That SickHippie Guy™

WordPress is really an incredible tool.  It really is wonderful for all of us that this amazing piece of software is available free of charge!  On top of that, there is a rich, full, community of developers who freely give their time to develop additional plugins to extend the already robust functionality of WordPress.  I have been working with WordPress for months now (mostly at work), and I have been working on this blog for 3 weeks now.

Well, on this wonderful journey I’ve come across a LOT of good plugins, and even more not-so-good plugins.  Right now I’m running 31 plugins on this site, although some of them I don’t really get much use from.  Things like Advanced RSS or Category Order are useful, but I haven’t explored their functionality much at all.  Other plugins like Smart YouTube or Maintenance Mode are installed simply because I know they will be useful at some point in the future.  If I need to take my site offline at any point, or when I’m ready to post videos, I don’t want to spend hours looking for those plugins again.  I could probably make them inactive, but I also want to make sure that they work with the plugins that I need.

So, without further introduction, here are my 12 WordPress plugins I can’t live (or at least blog) without!  These are not in any real order – all are equally valuable in my book.

1. OZh’ Admin Drop Down Menu is first in line.  Simply put, this takes your admin menu from the side and puts in into a really nice dropdown at the top of the screen.  It makes everything in your admin menu accessible, and has a lot of great little configuration options for making it exactly what you want.  It even tells you when you have new comments and plugin updates, and how many of each! It really makes the backend a lot less confusing to navigate, and gives you your whole screen to work in to boot!
2. Google XML Sitemaps is up next.  This little plugin is amazing!  Whenever you change or update anything on your blog, it creates a new XML sitemap, gzips it, and notifies Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask that your site has been updated.  Knowing that the biggest 4 search engines are instantly informed every time I make a post is comforting, to say the least!
3. Twitter Tools & Twitter Tools: bit.ly Links I’m counting as one, because they work so beautifully hand in hand.  With this, you can bring your tweets in as blog posts, push your blog posts out as tweets, and will even pass your blog links through bit.ly before posting to Twitter!  The only complaint I have about this one is the sidebar widget included is pretty clunky, doesn’t seem to update quickly, and just doesn’t look that good.  Other than that, it’s easily the best integration between WordPress and Twitter that I’ve seen yet!
4. Lets talk about tags for a minute – Simple Tags specifically.  I must admit, I don’t have much of a clue about tagging.  I’ve seen the various tag clouds around, but never really used them – I always just searched for what I wanted.  When I was setting up this blog, when trying to find a good Twitter integration, I clicked the ‘Twitter’ tag on the plugins page after searching didn’t get what I was looking for.  Lo and behold, I found Twitter Tools.  I started exploring tags a bit more, and found this plugin here.  This thing will actually go through my post before I post it and suggest tags for me!  It grabs from Yahoo and Tag the Net, plus looks through current tags on my site to offer suggestions.  There are a lot of other great features on this plugin, but I’ve gone on too long already about it.  If you like tags and tagging, this plugin is for you!
5. Comment Reply Notification is a nice plugin that offers a functionality that should have been in WordPress in the first place.  Offering reply notifications is a must have for any community driven site.  With this plugin, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, they have the option to receive an email when there is a reply.  Really useful for keeping people informed, and for bringing people back to your blog.  This is definitely a must have plugin!
6. Contact Form 7 is another great plugin.  It’s simple, but extremely flexible.  You can leave all the options alone and still have a nice slick contact form, or you can go all out and tweak options to your hearts content.  Unlike most contact form generators, you can even tweak the individual error messages from the settings page, rather than being forced to edit the code (and re-edit after a plugin update).  No website should be without a contact form, and this makes it simple.
7. WordPress.com Stats is very straightforward.  You put in your API key from WordPress.com, and it starts gathering stats for you.  Adds a nice little piece to the dashboard, and lets you see all sorts of information – incoming traffic, outgoing traffic, traffic overall and per post, and so on.  Best of all, all the tracking is done at WordPress.com, so it doesn’t add any real load to your server.  Combined with Google Analytics, you will have all the stats you could possibly want.
8. That brings us to Google Analytics for WordPress! Put in your Account ID, it adds the tracking code for you! Tracks outbound links, download, and doesn’t track admin by default.  A simple solution for a common headache – no template coding required!
9. WP Super Cache is basically a ‘just in case’ solution.  It serves up static html pages to visitors who aren’t logged in or haven’t left a comment.  This is great if your blog ever receives a huge spike in traffic – you’re on the front page of Digg or Slashdot, for example, or when the gates open up on that big product launch.  A lot of nice technical options in the backend, but works beautifully out of the box as well.  It will even rebuild a page whenever someone leaves a comment, so you know that visitors are seeing the latest content on your site (even the search engines).
10. Broken Link Checker is really handy.  It goes through your site and looks for broken links – then displays a nice dashboard widget telling you how many unique links you have in your site, and how many of them don’t work.  Since the web is everchanging, a site that is up today may be gone tomorrow – it’s handy to know so that you can easily remove broken links without having to test them all yourself.
11. All in One SEO Pack is a plugin you will see on almost every list of ‘must have’ plugins – and for good reason.  If you want complete control over every aspect of your site’s SEO, this is all you need.  Even if you don’t know anything about SEO, going through the settings page will give you a nice idea of what you might need to search for on Google to learn.  Highly recommended by everyone I know who has used it, this is absolutely wonderful for giving your site those lovely back-end tweaks to boost up the ranking a bit.
12. TinyMCE Advanced is a wonderful plugin that adds about 16 new TinyMCE plugins plus a host of other new features.  While I love coding in Dreamweaver, I won’t deny that there are times when WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is just plain quicker.  This plugin brings WordPress’s TinyMCE editor one step closer to perfection – adding a number of things that I had wished were there before.

Well, that’s all of them – I really hope some of these were useful to you.  Maybe I shed some light on an aspect of your blog you hadn’t considered, or maybe help you feel smug in knowing that you already have all of these installed!

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