Brad’s Essential List of WordPress Plugins

Written by blogboy from http://www.bloggingfornoobs.com/ on April 11th, 2008 | 1 Comment

• Akismet This is the best in spam control there is hands down.
• Ultimate GA (Google Analytics) You can use the Google Analytics services without this plugin, but frankly why would you want to.  It makes the service so much easier to use and, even better will write a lot of the code into your blog for you.  This is a 5 star plugin and a must have.
• HeadSpace 2 is the best all around meta tool there is.  It is a little harder to get setup than the All in One SEO Pack but it is a far superior plugin.  Mani at Daily SEO has a really great post about getting it set up right using one of his themes, but the principals are the same no matter what theme you use.
• Google XML Sitemap Generator is the best tool you can have for getting indexed quickly and efficiently.
• CommentLuv by FiddyP is a sure fire way to get your readers involved by providing not only a link back to their site, but assuming they have an accessible feed it will post a link to their latest post too.
• Auto Social is a sure fire way to make sure your posts get to Del.icio.us Every post you makes gets submitted with your post tags.  If you couple this with the post thingy that will put all your daily tagging into a single post auto post it to your blog, then you are in good shape to have a daily wrap up of everything you are doing online.  See The Other Blog for an example of how I aggregate this feature.
• Simple Tags This is a plugin that has been around a long time, but one that is rather new for me.  It is in a word complete tag management and may eventually displace my use of Technorati Tags once I learn to use it to its fullest extent.
  
• ShareThis Bloggers are foolish not to include multiple ways for people to add their posts to their favorite social bookmarking sites.  I like Share this because of its tiny footprint, just a small green square that expands when clicked on.  If you use Socialize which is probably the other one you have seen a lot of I suggest keeping the number of sites manageable and fixing the plugins ss so you have 100% opacity.
  
• Technorati Tags When set up right will use WordPress’s native tagging feature to create Technorati tags and provide the appropriate links back to Technorati.
  
• TinyMCE Advanced Last but not least getting a hold of this dynamic plugin will help you control your content far btter than the native posting interface.  it is like going from MS Wordpad to the latest and Greatest version of Word in terms of features.
  

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