Groovy Sputum

Useful Plugins

I hope you have enjoyed reading my Top 5 Greatest OSU Moments the last few days. I have been doing some research about the WordPress platform and wanted to share some of the useful plugins that I have discovered and am using presently. I have found that these plugins really help me as I am blogging.

• Simple Tags: this is a great little tag manager. You can rename any of your tags globally (great for the times you misspell a tag and end up with 3 of the same thing, i.e. word press, Wordpress, and WordPress), have tags automatically generated for each post, or get tag suggestions from Yahoo and the web using the click tag feature.
• All in One SEO: this is a search engine optimizer, hence the name SEO. This will generate unique meta information in the header of each page of your blog based on the content of each page. For instance, instead of every page having the top 10 tags and basic blog description, each page will be tagged with the tags you created for that post and the page description will be the excerpt of your post.
• CyStats: logs just about every data you might want about your blog. Number of unique hits/visits, number of bot hits/visits, search query returns (both internal and external), page usage, trackback data, and on and on.
• WP-Polls: my latest plugin addition, this little guy enables internal polls and is very customizable. I am not a huge fan of external blogging services for things like polls, calendars, and galleries. I just don’t like to log in to a gazillion sites to do something simple.
• Search Everything: this extends the search capabilities of the standard WordPress search bar. The default WordPress search form only searches post content (as far as I know) but this plugin expands that form to tags, categories, image titles, post titles, comments, and more. Basically, it allows your viewers to search everything, hence the name.

If you have never used plugins on your WordPress site, I highly recommend trying them. They are easy to use, easy to install, and very helpful. One thing to note: it is a good idea to get your plugins (and themes, for that matter) directly from the WordPress web site. There have been reports of malicious code being inserted by third party download sites and that is no fun. Get the genuine stuff here.