Pallian Creative

10 Useful Wordpress Plugins

Posted on Aug 22, 2008 - 2:16 AM EST

If you’ve ever used Wordpress before to run a blog, you would know by now how many thousands of plugins exists out there to make your blogging experience better. What you may not know is that about half of them are poorly coded and almost surely slows down your site and/or exposes security flaws. I’ve been researching and testing a whole bunch of new plugins for the new upcoming TIM sites and thought maybe I should share some of the plugins we’re using. We use Wordpress MU over the original Wordpress - so this presents a little challenge by itself. But with a little trial and error and some code tweaking, I’ve managed to install the following 10 plugins successfully. If you run Wordpress, try installing these plugins if you haven’t already done so. It’ll go a long way in making your blog a little bit more efficient.

WP eCommerce

With our growing list of products for sale (alerts, dvd, book etc) and with the introduction of five additional products planned for fall, we needed an e-commerce site that could make shopping a little easier - and WP eCommerce is just the perfect plugin for that. Its Ajax powered and super easy to setup - and it integrates effortlessly with our new payment processing system. Download HERE.

AntiLeech

Ever did a google search and notice that your exact same blog post is on another ghost site competing for traffic hits with yours? AntiLeech helps prevent content theft by sploggers. It’s a clever little plugin that produces a fake set of content especially for sploggers that includes links back to your site. A must have to stay on top of google. Download HERE.

iWPhone

Here’s a neat plugin that automatically reformats the blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. Just tested it on my iPhone and it works like a charm. TIMAlerts members using iPhones will especially love it. Download HERE.

Sabre

Sabre - an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine is a lifesaver plugin that helps us manage our subscribers and prevents spambots from signing up. If you’ve ever tried registering for TIMalerts and had to answer a math question, it is Sabre doing it’s thing. Download HERE.

Disqus

Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. We were a little hesitant to use Disqus at first, mainly because it originally stored all the comments on their server (so if they went down, all our comments will go down as well). But they just launched a new wordpress plugin that now allows us to host the comments. You can see it in action on Lindzon’s (who also happens to be an investor) blog. Download HERE.

cforms II

A clean and simple AJAX contact form with a lot of CSS styling options. You can see it in action HERE. It is also capable of doing insane stuff like create and deploy dynamic forms at run-time. Download HERE.

Exec-PHP

A must have plugin to run PHP scripts in blog posts. not everyone may need this one, but we use quite a bit to post dynamic ads on blog posts. Download HERE.

Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others. It’s quick and it’s easy hits. Download HERE.

Google Sitemap Generator

If you need to generate a XML compliant sitemap for search engines, Google Sitemap Generator is the best choice. There are about 8 others out there, but this is the only one I would recommend. Download HERE.

WP Cache

And finally, the one plugin that will actually make your site load faster. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond. Download HERE.

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