12 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

By
Lynda Giddens
– Thu July 29, 2010Posted in: Blogging

I confess, I have a slightly concerning mild WordPress plugin addiction. At current count, I have 60 active plugins. I went through yesterday and got rid of any plugins I wasn’t using or felt I could eliminate without a big, heart-felt goodbye. I think I got rid of two or three things.

If you want to take a look through my plugin page, it lists all the plugins I’m using with links to the plugin site. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about how I’m using any of them!

I picked out some of my very favorite plugins to share with you. These are the ones critical to making my site what it is. Sure, I could get of Flickr Tag Cloud Widget and not shed a tear, but if these suddenly stopped working… wow. Let’s not talk about that, okay?

Here you’ll find three categories of plugins: Site Interaction, A Photographer’s Dream, and Easy Site Maintenance. Then at the end of the article, there are some BONUS plugins.

07-20-10 - Pink and Yellow Flowers


Site Interaction

I find personalization and direct interaction with each of my visitors is a good thing and helps to bring them back. Also, it’s enjoyable and I want people to feel welcome. These plugins help me enrich interactions on my site.

  1. No Self Pings – If you do a lot of interlinking (which you should if you’re following Problogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook) then pinging your old entries is going to get old really quick. At least it did for me. I want my comments area to be about others and my interactions with them, not conversations with myself. That’s why I don’t post tweets I tweeted out about my site as well. This is a set-it-and-forget-it plugin.
  2. WP Greet Box – Chances are if you followed an external link to an article on this site, you saw something like this box at the top of the page:

    What I like about this is that it allows you to set an image and the HTML greeting for every referral URL you specify. It comes pre-configured for a bunch of common sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. I’ve added a “like” button for my fan page to the Facebook greeting and I added this greeting for people visiting me from the BlogFrog SITS forums. I’m not sure what other people think of my implementation of this plugin, but I feel it’s pretty nifty.

  3. Comment Reply Notification – I learned about this plugin from Sarah at OneStarryNight. I noticed I got an email response when she replied to my comment even though I hadn’t subscribed. So I asked her about it and I’m so glad she shared this with me. (Please take this as a lesson to always ask a blogger if you have a question about how they do something. The worst that could happen is they’ll blow you off, but most are quite helpful!)

    Before this plugin, I struggled with knowing when I should reply to a comment by email and when (if ever) it is okay to reply only on the site. Sometimes I’m asked questions and I know how hard it is to keep track of comments after I’ve posted them, so I don’t want the reply to be lost in the void. But it wasn’t as easy as just replying to them by email AND replying to the comment on my post because some people are subscribed to comments. So to avoid possibly sending them two emails for one comment, I felt obligated to check to see if they were subscribed to comments before responding. See? It was a PAIN.

    With this I can set it up so a response only goes out when the blog author replies, or when anyone replies to a comment. I have it set up so you’ll be emailed if anyone responds to your comment. I haven’t received a complaint about this so far and feel it fosters conversation and return visits to the site.

07-29-10 - More Flowers

A Photographer’s Dream

I’ve done a lot of searching for plugins that might be of interest to photographers and what I found was a lot of add-on galleries. I use Flickr to showcase my photos and I’m more than happy with it. So mostly, I wanted some cool plugins to make images stand out on my site.

  1. Get the Image – This plugin is used in your WordPress theme templates. If you’re not comfortable building or tweaking wordpress templates, this is probably not going to offer a lot of value to you. I use this plugin primarily on my main page.

    With this you can specify a custom field (or thumbnail) to look for the photo and you can set the image dimensions you want in the output. If there’s no photo in the custom field, it will look for anything attached to the post. If nothing’s attached to the post, it scans any other images to pull from there. One of the big problems I had building a magazine-style front page was so many themes and suggestions called for multiple images in custom fields. Annoying since ALL my images are uploaded to Flickr! With this, I don’t have to have any images uploaded to WordPress for it to display properly and that saves me a lot of time.

    (Along these lines, Auto Post Thumbnail doesn’t deserve its own line item, but it will automatically set your featured image from any attached images or images from other sources.)

  2. Featured Content Gallery – This is the showpiece of my front page. It allows me to feature articles with large, high resolution images. I personally love it and think they’re cool to click through. You can either have a “Featured” category (any category you specify) or decide to highlight individual posts using their ID. For a while I didn’t want to create a Featured category that had no purpose beyond showing entries on this plugin, but in the end I got tired of maintaining a comma delimited list of entries. For the purpose of this plugin, I do use one custom field for image resolution 600×300 – so sometimes I will call that custom field in the Get the Image plugin.
  3. Live Flickr Comment Importer – There is another Flickr Comment Importer plugin which is cool, but I feel inferior to this one as it requires your image title on Flickr to have the same name as your post title. I find that kind of silly. With this plugin, however, it will bring in the comments for any linked Flickr images. You can set custom fields to not import comments, to import comments only on specific Flickr phtoos and to include a thumbnail of the original photo with the comment. It imports the Flickr user’s avatar in the size you specify in your WordPress settings and links back to their comment on your photo on Flickr.

    I like having all my comments in one place, so I use this frequently. It’s bit me in the butt though when writing Friday Finds and I link up to so many different Flickr photos. I’ve forgotten to turn off the importing and had to delete hundreds of comments from my database. (Thank God I know sql or that would have been tedious!)

  4. Flickr Gallery – Wow, this is the most robust Flickr plugin out there and is probably my absolute favorite on this list. I would most assuredly cry like a broken hearted cowboy if this plugin ever stops working. This allows you to use really easy to use shortcodes to bring in a gallery of photographs right into your entries. I’ve used it on photo stories before to include other photographs taken during that time period that weren’t included in the article. I also use it in Friday Finds as a way to draw all the challenge participants’ photos in for display on my site. Both of these examples work their magic through unique tags. It’s quite powerful and if you’re a heavy Flickr user, your imagination is your limit for how to use this plugin to display your work on your site!

    Here’s an example! Magic Flickr Gallery Plugin, please show me all my photos tagged “flower”, sorted by “interestingness”:

Easy Site Maintenance

  1. Widgets on Pages – There are a lot of cool widgets out there, more than I could ever fit in my sidebar and footers. This wonderful plugin allows you to use shortcode to add widgets to pages. It’s pretty rad! You set up how many widget boxes you want to add to your widget area and can give them a specific name so you don’t forget what they do. Then you can drag and drop as many widgets as you want in there and call it all up on a page or post using shortcode. Again, your imagination is the limit for how to use this! A note of warning though, if you add sidebars to your theme (something I’ve done a few times since installing this plugin) it gets your widgets all out of order and basically shifts the content for each of them up by one widget. When I add a new sidebar widget box to my theme, I have to go back to my widgets and immediately reorganize everything. This is because the plugin adds the widgets to the end of the theme widgets. It’s also probably something you’ll want to pay attention to if you switch themes.

  2. Advanced Blogroll – I don’t care for WordPress’ built in blogroll display capabilities. This plugin gives you a widget where you can specify a blogroll category, how many links to post, the size of the image to display, the order (or random) and number of images to include. I use this in my footer for Random Linky love and also on my Button Blogroll and Be Inspired pages, which also utilizes the Widgets on Pages plugin.
  3. Broken Link Checker – Day 27 of the 31DBBB challenge is to Hunt for Dead Links, however I’ve had this plugin set up since before the challenge and it’s going to make day 27 a breeze for me! This adds a box to my dashboard which lets me know anytime it finds a dead link. From there, I can very easily check the link to see if it’s really dead, unlink the URL entirely or replace the URL with the updated one on that site or an altogether new one. It only takes a minute or two to research and resolve each broken link issue. This is much better than going through and taking care of broken links in a big batch.

BONUS! Plugins I just found

I haven’t been using the plugins for long and in some cases, I’m not actually sure how I’ll use them, but they are COOL and I want to share them with you.

  1. Editorial Calendar – If you’re doing the 31DBBB challenge, day 12 is about developing an editorial calendar. This plugin makes it easy to visualize and rearrange your upcoming blog posts. I have my calendar scheduled for the entire week! This post is actually the first one I drafted in the calendar.
  2. BM_Shots – I don’t know what’s up with the name of this plugin, it’s not very descriptive! This lets you put an easy shortcode into your post or page that will generate a screenshot to the site you link. I have it set up on my Why Stick Around page, which is a work in progress. I might start using this in Friday Finds to highlight featured blogs. I don’t really know HOW I’m going to use this, but I want to think of how I can because I love this functionality.

Not Enough Plugins?

If you want some more great plugin recommendations, check out these articles!

http://onestarrynight.com

Sarah of One Starry Night has some great stuff!


Question Time

  1. What’s your favorite WordPress plugin?
  2. Do you use any on this list and if so, what are your thoughts?
  3. How do you think you could use one of these plugins on your blog in an imaginative way?
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