One of the best things about hosting your own wordpress installation or it is hosted outside of wordpress.com, you will need to go onto wordpress.com and setup an account to get a key. It only takes a few minutes to do and it can be reused every time you do a new installation.
Contact Form 7 for Adding Feedback Forms
Rarely do I ever work on a client project that doesn’t require a form to collect information. Web forms are an excellent way to gather information from site visitors. I know that there are several plugins on the market for doing this but I prefer the Contact Form 7 because it has always been reliable. Admittedly I haven’t tested many of the other form plugins that are out there so they might be just as reliable. One other thing that I like about Contact Form 7 is that it allows you to deploy multiple forms. The only drawback to this plugin I would have to say is that you have to sometimes spend 20 minutes with the client showing them how to use it. Currently this plugin is on version 2, and it was written by: Takayuki Miyoshi
I am a Picasa fan from way back, I know some that prefer Flickr over Picasa but I always recommend Picasa to my clients for storing and sharing photos. The Kpicasa plugin works great inside of wordpress and brings in all of your galleries onto your site as if you were hosting them there yourself. I have this plugin running on my site right now, just click on the photos tab and see for yourself. Very transparent plugin. The reason this plugin is part of my core installation is because 9 times out of 10 the client is going to want some sort of photo gallery on their site, never fails. (note, there are several plugins out there that will do the whole picasa integration like this but they require some additional coding, this one written by: Guillaume Hébert doesn’t, so that it why I use it, and it does a great job).
Wicket Twitter Widget for Displaying Most Recent Tweets
I have found that sometimes just inserting the javascript from Twitter to display your recent tweets can be problematic, and I have never been able to figure out why this is. Instead I found an alternative to just hand coding the JavaScript in and use this plug-in instead. The plugin is also put out by Automattic, the same company behind the scenes with wordpress so I feel pretty comfortable with it’s reliability and for the most part I have been able to use this one w/out incident.
I throw out the term social saturation a lot because it’s huge! For those of you who check your log files you might have noticed that the top referrers to your site have changed dramatically over the past year or so. Granted, a fair number of people still find you through Google, but the leading referrers for me these days are Facebook and Twitter. I always recommend that my clients setup a Twitter account and use it if for pushing their content out onto Twitter and Facebook. This plugin does just that, it pushes blog posts and updates onto Twitter, which in turn is setup to change my Facebook status. This is all handled automatically and behind the scenes. I know that there are other ways to incorporate your feeds into Twitter but this plugin has always been very reliable for me and it posts instantly. For a while I was using a twitterfeed solution and it worked well, but I couldn’t ever time when it was going to update.
Tweetbacks for Retweets
Retweets are the new blog comments in my opinion. When I go and post something on my blog and it goes out to Twitter I will occasionally get comments on the blog but usually the best way to gauge the reception of your post is by how many people retweet your post. Tweetbacks goes out and looks for tweets and retweets that are related to that particular post and displays them on your blog just above the comments area. Granted, this plugin doesn’t add a lot of value to your site or your content but I think it’s a neat way to gauge your readers responses. I first learned about this plugin from Dan Zarella, who I follow pretty closely and it was written by Joost de Valk, another name you might have heard before if you follow WordPress very closely.
Google XML Sitemap for Dynamic Sitemapping
This plugin is by Arne Brachhold and is a neccessity in my opinion. As a developer you already know the importance of having an xml sitemap on file w/ Yahoo and Google in their webmaster tools section. The problem with dynamic sites is that they will constantly be adding pages of content. This plugin magically (more php than magic) automatically updates itself when new content is added and it updates your sitemap. It’s one of those set it and forget it feeds that you never really have to worry about, it just works.
Google Analyticator for Analytics
This plugin was released by Spiral Web Consulting and it works very well. Another problem with tracking dynamic sites is that the tracking code for Google Analytics has to be in every page that is created for you to get an accurate account of your traffic. In the past we have manually coded in the tracking code in either the header or footer of a site, but with this plugin that doesn’t have to be the case. You simply enter in your UA-XX-XXXX number from Google Analytics and it will automatically insert this for you. It’s more or less a timesaver and one less thing you have to do during the development process.
Social Bookmarking Reloaded for Social Saturation
If you own or operate a website you want to make sure that it’s easy for your visitors to share your content with their friends, that’s just a given. Probably the best way to do this is by adding the social bookmarking reloaded plugin to your site. This plugin is responsible for the facebook, myspace, twitter, digger, and delicious icons you see below. All a user has to do is click on these icons and it immediately takes them to their account on these services. I only have a few services checked but this plugin allows you to have as many of these as you want listed. I do my best not to overwhelm people so I stick to the basics. This plugin was written by Pedana vibrante and has had a couple of updates over time so I know the project is still very active. Again, I know there are other plugins that are out there, and even some groups of plugins that can be used together to accomplish the same thing, I have just found this one to work well and be stable.
Feedburner Feedsmith for Feed Management / Tracking
I used to use the Feedburner Feedsmith on all of my sites that had feeds on them but recently I haven’t been doing this as much because I had some issues once with Feedburner. Those issues seem to have worked themselves out and I am back to using it. Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. Feedburner (now under the umbrella of Google) is a great tool for managing your feeds and tracking subscribers, etc. (note: out of all of the plugins I mentioned above, this is one that I might occasionally omit from activation.)
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If you a plugin that is not on this list that is part of every wordpress installation you do, I would love to hear what they are, please feel free to comment or send me a tweet…
Cotton,
This is very helpful! Thanks for sharing these plugins.
I use a few of these on my http://robmcbryde.com site, and now have a few more to implement after reading your list.
Awesome.