Favorite Wordpress Plugins
One of the best things of an open platform is the community that develops around it. The huge community around Wordpress has built a number of plugins that extend and enhance the base installation in many ways. I’ve listed a few of my favorite plugins that I use on this site. Hope it’s useful.
Optimal Title
Wordpress by default prefixes the title of your blog posts by the name of your blog. Now, this isn’t very search engine friendly. Using Optimal Title reverses the order of your title to have the name of the post at the beginning followed by the name of the blog (this is customizable.)
Image headlines
No matter how much time I spend at the typography at this site, it simply doesn’t look as good as static pictures. Image Headlines is a plugin that converts your titles to beautiful, lick-able images. These are cached, so you don’t have to worry about needlessly hitting your web server.
LaTexRenderer
LaTex is the defacto inputting method for physics and math, so much so that even Microsoft is implementing something along these lines for the next generation of Office. The LaTexRenderer plugin implements a nice wrapper over mimeTex. I’ll save my discourse on the virtues of LaTex for later.
Markdown
I use emacs to write my posts, and do so in plain text. Markdown converts specially formatted text to valid XHTML. I think this plugin is included by default with Wordpress. This lets you spend more time with the content rather than bothering about how it’ll look when published.
Google Sitemap
A plugin to automatically update the Google compliant sitemaps for you. This makes the search engine crawl process for your site more efficient. One less thing to keep in mind.
Related posts
This plugin lists related posts at the end of each post. This is a great way to reduce the number of “exit points” on your site. In the future, I intend to write a small script to visualize how people jump from post to post as a graph (with normalized weights for the edges.) Highly recommended.
Footnotes
One feature that I missed from my previous blogging software was the use of footnotes. This plugin lets you do that.
Acronyms
This plugin will automatically put the expanded form of an acronym as a tooltip.
Time Since
This plugin will replace the date with the time that has elapsed since that date. I find this easier to read than just the date.
Here are a couple of others:
If you have pages, the SearchPages plugin [1] lets you extend WP’s search capabilities to your pages, too, not just posts.
If you want to have a dynamic show/hide content link for Read More kind of scenarios, there is a plugin [2] that lets you do that.
And not to mention Askimet [3], which has saved me from heaven knows how many millions of spam comments. And if spam is a genuine problem, try looking at the Anti-Spam image plugin [4], which renders captchas.
There is also the AJAX comment preview plugin [5], which lets your posters preview their comments, without a submit.
And finally, there is the WP DB backup [6] plugin, which is immensely useful.
[1] http://randomfrequency.net/wordpress/search-pages/
[2] http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2004/05/20/show-hide-more-with-wordpress/
[3] http://akismet.com/
[4] http://www.infor96.com/~nio/archives/369
[5] http://blogwaffe.com/ajax-comment-preview/
[6] http://www.skippy.net/blog/plugins/
So, there you go!
Hey Karthik,
Thanks a lot for pointing me to these very interesting plugins. I’ll be trying them out soon. Though, I don’t find show/hide content plugin to be very useful – why not show the entire text to begin with?
My most required features right now: Tag visualization, Recent comments/commentators, subscribe to comments (using feeds), advanced search. SPAM isn’t a big problem yet.
I’ll definitely be updating this page when I get around to installing more plugins. Cheers.
The expand/hide plugin is useful when you have large quantities of either text or images.
That way, a single post does not take up the whole page. Imagine these two posts on the main page, without any hiding mechanism. It would make it impossible to have more than a couple of posts, and sometimes maybe just one.
And since I do post a lot of pictures and on occasion, lengthy rants, I figured that it would be useful to have something that will help me provide an excerpt. Secondly, I also use this tool when I have new blog entries and the old ones are taking too much real-estate on the main page.
After a while, I basically make sure that only the excerpt remains of older entries (unless it is short) so that I can use the real-estate for other newer posts.
Btw, if you are interesting in the feed subscription, look at Feedburner. There are some interesting plugins supporting WP and FB.
And thank you for your list of plugins — installed LaTeXRenderer and even blogged about it. Very useful.
Cheers.
s/interesting/interested
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