Anne Kowalski

Comment » Best WordPress Plugins

If you’ve ever had a look at the Plugins page at WordPress Codex you’ve probably have been overwhelmed by the amount of downloads available. Searching through the downloads available can take quite a bit of time, and trying them out takes even longer.

Here’s the list:

Dagon Design Mailer Form - Helps you create contact and feedback forms for your WordPress site, as well as more general forms. It is very easy to set up and highly customizable.

Firestats - This is a full-featured statistics plugin that records site visits, referrer URLs, and popular pages as well as information about your visitors such as country, operating system, and browser. You have the option of turning off the Firestats logo that automatically shows up in the footer of your blog.

Maintenance Mode - A very easy way of temporarily preventing your visitors from accessing your site while you are installing updates, doing maintenance, etc. It is very similar to Drupal’s default site maintenance feature. Default languages are English and German.

Now Reading - If you like to occasionally review books, or would like to have a digital library on your blog, then you’ll probably like this plugin. When you add new books the cover images and purchase links are automatically added if they are available on Amazon.com, or you can add them yourself if they aren’t. There’s an option to add your Amazon affiliate ID (if you have one).
Note: When you are adding books using this plugin, use the ISBN if at all possible - it gives far more accurate results than searching by title.

Our ToDo List - Shows a todo list in your WordPress Dashboard. Helpful for keeping track of post ideas.

Note: When I installed this I had to go to Manage>Our ToDo then click the link to run the script (under the Install heading) before it would work, despite having version 2.1.

Subscribe to Comments - Lets commenters on your blog check a box if they want to be notified by email of new post comments.

Lightbox 2 - Ever go to those blogs where when you click on a photo, it enlarges the photo, layers it on top of the current page, and dims the background? That’s probably Lightbox 2 (or one of its many variants) at work. All that’s required to use it after activation is inserting “rel=lightbox” into the anchor tag.

WordPress Gallery2 - This is a much more fluid way of adding pictures to your posts than using WordPress’ Upload option if you want to include a photo album on your site. You will need to already have an installation of Gallery2 before activating this plugin.

Akismet - This one is automatically included in the default install of WordPress. It greatly helps reduce the amount of spam postings on your blog. Rather than having the spam postings show up in the comments for everyone to see, you can instead filter them out through the admin panel. Anything not manually deleted by an admin gets deleted after 15 days.

In order to use Akismet you first need a free WordPress.com API key.