Five Useful, Simple Wordpress Plugins

I’ve been playing around with developing Wordpress sites for a while now. I love how quick and easy it is to launch a site and update content.

One of the greatest features is the thousands of plug-ins available for Wordpress. You can find a plug-in for just about anything you want to do - or if you have some PHP know-how, you can develop your own.

Here are five basic Wordpress plug-ins that I’d recommend using for any project you start.

Akismet - Spam Protection

This plug-in comes pre-installed with Wordpress - and there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t use it. Akismet automatically captures most spam comments and places them in a separate “spam” category. You don’t get bombarded with “Moderate Now” e-mails, and you can trust that your comment logs will be pretty clean.

Since I’ve been using it on this site (about two months), Akismet has caught a little over 900 comments. Once a week or so, I scan through the comment log and rescue any false positives. Occasionally a legitimate comment will get swept up, but all you need to do is select it, hit “De-spam Comment,” and it will be saved.

All In One SEO Plug-In

The All In One SEO Plug-In is just what it sounds like. It adds some extra functionality to tweak the SEO of each of your posts and pages.

For example, All In One will automatically generate a description meta tag based on your excerpt and it will automatically generate keywords based on your tags. You can also use this to modify the title element of each page. I’d say it’s a must have for optimizing your website.

Exec-PHP

Early on, I was looking for a way to execute PHP code inside a post. Wordpress doesn’t have built-in support for this, so you need to find a plug in to do it.

There are dozens of plug-ins that attempted to implement this feature. Exec PHP is hands down the best that I’ve found. You simply add regular PHP tags to your post and the PHP code will be executed properly. I’ve never run into any bugs while using the plug-in, unlike some other plug-ins I’ve tested.

Per Post CSS and JS

Per Post CSS and JS allows you to attach individual stylesheets or javascript files to your posts or pages. This is great for changing the look of a specific page without creating an entirely new template. By attaching these files to individual posts, you cut down a lot on redundancy.

For example, let’s say you wrote a javascript file that you use in 10% of your posts. Why should it be attached to the other 90% of your posts?

I’ve also found it very useful for creating HTML/CSS/JS tutorials. I can place my sample code in external .css and .js files and have it attached properly to the page. This way I don’t have to write in-line styles to demonstrate functionality.

WP Unformatted

This simple plug-in removes all of the auto-formatting that Wordpress adds to your posts. With WP Unformatted, you can add a custom field to your post to tell the plug-in to strip out all of that formatting.

For example, Wordpress likes to wrap text in tags. Sometimes - like with forms - this is entirely undesirable. It can mess up your carefully formatted (and syntactically correct) HTML.

By using WP Unformatted, you can add sophisticated mark up to your post content without worrying that Wordpress will screw it up with random and tags.

And Many More…

There are, of course, dozens of other useful plug-ins. I’ve used plenty of other plug-ins that I liked. However, these are the ones that I feel appeal to the widest audience.

No matter what you’re doing, you’ll probably find a use for spam filtering, individualized stylesheets, SEO, PHP, and clean formatting. I would never start another project without these plug-ins.

What else do you find useful?

Tags: blogging, html, php, plugins, wordpress