My favorite WordPress Widgets and Plugins
After using WordPress for a while now on different sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that WordPress simply rocks. I’m not sure I would ever use anything else for a new site, even a non-blog site. In any case, over time, I’ve used the following Wordpress plugins and widgets on some or all of my WordPress sites. Of course, there’s the old standards like Akismet, that no one should ever be without, but I’m not including those in the list. Some of these might be ones you’ve never heard of before, while some are pretty popular.
First things first, if you are starting a new blog, choose a theme that is widget-compatible. Whether or not you intend to use sidebar widgets, you’ll eventually discover that you want to. So be prepared in advance. Now, on to the list.
Adds Sidebar Widgets panel under Presentation menu
This is a widget that can let people directly bookmark your blog, or an article on selection of social bookmarks sites.
Adds a sidebar widget to display the categories as a tag cloud.
Provides a widget interface for any php code.
Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www.
Link Indication
Adds CSS class attributes to external links and optionally to any other link types such as flickr, wikipedia, imdb, etc.
This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to Wordpress comments.
Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
Allows you to insert online videos in your post by providing the video url between the
This plugin will set up a “link to me textbox” with HTML code in your blog posts and increase your search engine rankings.
Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. Either display it as a block suitable for the body of a page or in a form compact enough for a sidebar.
Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.
Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
Allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. You can use it with any blogging tool/method, not just when posting from WordPress itself (doesn’t use custom fields). Supports multiple words within tags. Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in [tag] tags.
Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device.
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors
Cache module for those times you experience the Digg effect
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Posted on May 3rd, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Tech Advice
5 Responses to “My favorite WordPress Widgets and Plugins”
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OK - scratch that MyBlogLog message.
Anyway - these are some of my most favoritiest plugins on the planet! But I would be afraid to install “Random Redirect”. Some of my earliest posts are downright embarrassingly bad!
No doubt we’ve all had some embarrassingly bad posts. That’s ok! Just proves we’re human.
Thanks for sharing your favorites! I love trying out different plugins (even though some disappear into oblivion after I deactivate them).
I’m going to try out the What Would Seth Gordon Do, the Random Redirect, and the Bookmark Widget. Most of the others I already use because… well… they’re my favorites too!