WordPress Plugin Round-Up

Every so often I get ques­tions about what plu­gins I’m using on the site, and the sheer num­ber they get in response seems to shock most so I’ve decided to doc­u­ment them all below. I believe that the best plu­gins should be invis­ible, thus the major­ity of these plu­gins add some kind of back-end func­tion­al­ity that I feel is miss­ing from the Word­Press core.

Advanced Excerpt
Advanced Excerpt adds sev­eral improve­ments over WP’s default excerpt. It will trim to a sup­plied char­ac­ter or word length and has the abil­ity to keep HTML markup. You can see it in use just to the right of this post under ‘Latest Posts’, I’ve set the excerpt length to four words, the HTML markup for <em> to be kept, and the ellipses to be …. All-in-all, very easy to install and use, and it provides some much needed functionality.

Akismet
Akismet is a very well known (and well used) plu­gin. Simply install it, enter your Word­Press API key, and you’ll likely never have to worry about com­ment spam on your blog again. At the time of writ­ing Akismet has caught 1,276 spam com­ments on this blog with a 100.00% accur­acy rate. Occa­sion­ally you will have to delete a few of the com­ments that it catches when it’s not com­pletely sure that they’re spam (at the moment I’ve been delet­ing quite a few Rus­sian com­ments), but for the most part it will do its job behind the scenes.

flickrRSS
FlickrRSS can be seen work­ing in the very right column. It is a simple plu­gin that pulls pho­tos from your Flickr pho­to­stream and dis­plays them on your blog, just enter your Flickr User ID and the num­ber and size of the pho­tos you want to dis­play. An added bonus is the abil­ity to cache the thumb­nails it cre­ates of each photo.

fmTuner
Next up we have fmTuner, which retrieves song inform­a­tion from your Last.fm pro­file and pub­lishes them to your Word­Press theme. In much the same way as FlickrRSS, you only have to enter your user­name and options to dis­play. For those won­der­ing, the dis­play format I’m using to show the tracks to the very right of this post is <li class="lastfm-item"><a href="[::url::]">[::artist::] - [::title::]</a></li>

Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps gen­er­ates an XML sitemap of your blog for use by Google, Bing, Ask.com and Yahoo (Yahoo requires an Applic­a­tion ID). You can see the sitemap cre­ated by the plu­gin for SuperpositionKitty.com here.

Limit Login Attempts
Limit Login Attempts does just what it says on the tin: it gives the admin the abil­ity to limit the login attempts, by lock­ing out the user after a cer­tain num­ber of tries. As only Jen and I use the admin panel I have set it up quite harshly, with a 24 lock­out after 4 retries, as well as tak­ing advant­age of the plu­gins abil­ity to email the admin upon lockout.

Plat­inum SEO Pack
Plat­inum SEO pack is appar­ently the “ulti­mate Word­Press SEO solu­tion”, and I have to admit that it does a pretty good job of it. The abil­ity to optim­ise titles, gen­er­ate META tags, over­ride META descrip­tions, set­tings for index or noin­dex, for fol­low or no fol­low, and much more make it almost indis­pens­able. For more inform­a­tion on just what each set­ting does see this page.

Ran­dom Posts, Recent Com­ments, Sim­ilar Posts
These three plu­gins are grouped together as they all make use of the Post Plu­gin Lib­rary by Rob Marsh. Recent Com­ments and Sim­ilar Posts can both be seen in action to the right of this post. Ran­dom Posts will be seen by any­body who man­ages to get a 404 page, which you can see here.

Sideb­log
Sideb­log is prob­ably one of the most import­ant plu­gins on this site as it drives the Vign­ettes that you see to the right of the main page. Rel­at­ively easy to set up, all I have to do to pub­lish a mini post is select the ‘Vign­ette’ cat­egory and the plu­gin will pub­lish it to the side­bar while at the same time remov­ing that post from the main feed. The code to do this is as easy as <div class="vignette">%content%</div>.

Twit­ter For Word­Press
Twit­ter for Word­Press simply dis­plays your latest tweet(s) wherever you wish on your blog. There is no GUI set-up for this plu­gin, as it is all done in your theme tem­plate. The single line of code that I use to dis­play our latest tweet at the bot­tom right of the main page is <?php twitter_messages('spkitty', 1, true, false, '$lt;img src="/twitter_small.gif" alt="rss" width="18px" height="10px" /$gt;', true, true, false); ?>. This dis­plays the latest tweet from our feed, with no timestamp, with my little bird icon as a link to the tweet, and URLs and users both as click-able links.

wp-Typography
WP-Typography is one for all the type nerds out there. It adds hyphen­a­tion, spa­cing con­trol, intel­li­gent char­ac­ter replace­ment, and CSS hooks, all of which greatly improve the look and feel of your blog. At the moment I have the hyphen­a­tion, char­ac­ter replace­ment, and widow pre­ven­tion turned on.