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Top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009

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Back in February I did a top 5 WordPress plugins. Now, I think it is probably time I updated it a little, so I’m going to do another top 5 plugins. I use these plugins quite actively on GEEK! so I feel the creators of these plugins deserve a little thanks from me.

So, here are my top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009:

  1. Executable PHP Widget: Sometimes it can be really annoying that sidebars in WordPress don’t support PHP code. Maybe you want to have a login/logout link to your blog in the sidebar. Sadly, the standard “Text” widget in WordPress only supports text and HTML, but not PHP. This plugin sorts that problem for you. Activate the plugin and then select the “PHP code” widget from the “Widgets” section of the WordPress dashboard. The new widget will accept text and HTML, as well as PHP, so it can be really helpful.
  2. Clean Archives Reloaded (external): This plugin lets you create an archive page for your posts really easily. It does all the work for you. You simply install the plugin and it does the rest. Simply create a page that you want to have the archive on, insert the code for the plugin, and the job is done.
  3. Full Comments on Dashboard (external): Find it annoying when WordPress doesn’t show full comments on the WordPress dashboard? I do, so I installed this plugin, and the problem was solved. There’s no configuration for this plugin – you just install it, activate it, and it starts working straight away.
  4. Lock Out: Need to do maintenance to your WordPress website or blog? This is a really simple plugin that locks all users out of your website, except yourself of course. You can set a customized message to let your viewers know that the site is offline for maintenance. It’s a very handy little plugin. Oh, a word of warning – the WordPress plugin site claims it only works to WordPress 2.5. However, I’m on WordPress 2.8.2 (at the time of writing) and the plugin works absolutely fine.
  5. Google XML Sitemaps (external): This is a great plugin that handles all of your sitemaps for you. It creates your sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file for you. It then hands over all the information to search engines such as Google, Ask Search and MSN Search (or Bing – whatever they call it now!).

Those are my top 5 plugins for now. I’ve used all of them for several weeks (some for months) and they’ve all been really helpful and easy to use.

I’ll do another top 5 in a couple of months, but for now – the above are my favourites! Enjoy.

Top five plugins I’d recommend for WordPress

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Well, you’ll probably know GEEK! (and most of the other sites I run) strongly rely on WordPress. It’s a fantastic platform, not only for blogging. It’s extremely customizable and you can just spend hours messing around with all the config with it. It’s also extremely reliable and as long as your server is up, it is there open to the web. And if you’ve got WordPress installed with cPanel on your server, running your website is a dream. Perhaps sometime I’ll do a post on cPanel.

Anyway, I also use quite a few plugins with GEEK!. Some of them are vital to me, and some of them I just use to add a bit of feel to the site. So, I thought I would do a top 5 to show my favourite and most loved plugins for WordPress. Remember, all plugins are free and a lot of them are open source so don’t restrain yourself. However try not to have too many as it will hog up resources on your server and your webhost may not be too happy about this. I would definitely say don’t use more than 15 simultaneously.

Here are your top 5:

  1. Statpress: A fantastic stats system for any blog or site hosted with WordPress. It monitors all the traffic coming into your site, and manages it into individual visitors, pageviews, spiders (bots) and feeds. You can look at detailed statistics on what browser, OS, country and versions each IP that visited your site was using. You can monitor specific IPs and search for specific results. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t get it to ignore your own IP (as far as I know anyway) so that might be an issue for some users. Try it anyway, it uses little resources and doesn’t use Javascript so won’t miss anyone not using Javascript.
  2. Sidebar Login: I like this plugin because it means any user can log onto their account with your site by just using the sidebar of your site. Saves having to go to the wp-login page. I mainly have it because I’m lazy, but also because it is very useful. I prefer it to the meta widget WordPress provides.
  3. All in One SEO Pack: A great plugin if you want to get your site out on the web search sites (which… most people do). Will sort out your META title, description and tags for you. Just type in what you want and it will make sure its on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
  4. Genki Announcement: A simple but useful plugin which allows you to post announcements on your site. It proves quite useful if you need to alert users of scheduled downtimes or other simular warnings. It’s not compatitable with all themes, but most work so you should be OK.
  5. Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam (external): A great system for comment SPAM reduction. Will add a CAPTCHA to your website’s comments form so that real users will be seperated from computer spam. You can also set it so registered users that are logged in do not have to fill the CAPTCHA in. If you’re getting lots of spam, this is the plugin for you.

So there you have it – my favourite WordPress plugins. They are all compatitable with WordPress 2.7 (I’ve tested them) so you should be fine. See what you think. If you’ve got any other great plugins you’d like to recommend, throw in a comment!