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Top 10 WordPress Plugins

Martin Sejas just posted an article on SiteProNews about “The Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Can’t Do WIthout” and not being a WordPress kinda guy, what do you guys think? Here they are in numerical order:

  1. Askimet – This is sometihing that I’ve toyed with on BE.Net sites and it seems to be a fairly capable system to weed out comment spam. However, it still isn’t accurate enough for my likes. That is why comments on my sites are still manually moderated.
  2. All-In-One SEO Pack – This has some rather nice features like automatically generating your META tags for you while still providing overrides.
  3. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Nothing worse than poorly behaved software that pings too often. This plugin could help you WP folks from getting blocked by ping services if you edit your posts frequently.
  4. Remote Database Backup – Nice piece of software to take care of routine facilities. BE has the ability to export the whole database as BlogML so no need for this on our platform(s). That reminds me, better run a backup or two 😉
  5. SEO Smart Links – This plugin will automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts to comments. This is a great way to beef up your internal linking strategy (which is always good from an SEO standpoint)
  6. Sexy Bookmarks – “Our sole aim was to stray away from the "in the box" thinking behind most social bookmarking plugins, and add a little flair that would entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.” Sounds good to me if it actually can get users to bookmark your posts…
  7. Frame Buster – This is nice technology to ensure your hard-written content doesn’t get “trapped” by someone else’s ad laden frame jobs. You can accomplish this same thing using javascript in most any other blogs skins but this is pretty easy to implement given WP’s plugin architecture.
  8. Google Sitemap Generator – I’m not sure which one he is referring to as searches for this plugin lead to 3 pages of results. Anyhow, I’m surprised that WP doesn’t have this built into the system. Rather short-sighted to leave this to the aftermarket to come up with essential functionality.
  9. CommentLuv – Rather ambitious plug-in. In an attempt to encourage more interactivity by commentors, it goes out to the commentor’s site while they are typing and presents the commentor with a list of links to their own content that is on target to attach to their content.
  10. WP BackLinks – Another ambiguous choice. 4 pages of results for this search term. Seems like closest match might be Backlinks; seems to be the most highly rate. It uses the SimplePie Core to create a list of articles on the ‘Net pointing at your post using a Google Blog search to return the data. 

So, let’s hear it from you experienced WP bloggers: What do you think of the list above? What plugins do YOU find essential? Please use the comment form below to let us know what you think. All legitimate comments will be posted.

Michael Gibbs
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