Crucial EduBlogger Wordpress plugins…

November 1, 2006

I am working on a new blog, to be announced soon. If I have learned anything from this blog (which will continue, but return back to the real core purpose of promoting free and/or open source software in k12 education) it’s that folks are out to get me.

By that I mean trackback/comment/comment form spammers. It’s been unreal! I can’t imagine what a real ed blogger that’s halfway decent in the rankings deals with. According to technorati, I don’t even make it into the top 100,000. Can’t say I’m terribly concerned, although I suppose it would be an ego boost if it happened. Maybe the new blog will be the trick! I’ll be announcing that shortly, once I finish getting the theme just right, the plugins installed, and some other fine tuning done. I think it will be good.

I want to ask a question before I continue, though. What do you think are absolutely mission critical Wordpress plugins? Here is a list of the plugins I either use or have modified for use. Do you have any that you think I should add to the list? For what it’s worth, I am using the newest version (2.0.5) of Wordpress and all these plugins seem to work fine.

• Akismet - Spam Protection - installed by default with Wordpress.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - Helps me tag my posts with ease.
  
• PodPress - It’s the gold standard for Wordpress and podcasting. Works wonderfully and recent improvements have knocked out some of the bugs that caused me lots of grief in months past.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement Plugin - theoretically redirects all feed traffic to feedburner.
• EdBlogger News Submit Link - Automatically adds a submit link for EdBlogger News. I actually modified this one from a plugin called Sol-Digg , by Bas Wenneker, which I don’t think is bring developed any more. So I say I did it! Jokingly more than anything, I give credit where credit is due. You can see this in action below each post.
• EduBlogoSphere Submit Plugin - I modified the above one to work for a new service, located at EduBlogosphere.com. In the interest of full disclosure, I sort of run the edublogosphere.com domain using an open source piece of software called pligg. I am thinking it would be a cool way to unite the edblogger community, but not sure I would ever get buy-in and enough traffic. So it sits there.
• Google Analytics - Helps me see the underworkings of my site’s traffic. Haven’t fully harnessed this one yet.
• Spam Karma 2 - This helps where Akismet does not, for trackback validation. I was getting LOADS of trackback spam until SK2 took control. I doubt I need both Akismet and SK2 but they don’t seem to be fighting each other.
• Wordpress Database Backup - This is also a default plugin, but a good one.
• WP Contact Form - I use this so that folks can contact me without me revealing my email address, a defense against spam, naturally. Although, I am finding out that LOTS of bots seem to be able to use this form, so now I am getting a bunch of contact form spam. I think I need a new contact form option with some sort of image validation-type check to it. Going to be looking into a new solution for this one…
• XD Forum - I wanted this more to learn how to do it than anything else. I have figured out a blog is not a great spot for discussion outside of the comments realm. My forum never got going, and was originally a bit hard to read. I fiddled with bbpress when it was first released a few weeks ago, and never could quite get it to work with my theme wrapped around it. It works nicely alone, and can integrate with WP logins, etc, but I had trouble truly integrating it, and my sites are fractured enough as it is.
• BlogLiner - I don’t use this on this blog, although I should. My blogroll is sadly out of date. BlogLiner spits my Bloglines blogroll into a fancy little sidebar widget. I had to trim the list, since there are a good many feeds in my account. I made the majority private and left the ones I think would be the most useful.

I think all of these are available on the newly redesigned WP-Plugins.net site, which I think can be a fun site to explore.

So that is the list compiled from my own surfing. I decided that if I was to find a more comprehensive list I might need to look to the blogging community, writ large. Via Bloggingpro I came across this article from John C Chow. After reading his list, I decided to add two to my list, and have installed them since beginning the draft of this post. They are:

• Digg Click - I previously used Cybernet’s Digg Button plugin but found that I had to turn off the Visual Editor each and every time I intended to include a Digg Button. Digg Click, as you can see from my implementation, has a nice feature of not requiring a post to have been previously “dugg” before it displays the button.
• Related Posts - This plugin is obvious. It seems to work based on the title of the post, and has a feature where you can add keywords (not tags) to help the plugin better match what it calls related to the current post. You can see that it works, although not terribly well. That is a fault of my desire to create witty titles that sometimes are a bit non-sequitor to the post content. Do I need to shape up? Well…maybe.

So that’s my list. Did I miss something? If you comment, please make sure to provide a link to your favorite plugin! I will be announcing my new blog soon, to much fanfare I am sure! Thanks for standing by me.

Posted in Educational Technology, General, Software