15 plugins for minimalism just doesn’t sound right.
Yes, it does!
Wordpress rules! It really does. There are plugins for every taste and every school.
The problem is that plugins are so cool, you can get hooked up pretty fast. Before you know it, you have frak-o-meter, moon phase and hottaimoijiruna running.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can clutter your blog like hell. Readers will just get lost in all this information, or just play around with your sidebar and forget your content.
And of course your blog will be slow like a turtle walking on honey. Just one digg or stumble will get your site ’suspended’.
Cut it down to the basics
So here are the plugins to keep your blog perfectly functionable, secure and simple.
Tagging
- Configurable Tag Cloud: categories are so 80s. Tags are intuitive and this is the simplest tool for tagging.
- Simple Tags: Manage all your tags. Fast and easy.
- WP Tags to Technorati: Now that you are a real tag-jedi, send them directly to technorati.
Security
- Akismet: Spammers leave us alone.
- Wordpress Database Backup: Schedule backups, or die.
SEO
- All in one SEO Pack: Let someone else do all the SEO dirty work.
- No Self Pings : Stop sending trackbacks to yourself, whenever you link to a post of yours.
- Google XML Sitemaps: Help google see you.
Promotion
- Community Cloud: Thank your active readers with a link to their site.
- Popularity Contest: it analyzes several variables (comments, trackbacks, views, etc) to show you which post of yours is most popular. Great combo with the popularity contest widget.
- Popularity Contest Widget: Promote your best stuff.
- Similar Posts: Promote similar articles. Good to keep readers browsing in your blog.
- Subscribe to comments: Instead of having 2 monologues in your blog (your post and the comments), enable a dialogue. Readers subscribe to the post they commented with a simple click and follow the responses.
- Contact Form: Lazy people just fill out the form.
Speed
Do you find some plugins mentioned above unnecessary? I would gladly strip the list (and my blog) down.
Paul M. Banas responded on 23 Jan 2008 at 6:36 pm #
Like the list. There are a couple there that I think I want to look into, namely Related Posts and the tagging plugins. To that end, would really be interested if you’d share your thoughts on your tagging strategy. This is something I’d like to work out and implement more formally with my site, but I just haven’t had the time to figure it out. Same with All-In-One-SEO. Love the tool, but not sure if I’m utilizing it to the fullest.
My additional plugins that I like are Viper’s Video plugin to help with YouTube embeds and the Tiger Admin plugin. The Tiger plugin gives a great structure to the default Wordpress dashboard, however it doesn’t play well with my other plugins, so I have had to deactivate it.
PMB
robojiannis responded on 23 Jan 2008 at 11:46 pm #
@ PMB
I”ll check out Tiger Admin plugin. Never heard of it. I seldom embed videos, so I don’t want to put too much pressure on the memory of the site.
I haven’t optimised SEO at all! I just have it running. Until now, it’s not one of my priorities…