I like WordPress, and one of the coolest things about it is WordPress plugins. There are almost 10,000 of them available at the official Plugin Directory. I’m only just scratching the surface of what’s available; but I’ve got a couple of favorites already, which I’m installing on almost every new WordPress site
- Akismet. Blog posts get comments from the public, and spammers like to leave their own garbage as comments. If you don’t personally monitor your blog’s comments, you’ll definitely end up with spam displayed publicly. Akismet provides the solution to this problem. In order to use Akismet, you have to key a “Key” by registering for an account at WordPress.com, the free hosted WordPress (as opposed to WordPress.org, the free install-it-yourself script.) It’s easy enough to do, and other than that, installing Akismet is simple.
- Configurable Tag Cloud. This plug-in gives you a “tag cloud” – those swarms of linked keywords of different sizes – with a lot more options than the one included with WordPress. Easy to install and use.
- WordPress Audio Player. This allows you to put a nice little Flash audio player into any post or page in your blog site. Very simple, and you can configure the little player with your site’s colors.
- Contact Form 7. This is the easiest and free-est way I have ever installed a contact form on a website in the past 14 years.
- Exec-PHP. Funnily enough, even though WordPress is written in PHP, you can’t just put PHP code in your blog posts or pages and have it work. I don’t know why, but I do know that this plugin makes it so that you can.
- ShareThis. This allows you to easily put the ShareThis social-media icons at the bottom of every post and page in your site.
Along the way, I’ve tried a few plugins that didn’t work so well, so this list represents only my tried-and-true winners.
