These WordPress plugins are some of the best ones I’ve found, and I find them totally essential for this blog, despite their simplicity. Some are so obvious that their features should be built-in to WordPress.
- Subscribe to Comments – Give your readers the ability to get email updates of new comments.
- Share This – Don’t clutter your blog with 37 icons for social bookmarking sites! Share This puts a single “universal” link that allows you to save the post to a plethora of sites.
- Chunk URLs – Are your users posting long URLs in your comments, stretching your layout funny? Chunk URLs truncates the visible URLs.
- Contact Form II
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – Feedburner users tend to run into a problem: When you burn your feed, the original remains accessible to your readers. The FeedSmith plugin redirects them to your Feedburner feed if they try to access the original.
- Full Text Feed – Current WordPress versions cut-off feed content wherever a <!–More–> tag is placed. Full Text Feed fixes this problem, putting your entire post in the feed.
- Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress 2.x
- Optimal Title – You can technically do this without a plugin, but it simplifies things a bit. With Optimal Title your post’s title is shown before your site name up in the browser’s title bar (which Google likes).
- Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam – One of the best CAPTCHA plugins I’ve found.
- Popularity Contest – What are your top posts? Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin allows you to show-off your most-viewed posts easily.
- Related Posts – The link is dead, as of publication. I haven’t tried it, but a lot of people recommend the similar (pun unintended) Similar Posts.
- WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allow your users to edit their comments (time limit option available).
Great selection of plugins, most of them I’m using already except the Feedburner Feedsmith and the Share This plugin. I don’t have any use for the first at this moment and instead of the latter I’m using AddThis.com.
Chunk URLs was new to me and I added it a few seconds ago. Thanks for pointing this one out
I’ve used AddThis.com in the past, but I prefer the Share This plugin. It keeps people on my site, and it’s more convenient if you want to add to more than one bookmarking site.
Matt,
Thank you so much for writing about Ajax Edit Comments as an “essential” plugin for WordPress. I’m glad you find the plugin valuable and thank you for promoting it.
Cool list. I had trouble getting my contact form to work, so I found PXS Mail Form which works very well for me.
I was wondering how you do this edit comment feature!