Favorite WordPress Plugins
I am working on my presentaiton for the October IPSA meeting. It is a WordPress presentation. I will be teaming up Andre Natta of The Terminal to talk about WordPress and WordPress MU. My part of the presentation will cover some basics of WP, including installation, getting started and plugins.
Since I am looking at the plugins I commonly use, I thought I would detail them here and why I like to use them. The sites I run with WordPress are all very different. In addition to my personal site, which is somewhat simple, I also run a blog dedicated to Mississippi State Sports as well as the website for my church, First Baptist Church of Birmingham. Each site has a different set of needs and I use different plugins to fill those needs.
For comment spam protection and moderation, I use Askimet. It comes pre-installed with WordPress and does a great job of catching comment spam and making sure you never see it. Across my various blogs, Askimet has caught well over 100,000 spam comments. It works really well. If you aren’t using it already, I strongly recommend you do.
Semologic’s Google Analytics plugin is great for adding Google Analyitcs reporting to your site. All you have to do is copy the analytics script into the plugin settings and it takes care of the rest. In addition to tracking all your posts and pages, it also automatically adds itself to outgoing links so you can track which links to other sites your visitors are following.
On the church website, one of the most popular features is our sermon podcast. We record both Sunday morning and evening sermons to post them on our website. By default, if you link to an audio file in WordPress, it will add the needed enclosure tags needed for podcasting. A plugin I have started using to take our sermon podcast further is PodPress. This plugin gives you complete control over your podcast, how it appears in the iTunes directory, allows you to embed a flash-based player in your site, and even tracks stats on your podcast files. PodPress is actually out of active development, and BluBrry has released Powerpress, which includes many of the features of PodPress and is in active development.
If you are using your WordPress site for more than just blog entries, you want your users to be able to earch more than just blog entries, including pages. Search Everything does just that. It lets you enable searching of posts, pages, comments and more. It also lets you exclude content from being searched. BTW, this functionality is rumored to be coming in the next version of Wordpress, version 2.7.
Finally, if you want to make your website available to those using iPhones, there is a plugin out that will deliver an iPhone-optimized version of your site to those users. iWPhone is a combination plugin and theme that will allow your site to easily be used on the iPhone.
