Blogternals

I read Website Magazine , and recently read an article written by Peter Prestipino about WordPress titled “Get the most out of WordPress Valuable Plugins and Resources for WP Installations”. I don’t really know who any of these people are but sometimes their articles are so far in right field that I have to ask where these writers are coming from. I am a huge fan and user of WordPress and have been using it for quite some time now. After reading this article I stood in my living room with my jaw hanging asking myself, has this guy ever even used WordPress or is he just writing to fill the white space in this issue with a bunch of nonsense. Peter opens this article “Many plugins available are available that ensure bloggers get the most from their installations”, then later in the article he talks about Dreamhost Shared Hosting CPU Usage plugin, an Amazon plugin and the only useful one in the bunch the WP Super Cache plugin. Come on guys if you are going to comprise a list first off don’t leave out Google plugins and surely don’t talk about host specify plugins. While the Dreamhost plugin may be useful to Dreamhost users, not everyone is, not even a majority of people using WordPress are using Dreamhost. Anyway I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to write my own WordPress plugin list.

What I have decided to do here is lists my top five plugins for WordPress, plugins I believe are the five most valuable plugins for WordPress today, for the majority of people. Keep in mind that these plugins are for the majority of WordPress users not the minority (i.e. this list was comprised with the regular Joe in mind not the Techie). I also think I will do a count down style list. After the top five I will just list some others that I think are useful and are just outside the top five for one reason or another, who knows maybe one day I will will do a top ten list.

5. Multi-Page Toolkit by Tarkan Akdam – Multipage posts with page titling and single page view. Fully featured quick jump and navigation options. Easy to use with Visual editor integration. Who at some point does not need to make a post multi paged, this plugin has all the features you will need to get the job done.

4. Edit Comments by Andrew Sutherland – Allows users to edit their comments for up to 30 minutes after posting. To change the time limit, configure it in this plugin file. I can’t say it any better than the description.

3. KB Robots.txt by Adam R. Brown – Manage your robots.txt file from within WordPress. Especially useful for WP-MU installations. We should all be using the robots.txt file if you are not then you are not utilizing all available resources to communicate with the search engines.

2. Google Analyticator by Spiral Web Consulting – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging. This plain and simple will make your life easy. You don’t have to keep digging in the the theme files to set this up and it just works.

1. Google XML Sitemap by Arne Brachhold – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Here this is at the top for a reason. If you are writing a Blog or website with WordPress your ultimate goal is most likely to get people to read it, well this is the ultimate tool to help you do that. This guy not only creates the sitemaps for you it notifies Yahoo and Google that they have changed and it is time to re-crawl, can’t get any better than that.

Other Notable plugins not making my list are: Domain Theme, Permalinks Moved Permanently, Social Bookmarks, WP Comment Remix, and WP-CodeBox

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!