Since we launched our blog hosting package I’ve been asked by a number of people about ways of getting the most out of their WordPress blog.
I’ve also found myself documenting a lot of the more common questions that new users might have
One of the things I love about WordPress is the way you can extend its functions via plugins.
The vast majority of the plugins available do not require much configuration or technical knowledge to get running. You can simply upload them into your “plugins” directory, activate them and just use them.
So which plugins would you recommend to a new user?
I thought I’d start a list, so here’s mine (in no particular order):
- Tiger Style Administration – as it makes the admin panel so much more attractive
- Subscribe to Comments – make your blog more interactive
- Do follow - if you aren’t being hit by spambots why not allow people’s comments count?
- Bad Behavior – stop the spambots and other nasties
- Click Counter – one of the best. Keep track of how popular links are
- Adsense Deluxe – if you are running adsense on your blog this is the only sane way to manage it.
- WP-Amazon – nice way of managing amazon links
- wpLicense - Insert a creative commons license in your blog
- Terms 2 posts - uses the Yahoo API to find related posts
- Terms 2 tags – automatically generates technorati tags based on your entries using the Yahoo API
- FeedBurner Replacement – If you are using feedburner to handle your RSS then redirect all your subscribers to your feed using mod_rewrite and this plugin.
If anybody has other recommendations please share them 
From danger:
Brian’s Latest Comments is a cracker once you’ve got people commenting on your blog, it inserts a lovely sidebar on your site, allows you to see who’s commenting on what.
Live Comment Preview is another nice one which I think you use Michele but haven’t mentioned in your list.
From blacknight:
Danger
I’ll have a look at the “latest comments” one. You use that on tcal, don’t you?
I forgot the “live comment preview” one which I am using
From Kae Verens:
I’ve found Spam Karma 2 to be invaluable for zapping spammers. Also, WP-TinyMCE is great – gives your commenters a Rich Text Editor to write in.
From blacknight:
Do you have a link for WP-TinyMCE?
From Kae Verens:
Here y’are: http://blog.phpmix.com/wp-tinymce/
I’d recommend changing two things in the options once you have it installed.
1) don’t use it for posting with, as it will interfere with your other plugins (the Amazon Links one, for example)
2) you’ll notice the first time you try it that the comments box will be an ordinary textarea, which turns into an RTE when you click it and accept the alert. Turn off the alert option and just turn the RTE on by default. The only non-javascript commenters you are likely to come across are spammers, so there’s no loss.
From danger:
Yep I use Brians Latest Comments (modified a tiny bit to put in extra divs for formating) and I see you are using it now too…good work. I have a question: What’s the value in putting the related technorati tags at the bottom of every post?
From Philip Casey:
Michelle, thanks for alerting me to the Tiger Style Administration. Lovely stuff.
From blacknight:
Danger – I like the way you have implemented it. Any chance of you sharing the code?
The technorati thing is automatic, so it saves the hassle of tagging entries and allows people to follow the tags if they want to. I’m not sure how useful people find it, but I like the idea of effortless tagging. As I’m using the feedburner plugin to redirect all the feeds to my feedburner feed I can’t place any extra tags into the feeds, so I can only use the categories.
From janine:
thanks for the handy list michele.
it’s another useful bookmark for when (if) i ever have the time/energy/courage to migrate from mt!
From danger:
Here’s the code michele:
http://tcal.net/uploads/briansedited.txt
Bit of editing of the css to how you like it and should be good to go.
From blacknight:
Janine – migrate – you know you want to
Danger – thanks – I’ll probably poke at it later
From blacknight:
Kae – Interesting plugin
From adam:
“Page Library: Useful functions for the ‘pages’ feature including generation of breadcrumbs, getting the number of child pages, and getting a list of child pages.”
http://www.gregphoto.net/index.php/2005/09/22/posted-wordpress-subpages-plugin/
Very useful if you use WP as a rudimentary CMS. Which I do. Makes giving control to the client a hell of a lot easier.
From blacknight:
Adam
Do you have any links to sites using this? It looks like it’s pretty interesting
Michele
From adam:
None that I want spidered at the moment Michele, but if you go to dev.mydomain you’ll find a slightly hacked work-in-progress.
From blacknight:
Adam – if that’s running on WordPress I am truly impressed
From adam:
It is Michele, and thanks. Can’t get Tiger Style working on it in IE though. Works fine in FF, tried CTRL+F5 and clearing my cache an’ everyfing, very annoying.
From blacknight:
As far as I recall Tiger won’t work with IE and is known not to work
From Geoff:
From their website:
Currently this design is compatible with Safari and Firefox. Until Internet Explorer complies with CSS2 specifications, this plugin will default back to the original WordPress administration design. The plugin does this automagically, without the need for browser sniffing. If the browser is incapable of displaying CSS2, it will not display the updated design.
From adam:
I spotted that after posting Geoff, but thanks anyway. I guess most bloggers use Firefox, but I’m not a blogger and I don’t, and I find it a bit annoying to have IE just left by the wayside. I suppose it’s possible it couldn’t be skinned /at all/ for IE, but I doubt it. But it’s their plugin so I guess they can do what they want.
From Kae Verens:
Adam, I think you’ll agree that your complaint there is amusingly ironic, given that traditionally, IE is the only browser that is catered for, and all others are left by the wayside.
I’m sure that once IE7 is released, its CSS capabilities will be up-to-scratch.
From Geoff:
Well ideally all common browsers should be supported. Failing to support the most popular is dumb, but as Adam says, it’s their toy so they can make the rules.
From adam:
Ironic indeed Kae, but of course the ideal is support for all major browsers, even if they are flawed. IE may have brought us MARQUEE, but Netscape brought us BLINK…
From adam:
The real irony is that I’m only using Windows at the moment in final preperation for another attempt to migrate to Linux permanently; SusSE 10 to be precise, which is utterly magnificent. I lasted a whole month on my last Linux outing, to SuSE 9.3, I’m hoping this is The One.
Hopefully it won’t matter any more next week, and I’ll be complaining from The Other Side!
From blacknight:
Adam – none of use IE anymore
Suse is an interesting choice of distro. I did try it a couple of times in the past, but I found it a bit inflexible for my liking
From adam:
I hated it before 9 or so, but it’s improved at an incredible rate version-on-version since then. I try all the other popular ones – Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandrake, Fedora, Red Hat, Mepis, Xandros, Gentoo, even Linspire – regularly on new releases but none of them hold a candle to SuSE these days, and none of them lasts more than a few days as the default on my boot menu.
Again, I lasted a full month with 9.3, and that’s a hell of a long time in comparison to everything else. No doubt I’ll find annoyances like I did the last time, but I reckon a switchback is better than evens this time.
I wouldn’t put anything other than Fedora or RHEL on my servers though. Real stuck in the mud about that, I’ve tried everything else and I’m just not comfortable with them. Red Hat’s like a comfy old armchair with visible stuffing on the server side!
From blacknight:
Adam
Wouldn’t you consider Debian or Ubuntu for servers?
From adam:
Nope. I ran Mandrake and SuSE on a few servers of mine over time and found that getting used to the quirks of a new distro was just too much hassle. I know exactly what RHEL and Fedora can do, what it’s quirks are, where everything is, etc. They do the job and do it well, I really have nothing to gain by changing.
From Georgie:
If you don’t publicly display your email address, how about a contact form plugin like this one, http://green-beast.com/blog/?page_id=136#df.