WordPress Plugin Rundown

Adam Chernow has a blog on his own site, but tends to use Tumblr more… He also asked me what plugins I use.

chernowa @raster WP is what I have my blog on right now… http://www.chernow.org/blog. What plugins are you running to do everything? →

So I thought I’d give the rundown of the current plugins I’m using. Many of these were added fairly recently. As a bit of history, I started this blog in 1997, first using UserLand Frontier as the publishing tool, and later using a Perl-based system I developed, until about 2005 when I moved to WordPress. I used my own custom theme since then and just within the past few months got around to fixing a few issues that prevented a few plugins from working properly.

So… here’s the list:

• Akismet – stops comment spam. (From the fine folks at WordPress.)
• Clean Archives Reloaded – used on the Archives page – it works. Not much more to say.
• Comments with OpenID – it seems to work. Is there a better one? I don’t know…
• Configure SMTP – my mail goes through an SMTP server.
• Foursquare – provides a widget in the sidebar with my most recent check-ins.
• Google XML Sitemaps – generates a sitemap.xml file used by Google to assist in indexing the site.
• I Like This – provides a ‘Like’ button on each post. I didn’t want to outsource the ‘liking’ of posts to FaceBook, so I added my own thinking people who didn’t want to leave a comment might use it. (Almost no one uses it.)
• Inline Tag Thing – I use this on occasion when I go through old posts adding tags. I hacked up my version a bit…
• OpenID – supporting OpenID. (Thanks DiSo!)
• Subscribe To Comments – pretty basic functionality that should be included with pretty much any blog nowadays. (Even though everyone says “email is dead.”)
• WordPress.com Stats – added recently, just testing it out. I go on these kicks where I keep a close eye on stats, and then I completely ignore them for months at time.
• WordPress Gravatars – adds Gravatar avatars to comments.
• WP Simple AdSense Insertion – I’ve been experimenting with adding ads to old blog posts that get a lot of views. We’ll see how it goes.
• WP Super Cache – great caching plugin to speed up page delivery. (I even donated some cash for this one!)
• WPtouch iPhone Theme – provides a more mobile-friendly version of the site.
• XRDS-Simple – I think the OpenID plugin required this to work properly…

I am by no means a WordPress expert (though I know a few!) and this is just the current snapshot of what plugins I’m using here. As I said, some have been added pretty recently, or I’m sort of “test driving” them for a while.

(I’d love a BarCamp session talking about WordPress, and it’s plugins, and overall best practices…)