Everybody has their favorite WordPress plugins. I thought I’d share my five favorite plugins and ask you to do the same. One thing we should all be clear about: there are always better plugins in the pipeline, and many of them have already been released. Let’s focus on the plugins that have already made a huge difference to the way we run our blogs. If you’ve got suggestions for better plugins that serve the same function, feel free to suggest them in the comment suggestion:
aLinks is a flexible plugin that automatically generates links within your blog posts. One of its best features is the ability to specify keyword phrases and the corresponding link that should be placed on those phrases. The plugin is well polished, and gives you a great deal of control (e.g. the total number of links per posts) and includes a click tracking mechanism.
aLinks can be used to interlink your own content or to create automatic affiliate links.
When’s the last time you’ve backed up your blog’s database? Come on…be honest. If you’re like me, you put database backup off because you don’t want to login to phpMyAdmin for every single one of your blogs. The good news is that you can backup your database from within the WordPress dashboard, and even have the database sent directly to your Gmail account, for long-term storage. A definite must.
It’s not perfect, especially with it’s handling of non-standard encodings in WordPress titles (the ? often replaces the ‘) but it’s great for creating a common, interlinking sidebar between networked sites. You can see me using it over in the right hand sidebar at TenFootSquare.
4. Semiologic’s Related Posts
Deep linking doesn’t just involve getting links from other sites. You need to have deep internal linking too. Any good related posts plugin can make a big difference in your link building efforts. On more than a handful of situations, I’ve used “related posts” to jumpstart a stagnant blog revival. Without a related posts plugin, your average post is likely to have 2-3 internal links. With a related posts plugin, you can expect to see incremental growth in internal links to any given post. The more posts you have, the more internal links each post will have. There are many good related posts plugin. Another one is Contextually Related Posts.
5. iMax Width
This plugin resizes all uploaded images to fit a max width. If you have a photo based blog, a plugin like this can be priceless to avoid breaking your theme or overlapping images with other div sections.
So what are your favorite WordPress plugins?
8 thoughts on “Top Five WordPress Plugins”
Here are mine :
1 top commentators
2 eshop
3 all in one seo pack
4 google xml sitemap
5 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Of course, depends on what you need …
Does anybody know of a simple, easy to use guest upload plugin that allows the user to describe and tag their images?
1.AJAX Comments, let readers add a comment more easily.
2.Feedburner Feed Replacement, Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner.
3.Some Chinese Please!, anti-spam plugin, it let Chinese blogger more comfortable. Donot use it unless you write your post in Chinese.
4.Ultimate Tag Warrior, a tagging plugin.
5.WP-PageNavi, display more advanced paging navigation.
P.S. I use the excellent AutoMySQLBackup for my backup purposes. It’s a shell script though (bash).
Edit 2: WOW! I made it #20 in the Performancing Top 20! 😀
I still use wp-cache, site runs faster for me with it.
DAMMIT! Why did you list aLinks? Now everyone will know about it! Seriously, man, some things are better kept under wraps
Isn’t WP-Cache obsolete at this point with new versions of WP? Or no?
Yeah, I was going to list Askimet, but I thought it was too obvious;-)
Outside of the best, akismet, here are mine
1. subscribe to comments – helps build readership
2. Viper Video Quick Tags – allows youtube and vid posting with ease
3. Postalicious – posts your del.iciou.us links on your site. great for days when you don’t or can’t post.
4. WP-Cache
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