Your favourite WordPress plug-ins?

WordCamp Toronto 2008In my presentation at WordCamp Toronto this weekend. I’d like to illustrate how WordPress plug-ins have extended the power of WordPress as a publishing platform.

Plug-ins that stand out

What do you think are the best plug-ins for WordPress? What are the most innovative? What extend its capabilities as a platform? What make it easier to use?

What my Twitter Friends Say

Here are some of the answers I received when I asked my Twitter friends what their favourite WordPress plug-ins are:

Jason Prini, @jasonprini, suggests two plug-ins: He says “you should never have a WP install without am XML sitemap generator” and “for bilingual blogging qTranslate is the BEST I’ve found yet.”

Andraz Tori, @andraz, volunteers “Dopplr, Disqus (and Zemanta naturally).” Andraz is the founder of Zemanta. I just discovered the plug-in thanks to his tweet. I haven’t tried it out, but I’m really intrigued by it. (Malcolm Bastien, @malcolmbastien, also suggested Zemanta. Thanks Malcolm.)WordPress

Aaron Wrixon, @aaronwrixon, says “I’m a fan of WP-SpamFree for catching and killing spam comments.”

Melanie Baker, @melle, and Stephen Davies, @stedavies, make sure I don’t forget about Akismet. “I would have probably stopped blogging without it. Almost quarter of a million spam comments stopped.”

Daniele Rossi, @danielerossi, endorses PodPress and cforms

David Jones, @doctorjones, thinks “WPtouch and WordTube are great.”

Greg Godden, greggodden,  tells me that “Another good one is SimplePie and the SimplePie Core, used for handling RSS feeds.” O.K. I’ve got to be honest. I don’t get this one. Can anyone who is using SimplePie explain it to me it language a non-coder can understand?

@TanMcG from Praized asked me to check out the Praized plug-ins. And heck, they’re a great Montreal-based start-up who will be at WordCamp Toronto. So, I’m not embarrassed to help them promote their plug-ins with a plug.

John Biehler, @retrocactus, says “I just spoke at WordCamp Vancouver about FAlbum (randombyte.net)….it’s not super common so many may not have heard about it.”

Jordan Behan, jordanbehan sends me to look at, among others, flickrRSS and WP-Polls.

Finally, Brian Longest, @longest, pointed me to a post he’d written earlier this year identifying his top 10 WordPress plug-ins.

What do you think?

If you have a WordPress blog, please tell me which plug-ins you use and which you rate most highly. Are there other plug-ins that you find indispensable? What are your favourites? I’ll do another post following the presentation detailing the plug-ins I included and linking to the bloggers who suggested them.

Thank you for helping me with the research for this presentation.

One last thing:

As I look back at this post and the wealth of pointers people provided to me via Twitter, I realize that how lucky I am to have built up a community on Twitter of other people who share my interest. Mark Evans is SO right when he calls this “Twitter’s killer app.”

  • http://clarkeblog.com Chris Clarke

    Joe, have you talked to Brendan Sera-Shriar? On the Wordcamp schedule, he’s scheduled to speak exclusively about WordPress plugins on Sunday. Will there be much overlap?

  • http://www.greggodden.com Greg Godden

    Sorry I didn’t explain SimplePie at all, the long and short of it is it can be used and easily customized to display content from a/multiple RSS feeds in a website.

    For example, on my site http://www.greggodden.com, I run the SimplePie plugin to pull posts from my – not as of yet setup blog – http://www.misfitofmedia.com, and that information is displayed in a block at the bottom of the page. Essentially the plan is to use it to promote my blog through my personal site by displaying the most recent posts, a brief description of each post and a direct link to the post itself as well as the general blog.

    What I’m using the plugin for is relatively simple and non-offensive, but it could be used in a very negative manner as well. The plugin gives people the ability to create a blog and have all of its content generated by pulling content from other blogs/sites RSS feeds. I believe this kind of thing is actually a pretty common spammer/squatter/google ads abusing practice.

  • http://www.praizedmedia.com Tanya McGinnity

    Thanks for the mention Joseph and for this blog post as we’re always looking for excellent plugins to help us out in our blogging efforts.

    We’re looking forward to meeting you at WordCamp Toronto!

  • http://thisismyurl.com Christopher Ross

    Text Replace (http://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/text-replace/) is an often overlooked but wonderful plugin for WordPress. Basically, it lets you do site wide text replaces through all your posts. I used it to auto link common terms like WordPress so even when I’m lazy and forget to link it, my site automatically inserts the hyperlink.

  • http://www.longest.com Brian

    Great article, and not only because you mentioned my top 10 plugins post. The way you listed out all the contributors was very helpful, I spent quite some time reading them all. Thanks!