Wordpress Plugin Starter Guide

[Saint_Michael 3]

Although I have been blogging in Wordpress for about 6 months now and after suggestion a few blogs on what plug-ins to use and of course some recommendations from a few Wordpress users. So if you?re getting into blogging and are going to be using Wordpress as your blog software and in the process of installing plug-ins. I would recommend what I call the starter package and what I mean by that is you want to install these plug-ins before anything else and before posting.

 

Even though there are some themes that come packaged with plug-ins you want to check this list to make sure this theme has it or not.

 

Spam Prevention Plugins

 

Now the worse part about running a blog is spam and so the following plug-ins will cut down on pretty much 95% of the spam.

 

Akismet

 

This plug in checks a list of known spammers and bots based on Akismet web service. It requires a WordPress.com API key for it to be activated and so all you do is sign up and get yourself that key to put in.

 

NoSpamUser

 

This plugin prevents spam users from even registering and it is based off a list from http://www.stopforumspam.com/.

 

Advertisement

 

Now if you plan to make money with your blog based off the various ad programs like Adsense, Kontera, Chitika then these plug-ins will be needed.

 

Kontera Ad Wrap

 

With this plug-in all you doing is dictating where you want the Kontera links to appear.

 

Kontera ContentLink

 

With this plugin all you have to do is enter your ID number in the menu and the JavaScript will automatically generate throughout the blog. That way you don?t have to worry about editing the footer page to all your templates.

 

Chitika | Premium

 

Now if you?re like me and were robbed by Google Adsense and there faulty system. Then you might have come across Chitika ad and used them instead or a combination of Adsense and Chitika. You fill in the info and then you are giving a line of code to insert into your theme template and you are good to go.

 

Google Plugins

 

There are a lot of different plug-in made to use Google services and such but if you are starting a blog that I would think that these would be the more important ones to use to get you started.

 

Google XML Sitemaps

 

If you want to get your site index fast in the search engines, then you want this plug-in. Every time you post, make a page or even if there is a comment made, this plug-in will run and update your site map and then it will contact Google, Yahoo and MSN to search your site and update their index accordingly. In addition, you may want to update the site map generation manually, especially if you delete anything or updated your site in some fashion.

 

Ultimate Google Analytics

 

If you are a person who is nothing but about the stats and love how Google sets up their stats, then this plug-in is for you. All you do is drop in your account ID and off you go, however, you still have to add the JavaScript code to your site in order this going though. This plug-in and one other would have to be the first things you install before posting or you could be inaccurate results if you decide to add it in later.

 

SEO Plug-ins

 

In this next group of plug-ins it is all about the SEO, Search Engine Optimization, which includes Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and of course hundreds of other search engines that will index your website. With these plug-ins they will help search engines index your blog quicker, faster and more efficient then doing it the old school way. Now I can?t promise overnight success, however, depending on your content, links from other sites, comments, pingbacks, tracks. It will help get your blog to the top or least let people know where to go to get some great information.

 

SEO Smart Links

This plug-in I find very ingenious, because of the fact it will use the tags and turn those keywords into links and then list all the articles based on those tags that you have. In a way, you are creating more links within your website that will be index into the search engines.

 

Broken Link Checker

 

As you blog, eventually you might end up with some broken links, be it videos, images, downloads and other websites. This plug-in will let you know what link is broken and in its own panel will let you edit the links and tell you what posts these broken links are at. A small warning if you are using Kontera, it will give a false positive that a link is broken because the links will change. Usually you can tell if its one or two words and if it is, that will be Kontera?s fault, but make sure it is a Kontera before removing it from the list or it will show up again.

 

Redirection

 

This plug-in is used to manage 301 and 404 errors and those can be a big factor in losing positions in search engines, especially Google. This plug-in will be especially good if your moving to a new domain, or if you?re having one of those posts are that trouble linking correctly. Another example would be if you?re using the Google Webmaster Tools and you want to fix those crawl errors, this would be the quickest way to fix those links instead of going on all over place to fix the broken links.

 

WordPress Related Posts

 

This is a must have plug-in for most bloggers, especially if your content is the same, what this plug-in does is generate a list at the bottom of your article that lists posts you have made with the same content or close to it. With that, you be able to generate more links with each new post in a specific category.

 

Twitter Widget

 

Although I do not really consider this much of a SEO plug because of how Twitter works, however, with the various twitter websites out there. However, with this widget running you produce tinyurl links that will go to various articles you tweet about. So in a way it does two things, first it lets your twitter followers go to your site and second it lets those power twitter websites link to your site. So you will get a very small SEO boost and visitor boost as well.

 

ShareThis

 

The ultimate plug-in for SEO is the ShareThis plug-in, it connects you to the biggest, most popular social bookmarking sites on the net. This means for everything article you add to one of those social bookmarking sites that is one more link to your site. Of course, it helps when your visitors or registered members do this for you as most of those social bookmark sites frown on self-advertisement. Well, I tell them this, too bad because trying to advertise your site for free and in a non-spamming way is near impossible. Especially when most websites charge absurd prices for a banner placement, but it helps that you have friends who run their own sites and can link up with them.

 

Post Related Plug-ins

 

With these plug-ins, they are all about inhancing your posts either buy displaying your most popular ones, changing the layout of your posts without needing to edit the template or changing how your posts are display on the main page.

 

Most Commented

 

With this plug-in all it does it is display posts and articles that are very popular by comments and it will show you how many comments have been made on that particular post.

 

WP-PostViews

 

Just like the Most Commented plug-in, this one tells you how many times your posts have been seen by your visitors and members. It is a good plug-in to use if you want to do something like lifehacker and set up the most popular posts of the week.

 

WP-PostViews Widget

 

It is just like the above plug-in but one of those sidebar widgets and depending how you set up your blog layout, sometimes you do not need both or would like to have both running at the same time.

 

Post Layout

 

With this plug-in you are able to add more into your posts, such as HTML, JavaScript, or even PHP. Usually good to set up your advertisement banners outside the normal means or if you want to alter the post out just a bit without the need to edit the post template itself.

 

Database Plug-ins

 

With these plugins they will help you optimize, backup, restore your databases to help them make them run faster, take up less space and of course help get your blog up in running if you delete something or get hacked.

 

WP-DBManager

 

To me this is the best plugin that is use to help maintain your Wordpress based databases. Sure you could do it the old fashion way of the PHPmyAdmin, but with this plug-in it makes the process a lot faster in optimizing, backing up and restoring your databases then going through that method. In addition, you can set it up to maintain a daily, weekly, monthly backup of your databases. As for those if your site is small enough then you want to do weekly backups, however, if you?re a site that posts on a daily basis at least 2-3 times in that day, then it is best to backup daily, Remember though that daily backup will suck down those server resources.

 

Optimize DB

 

If you have a different method of backing up your databases then you can get away with just optimizing those databases. However, I will point out if you are a blogger who uses this and WP-o-Matic, for some reason this plug-in will get redirect to that plug-in. As to why who knows, but it happens. Of course, if you really need to use WP-o-Matic plug-in try to use it loosely, especially if you are posting your own content.

 

Blog Stats

 

If your all about the stats, and want to know how your blog is doing these are the plug-ins for you.

 

Blog Stats

 

I list as a must have plug-in as it concentrates very specific stats, such as Google PR, Alexa Rank, Technorati Rating, links, post/tag/page count, backlinks and some other good stuff. It is a great way to see how your blog is doing and if you?re one of those Google PR nuts then you can keep an eye on how your PR is doing.

 

StatPress Reloaded

 

Right after google Analytics I consider this the next best stats tracker, it has everything you want, visitor/feed/bot tracker, what links have been visiting, what websites people came from to visit your site. A definite plug-in to install right after you install your blog to get the most of accurate data and to see how popular your blog is getting.

 

WP-UserOnline

 

A handy plug-in to have to see who is online right now visiting your blog, it tells you either a bot, guest, or registered user and lets you know how many total is online as well.

 

WP-UserOnline Widget

 

While UserOnline will be viewed in the dashboard, the widget will be shown on your site and so you can see who is visiting your site and of course see where they are on you site.

 

Coding Plug-ins

 

If your site is all about code and code based tutorials, then you want to check these plug-ins out and make your code stand out more instead of looking like regular text.

 

SyntaxHighlighter Plus

 

This plug-in covers all the big languages out there, HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, C/++ and more. With this plug-in your code will stand out and not be invisible and you will be able to copy and paste this code without the need of copying the line numbers either. Very useful if you have large amount of code or sharing a large script on your site, your visitors won?t have to go through and delete all those numbers.

 

Exec-PHP

 

With this plug-in, it makes it possible to run PHP scripts inside your blog, very useful for small scripts and or running PHP within your blog as well. Only downside to this plug-in is the fact you have to change the visual editor to a basic text editor to work properly. I hope that that gets fixed soon.

 

EVERYTHING ELSE

 

These plug-ins have no categories I could put them in, but are still good enough to be used on your site.

Contact Form 7

 

One of the best contact form plug-ins in the Wordpress world. You can custom building your forms within Wordpress and with some short code and a page or post; you will have an instant form. Very useful for visitors or registered users to contact you or contact your staff.

 

NextGEN Gallery

 

A friend introduced me to this plug-in and after using it for my designs; I trust no other gallery plug-in to be on my site. Sure, it takes awhile to set everything up and navigate your way around this panel, but once you understand it and put everything together you will be running a Wordpress gallery in no time.

 

Really Simple CAPTCHA

 

This plug-in is used for Contact Form 7, however you could use it for something else. However, I know there are better CAPTCHA plug-ins out there but since I was looking for convenience and this one work with the Contact Form plug-in I installed it.

 

WP-Cumulus

 

With this plug-in it sets up a flash based tag cloud and if your looking to build an AJAX like blog or want to use something different then check this plug-in out.

 

WP-PageNavi

 

I don?t know what I would do without this plug-in, if Wordpress designers were smart they would have had this installed a long time ago. It changes the Newer and Older links at the bottom of your blog to page numbers, it is a pagination plug-in that is use for quicker access to your articles.

 

WP-UserLogin Widget

 

This plug-in is used to help your registered member login in quicker that is about it.

 

So these are the plug-ins that I think all starter bloggers should have and although there are no links to them, just use the words in bold and search them within the plug-in panel in your Wordpress blog or the Wordpress website.

 

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!I've used the Contact Form 7 and the WP-PageNavi plugins and both are simply amazing.Contact Form 7 enables you to handle just the markup of the form while the plugin takes care of processing the form post results, emailing them to the specified email address(es). All you need to do to get the contact form to appear is copy-paste a 'tag' (if that's what you want to call it... it's more like a special HTML comment) to a post or a page and that's where it appears. You can create multiple contact form 'templates' and re-use them on multiple pages.WP-PageNavi is used to get pagination on your blog. Usually, you've just got the Next and Previous links to navigate between the pages of your blog. You'll have to add a PHP snippet to the page (replacing the Next-Previous navigation) in your themes folder to get the page numbers to appear. BTW, WP-PageNavi enables you to include a CSS file in your theme folder so the navigation changes by theme, in case you want to switch between themes often (X'mas theme during the christmas season, then back to the regular theme again).You might want to try the "KNR Author List" widget that I created (available in the Widget directory on WordPress.org). If you've got a blog to which multiple users post blog entries to, you can display the list of authors in the sidebar.BTW, have you used any plugins for article and comment rating? I've tried GD Star Rating but it seems to having issues on some versions of WordPress/MySQL/Apache/PHP (some combinations work, but a lot of users have had issues). What's your experience been with Akismet?Regards,Nitin Reddy

[Saint_Michael 3]

Yeah I had use them that on a couple of themes, but after moving to my current them I had problems getting it to work properly and so I eventually dropped it from use. Might have been updated since I last used it, which was about 3-4 months ago, but I have no interest in using it though. So odds are you would have to contact the author or see if there is a support forum/site for the plug-in and go from there.