Screenshot of Wp-Cumulus
Screenshot of Wp-Cumulus

First of all, let me just point out, (in case you didn’t notice it right away, as I didn’t) that you can now install plugins directly from the plugin dashboard – no more FTP-ing those babies!

Now let me share my list of useful and enjoyable WordPress Plugins:

  1. Add to Any – Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.

  2. Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

  3. All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

  4. Comment Luv – Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking for their feed while they type their comment and appends it once they submit.

  5. RSS Signature – Provides a simple administration interface to allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds. You can add any kind of message, tag, or even images — as long as it can be displayed in an RSS feed, it’s up to you. Cool huh?
  6. Subscribe Remind – With the Subscribe-Remind plugin, some text will automatically be placed at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. It’s an unobtrusive and effective way to turn visitors into subscribers.
  7. Theme Test Drive – allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparent and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme.
  8. Tweet This – A plugin that adds a Twitter link to every post and page, so your readers can share your blog entries on their Twitter accounts with ease. Shortens URLs in advance. Tested on WordPress 2.7.1, 2.0.11, and 1.5.
  9. WordPress.com Stats – Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more. Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.
  10. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
  11. WordPress Database Backup – WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
  12. WP-Cumulus – Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting. Clicking the tags can be a little hard (depending on your speed setting) but does take you to the appropriate page.
  13. WP-Polls – WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

With the exception of maybe two, I’d list all of these of these as my “Must Have” plugins. What are yours?

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Amber

Hey, y’all! I’m Amber and I wear many hats. I drink a ton of coffee and I’m constantly sweeping crumbs off the floor. After 18 years of homeschooling, I’m getting close to graduating my third child and now we are starting over at preschool with our fourth, Lil Miss Mouse. She keeps us young and she’s the main reason for my excessive coffee consumption. Drink up!