugin I originally got and wasn’t sure how I’d use but I’m enjoying finding background info with it. For example talking about Superman Returns I was able to link where I could get the rest of the Superman Movies.
• Last but not least is the WordPress tune up plugin which patches a few things that got broke in the latest patch.

As I meantioned I had gotten asked on Digg to do a write up about what Plug-ins I suggested. I decided to explain why I use the ones I do, and the reason for my two different galleries was trying to figure out which one I like best, and so far it’s a tie for different reasons.

Digg it! | Reddit!

Edit: I can’t believe I hadn’t linked the plugins… it does no good to write about something and not provide a link to download it. Sorry about that. I also forgot to put in the Plugins used plug-in that I used at the very beginning.

Tags: Blogging, Interesting, Plug-in, Site Update, Wordpress