White Hat Blogging in Black and White and Now Muted Colors

You are here: Home » Plugins » 12 Plugin Must Haves for WordPress 2.7

12 Plugin Must Haves for WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.7 is upon us and as I continue to tweak the Blogging In Black and White theme I am forced to deal with a few more plugin issues.  I have already seen the idiot list of plugins out today claiming to be must haves for 2.7, but I am here to save you from yourselves and those idiots.  First off anyone who suggests Managable, Ultimate Tag Warrior, and a number of other is simply full of crap and hoping to cash in on you being gullible.  Mageable is now part of Wordpress and won’t function, in fact it probably will break your install and Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t worked since tags became a standard part of wordpress way back when.  There a plenty of plugins in this category so choose them with caution and check them out at the wordpress extend site for yourself.

Here is my list of must haves:

• Google XML Sitemaps:  If you want to be indexed by google this is a must have tool to get it done right.
• HeadSpace2: This is a far superior plugin to the All in One SEO Pack, even when that plugin was well maintained instead of the weenie version that is currently out.  Check out Mani’s great tutorial on HeadSpace 2.
• Redirection:  If you are serious about your SEO you need this plugin.  Whether you use a plugin to automatically shorten post slugs removing trash words, do it from the write window or do en masse from the manage meta data tab that Headspace 2 gives you, you will want redirection.  Furthermore if you change to the more SEO friendly permalinks of blog.com/category/post-slug/ this becomes even more important.  Wordpress can muck it up pretty badly if you don’t have this plugin.
• WP-PageNavi:  This is the premier pagination plugin.  If you are a noob you can get by with the standard previous/recent posts links because you lack enough content to make installing worth while.  After you have a few pages though this makes navigating so much easier for your reader.
• WP-DBManager:  This is one of Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan best plugins and he has a lot of really good ones including PageNavi.  This is the one tool i don’t like being without.  It provides complete management of your blogs DB from within wordpress, as opposed to going through the often confusing php Admin panel.
• Feedage Tracker: This plugin makes it possible your your reader to add your site to any number or feed readers quickly and easily.
• Auto Social puts you one step closer to being noticed by millions of more readers by bookmarking every post you make on del.icio.us
• Akismet:  I have come full circle on Akismet.  There are some better spam blockers out there, but many of those plugins actually go too far and have no means of rescuing potentially good comments.  A note to all I recommended wp-spamfree to, it is one of those that works too well and also can cause pinging problems, despite the authors claims to the contrary.  I use akismet in conjunction with Bad Behavior for the most effective results.
• Bad Behavior used in conjunction with Akismet is one of the most potent combinations for spam protection.  The area where bad behavior really shines is when it comes to spam bots that akismet misses.  If you are serious about your traffic and spam you might want to add Bad Behavior Log Reader.
• Sociable: When it comes to social bookmarking there are a lot of options and a lot of good plugin choices.  I have flip flopped back forth between most of these choices and still use some of them on certain blogs because of style issues, but by and large Sociable is the way to go.  You are able to add buttons from man many different sites and not just the popular English language ones.  The one caveat I do make about this is before uploading it you need to fix the style sheet which has icon opacity set at 50% making many links hard to read on the page.
• WP Calais Archive Tagger:  This is a must have for tagging old content, especially if you are importing it from another source such as Blogger or LiveJournal.  It effectively tags your entire post archive by performing semantic analysis on the post text.  On some sites I run this about once a week and let it add any newly important tags that might be potentially good for searches.
• Tagaroo: Where the Calaise Archive Tagger works the semantic tags for your previous posts, Tagaroo will work on your current posts.  The second feature of this awesomely powerful plugin is it will associate your tags with Flickr images that you can directly insert into your post from the write page.

There you have it folks my must have list of WordPress 2.7 Plugins.  These aren’t the only twelve plugins I use by any means, but they are the ones I use consistently through out all my blogs and would be sad shape without, and unlike many other lists out this week all of these actually work in WordPress 2.7.  Look for my list of Comment Related Pluginssoon!