Quote:
Originally Posted by jamestl2  Well, I was just thinking here that members with other blogs could benefit from the knowledge of why you chose to install certain plugins on the admin side too, and how they're helping you  . |
Oh, sure... didn't realize you were asking from that context.
WP-Cache - this is the most critical one for me. It caches all blog posts, so PHP/MySQL usage is greatly reduced. This speeds up page loading and dramatically reduces server load, meaning that you can handle much more traffic on the same hardware. When I turn off caching, the server load spikes to at least 4x its normal level and sometimes to 20x, and the site slows down to a crawl. Without this plugin I'd need much faster hardware (more $$$) to handle the load.
Askimet - Essential for nuking trackback/pingback spam. It has caught more than 60,000 spam attempts on my blog already and continues to catch about 150 more per day. And I don't even have blog comments enabled -- this is all just from trackbacks. Today I installed an Askimet plugin for the forums too, so hopefully most of the spam attempts here will be automatically nuked as well.
WordPress.com Stats - Just installed this one a few days ago. It shows some pretty cool stats, including your top blog posts. I can see that "How to Become an Early Riser" is still #1 by a landslide. I can also see that same article has been getting thousands of hits from StumbleUpon during the past few days. And finally I can see that the "raw food diet" search term is sending me a lot of traffic right now. Most of this data is redundant with my regular web server stats, but it's another way of looking at it.
RSS Signature - Add an HTML signature (copyright notice, links, etc) to the bottom of posts in your RSS feed. Previously I used OZH Better Feed. I just added it to Erin's blog too.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade - I love this plugin! It automatically upgrades a live blog to the latest version of WordPress, including backing up old files and the database, unzipping, deactivating and reactivating plugins, etc. I used it to upgrade Erin's blog, although I haven't tried it on mine yet. This will save a lot of time when each new version of WordPress comes out.
SRG Clean Archives - I used this to create the archives page. Works great.
Google Sitemap Generator - Automatically creates sitemaps and submits them to Google and other search engines. Probably unnecessary for my blog (Google spiders come here every day anyway), but should be a nice addition for most bloggers.
PodPress - I haven't had time to play around with this one yet, but it promises to make it easier to post podcasts and adds some new podcasting features.
Oneclick - Fast installation of new WordPress plugins. Just enter the URL of a new plugins' ZIP file, and it handles the rest. I haven't had a chance to test this yet, but it looks useful.
All of these are available at the
WordPress plugins page, or you could do a Google search to find them as well.
Here's a
great list of WordPress plugins too.