WordPress: Seven Useful Plugins for You to Consider
As you know, I’m a HUGE fan of WordPress. Not only do the search spiders love the platform, but it’s so easy to use and so extremely customizable that you can find plugins that help you to do just about anything you want to do with your blog. It’s just incredible!
Anyway, I’m always checking out new stuff, and am excited about a few new plugins I just heard about and thought I’d pass the information around. I have to admit that I haven’t tested them myself yet, but I have every intention of installing and using them as soon as I’m done writing this post. So, here we go:
WP-Contact Form:Â I do use this one. It’s awesome! If you go to my top nav menu, you can see it. Setting it up is just a matter of making a new page, and plugging a little code into the HTML tab. Simple and one of the things that spiders look for in a web site. If you don’t have a contact form of some kind, you should and this plugin makes it easy for you.
Scissors: Allows you to do some sweet photo editing from your blog, like resizing and cropping. And it helps make the image smaller, which WordPress doesn’t do. It just resizes the image but keeps the size intact. That could mean MB for scanned images, for example. Better to resize before uploading or with this plugin, do it from your blog. A little more convenient, I’d say.
Lifestream: Add as many of your social feeds as you want. Each time you post to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. your updates can immediately be posted to your blog as well. This isn’t for me, though. I like to give a digest on the weekend, when I”m not posting content, but you really don’t want to know every time when I tell someone I hope they feel better, now do you? Be sensible about this. Too much la-di-dah won’t be good for your credibility.
N-Voice:Â This is a great plugin for folks who’d rather talk than type. It’s great for people who can’t type or people who are handicapped and unable to type. Blogging can be writing, but it can also be talking or video or whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s valuable content.
Redirection:Â Change your permalink format after making several posts in your blog? This plugin will make your 404 errors 301 redirects, and allows you to point the pages wherever you want them to be. Spiders really don’t like dead ends. This plugin helps stop them from happening.
PayPal Donations: Is your content really good? Do people tweet about it? Do they make comments and tell you how much you’ve helped them? Well… maybe it’s time you started accepting donations. Couldn’t hurt to have a button that lets people decide how good your content really is for them, right? You’ll be seeing one in a widget in my sidebar very soon, I think.
Daiko’s Text Widget:Â I’ve been using this one for quite some time, and it’s great! It allows you to add php code to your widgets. If you set up a text widget and it doesn’t work… this is your solution. Just add a Daiko’s and you’re probably going to be all set!
So, there are seven really cool plugins that will help you to make your blog awesome and save you a ton of work on some fronts. Try them out, one at a time. If you install more than one and your blog goes kablooey, you’ll know which plugin did it, and you’ll be able to uninstall it and go along your merry way. I’m not saying that any of these will be problematic, but you never know. Sometimes a plugin won’t work with your theme or your version of WordPress. Update to the latest version first, of course, and then… let ‘em rip!
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September 22nd, 2009 at 6:35 pm #
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