Favorite Wordpress 2.6 Plugins

• by Judi on Sep 2, 2008

Every so often, I like to share my favorite wordpress plugins. With the outing of wordpress 2.5 (and the 2.6 upgrade) we had lots of new and improved plugins. So I think it’s time to do a new “Favorites” post. Along with each plugin, I’ve given the basic description, underneath, my own thoughts.

Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Akismet is a plugin I install and “let it go”. If it misses some spam, I see what it’s missing and plug in a few of the keywords into the spam catcher on the settings -> discussions link in the admin and have akismet recheck. Works pretty good for me and I’ve not yet needed another spam catcher - currently, it’s caught well over 35,000 pieces of spam.. not too shabby.

Breadcrumb NavXT - Adminstration Interface - Adds a breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.

I like this one. It adds the little trail at the top of each page, showing how a visitor got to the page their own. I don’t know if others find it useful or not, but I like it on other sites, and actually have used it… so I think it lends to drawing visitors deeper into the blog.

Comment Email Responder - Emails commenter when an admin replies to the comment, if commenter is not subscribed to email updates via Subscribe-to-Comments.

This is a nice plugin… enable the admin to reply to the comment, as well as make sure the reply goes to the commenter.

Commentluv - Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment.

This is such a handy plugin. I see it all over and have used it many times to visit others blogs when I’m out blog-hopping

Contact Form 7 - Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

Just as the plugin descriptions says… simple, but flexible. It’s a nice, easy to use contact form. Set it up, let it run.

Cross-linker - A plug-in which allows you to set-up words which are automatically hyperlinked to desired URLs

Ok, I really like this plugin. Now, with wordpress 2.6.1 (and probably a few versions back) you don’t really *need* a plugin like this just to link within your own blog if you use tags (and we all do now, don’t we?), because your tags can link themselves… but what I like about this plugin is the ability to direct a word or phrase to a specific url. I use it to interlink some of my blogs.

CyStat - Statistik-Plugin

When I first started looking at my plugins page, in preparation for writing this favorite wordpress pluging update, I was going to say cystat was one I could do without… as a matter of fact, I almost deactivated it. But I took a look at it in the admin and decided I liked the stats it gives. In the past, it wasn’t one I paid much attention to. I use wordpress stats (see later) and have always liked the easy to read info from it.. but cystats were different, it shows things like what keywords are used for an internal search of my blog - Oh, love that!

Dashboard Editor - Allows you to customise the dashboard.

Not a big deal on this one.. but I like my pages clean and uncluttered. The in-the-box dashboard index has way more info on it than I need or want. And while most of it is at the end of the page.. I still like the ability to get rid of what I don’t want.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

When I updated my feeds at feedburner.com, it suggested this plugin to download - this way all the feeds on each site (whether it is the standard site feed, or the one from feedburner) will point to one place, my feedburner feed. Very nice.

Flickr Gallery -Use easy shortcodes to insert Flickr galleries and photos (and videos) in your blog.

I love flickr, you know? I mean, I could have a gallery on my own site. Host my own pictures and all that - my site host, bluehost.com gives me more space than I could ever use, even with all the blogs I’m trying to manage.. but I Love my flickr. I don’t have pictures in interestingness, or get many comments, but I don’t care. So, this plugin gives me a little “gallery” here on the site, it’s easy to view quickly.. but all pics link back to my flickr page.

Flickr Manager - Handles uploading, modifying images on Flickr, and insertion into posts.

And I know I could just upload all my media through the wordpress admin.. but well, I love my flickr… so this makes it easy for me to view pictures while I’m in writing mode and choose which pictures I want to add to a post. It’s just as easy as adding media with wordpress.. but again.. it’s flickr… ok.. on to something else.. enough about my favorite photo sharing place….

Google Blog Search Preview - Displays Google Blog Search Preview in the activity tab of Dashboard. Similar to technorati incoming links.

Take it or leave it. I keep it, because I like a quick view of who’s been writing about something on my site. If I didn’t have it, I’d have something else.. this works great, it’s simple, unobtrusive, right there on the dashboard. I’ll take it.

Favorite Wordpress 2.6 Plugins continued on next post

See past Favorite Wordpress Plugins Posts

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