Another Part of Me

There are literally thousands of available plugins for standalone installations of WordPress’s blogging software, and I’ve tried quite a few. The main requirement that I have for a plugin is that it does what it advertises and is easily configurable. The following list is comprised of a handful of plugins that I consider essential to publishing and maintaining this site.

AddtoAny: This plugin allows you to easily give readers the ability to share posts on all of the biggest social-networking and sharing websites. It also includes functions for emailing the document or pulling up a printer-friendly version. Very easy to customize via the settings page.

Akismet: How else would you manage all of that spam coming your way? This plugin was created by the makers of WordPress, so they play well together.

Cleaner Gallery: Anyone trying to share photos on a WordPress blog is probably aware of the shortcomings of their gallery feature. This handy little plugin “magically” makes the built-in WP gallery options work the way they are supposed to and even provides a few more options to make photo-sharing easy.

Contact Form 7: We all need a form that site visitors can use to contact us. This plugin includes the ability to add multiple contact forms to a blog – all easily configurable.

Google XML Sitemaps: Need an easy way to notify all the major search engines of updates to your site? It doesn’t get any easier than this!

Search and Replace: This one was a lifesaver. After moving my blog from .com to its own server, I found that all of the image urls were still pointing to the .com account. Rather than spending hours (or days) going through each post to update the image urls, I used this tool to search for and replace the incorrect urls.

WordPress Popular Posts: I like to see which of my posts are the most popular at any given time. This plugin adds a widget to the sidebar that tracks the most visited posts over a specific period of time that you choose (i.e. one day or a week).

WordPress.com Stats: Those of us who are familiar with WordPress.com blogs find their statistics reports to be both thorough and easy to comprehend. Adding that functionality to a self-hosted blog is a cinch with this plugin.

WP Google Analytics: Even though the previous plugin gives you essential traffic information from your dashboard, connecting your site to Google Analytics is essential to generate in-depth reports on your site’s popularity. This plugin automatically adds the Analytics code to every page/post on your blog.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: I love this one. Older posts are easily lost in the mix, but this plugin adds a list of possibly-related post titles at the end of blog entries. Once again, it’s easy to customize the way it works and the way it looks.

Which plugins are essential for maintaining your blog?