About your plug-ins
Thursday, May 8th, 2008We provide a collection of excellent plug-ins to help you get the most out of your blog. As a general rule, we suggest that you activate all of them. However, most of them require that you do a little bit of work to get them going, so read below to see what each one does.
Akismet — This is the spam filter that comes standard with WordPress. Enabling it is very easy, but you’ll need to sign-up for a free WordPress.com API key. You can get the key here and then use it on any WordPress blog that you create (here or elsewhere).
All in One SEO Pack — This plug-in helps to make your site a little more attractive to Google. After it’s activated, you can play with the settings under your “options” tab.
Enhanced WP-ContactForm — This allows you to create a simple contact form on your site. Once it’s activated, you can add the form to any page or post that you want. It’s most commonly used on a Page named “Contact” or “Contact Us”. To enabled on that page, simply switch to HTML mode and insert the following code:
<!–contact form–>
Fancy Zoom — This is a fun plug-in that makes pictures zoom-up when someone clicks on them. If you show a photo thumbnail on your site and link it to the full-sized image (which WordPress does by default), then the zoom effect will work. Here is an example from a post on our blog (click the image in that post).
FeedBurner FeedSmith — Ideally, many of your users will subscribe to the RSS feed for your site. If you prefer to use FeedBurner to manage your feed, as we recommend, this will allow you to very easily point your site feed over to your FeedBurner feed.
Google Analytics for WordPress — If you like to use Google Analytics, enable this plug-in and then provide your Google Analytics code and it will put it in the footer of every page in your blog.
Highlight Author Comments — This will allow you to change the look and feel of comments made by the author of a post. This is nice for when people leave comments and you respond, as it makes it very clear that you are the author of the post and not just another random person leaving a comment.
Live Comment Preview — This simply shows a live preview of the comment that a user is typing.
Robots Meta — This is another search engine related plug-in. After enabled, you can go through and set a few options. We recommend that you “Prevent indexing of” both “The login and register pages” and “All admin pages”. This will tell Google to ignore those pages, which will help your other pages to rank better. Feel free to play with other settings in there as well.
Search Meter — This will keep track of what terms people are searching for on your site, helping you to write content to fit what people are looking for.
Subscribe to Comments — If someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, this allows them to get e-mail notification of other comments. This can lead to increased discussion in your comments, which is a good thing.
Twitter Tools — If you use Twitter, this has some nice features. My favorite is to have it send a new Tweet each time you write a blog entry, but there are other options as well.
WordPress.com Stats — This captures some very nice statistics about your visitors, such as daily visits, search engine queries they used, most popular posts, etc. It requires an API key, just like Akismet does. The same API key works for both plug-ins.
If you have suggestions for other plug-ins that we should add, let us know in the comments below and we’ll consider it.