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Best Plugins for Wordpress
By admin | March 18, 2007
I am new to blogging and have experienced a bit of a crash course in what tools are the best to use for my Wordpress blog. Wordpress is great in that it is open source and allows anyone with the desire and ability to write applications to use with Wordpress. These applications are called “plugins”. It is great in that the vast majority of them are free of charge for anyone to use. The bad thing is that there is not much accountability for what happens if they don’t work correctly.
I have tried out many plugins over the past few weeks, and the following are a group that I have downloaded, installed, and I will bless as being very good:
Sidebar Widgets - by Automatic, Inc. - This ingenious plugin allows a widget like interface to arrange and manage different components in your sidebar. It works with the stock themes that come with Wordpress. Other themes may not be compatible with sidebar widgets; It of course works great with the default Kubrick theme, and I have successfully used it with Ocadia.
Sidebar Widgets allows you to arrange components in any order you want and gives you many options for components including: pages, archives, categories, links, search, RSS feed, calendar, meta, del.icio.us, recent post, and static text. The best trick is for people using adsense. You can take the code that the adsense code generator gives you and simply paste this into a text box. The resulting adsense ads shows up wherever you place them. Terrific!
Post Teaser - I kept noticing on other people’s fancy blogs that you sometimes see the only the first part of the post on the main page with a link to see the rest - seemed pretty cool to me. I finally found the tool that allowed this in Post Teaser. Once you activate this plugin, a tab shows up under “options” that allows you to configure. You can choose how many words to preview before the break and specify exactly what test is shown at the break. A unique feature is that the number of words and images can be displayed along with the approximate reading time. I made mine much simpler with a link to “read more . . . ”
Ultimate Tag Warrior - I am still learning what all you can do with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. For myself, the most useful feature of this plugin is that it adds a field in your posting / writing page to add tags to your blog. There is an option in the setup for this plugin that automatically creates a meta tag with all of these tags in your individual post. This is a powerful feature that greatly increases your control over how search engines see your posts.
Ultimate Tag Warrior also allows the addition of tag pages, tag clouds, and other graphical elements that shows what tags are associated with your blog. I have not investigated these yet, but hope to learn more about tag clouds.
SEO Title Tag - SEO title tag allows you greater control over the title tags of your posts and pages. The default for most blog themes is for the title of your post to automatically become the title tag that search engines see. This plugin allows individual control of the title tags so that you can edit them to be something unique to the title shown in your post. Again, this is a tool that allows greater control in optomizing your blog for search engine exposure.
Topics: Blogging |