A site I recently encountered posted a list of “favorite Wordpress plugins“. Although I do agree with some of the things on there, I disagree with many others. Allow me to post my own list:
- All in One SEO Pack is a great plugin, which “out-of-the-box” does everything imaginable for your blog. That is, everything from META tags to messages to the search bots, and even automatic META descriptions. (Add META Tags was on the author’s list, but it is not compatible, since it has multiple redundancies already provided by All in One SEO Pack.)
- OneClick Installer, which takes the pain out of uploading new themes and plugins. I personally don’t upload themes at all, and I often need to use my cPanel File Manager to edit my plugins anyways, so this only saves me time with the plugins that don’t cause errors. (On a host with PHP/CGI installed, the “edit file” command from within WordPress doesn’t work.)
- Ultimate Google Analytics, which makes it easy to install the Google Analytics code on a blog. It also adds the advanced feature of being able to track external links, mailto links (I never use them), and downloads.
- Google XML Sitemaps, which creates a new sitemap for Google and Yahoo! whenever a post is made or its functionality is triggered. My only concern is that its “human-readable” version, that is, with the XSL stylesheet, is not validly coded into the main XML file, and doesn’t load properly in Firefox.
My list is quite short, since I don’t feel like slowing down my blog with an excessive amount of redundant plugins. The author of the post listed the following plugins, which I reject:
- FeedBurner FeedSmith — I do not believe that tracking your feed readers is necessarily a good thing, and even more so when they are unknowingly forwarded to FeedBurner. It’s also questionable to me — why would you want to deliver your RSS/ATOM feeds through an external service?
- Related Posts — for many blogs, searching through the database for relevant posts is performance-intensive, and overall bad for the user’s experience.
- Social Bookmark Creator — perhaps, at some time in the future, I shall use something like this, but I don’t like clogging up site design with additional external links or images.
- Global Translator — Geekie.org and many other blogs are in English; letting Google’s machines, no matter how good they are, translate our work is questionable.
- WP-ContactForm — the author’s homepage can’t be displayed, so I don’t have much to say about this. Besides, within the FreddyWare Solutions Enterprise Network, we have one centralized location for contact forms. (For instance, you can send me an e-mail through our official form at http://www.freddyware.net/contact.form/frederick.ding.)
- WordPress Database Backup — WordPress has such nice built-in backup (export) and restore (import) functions that I believe such a plugin is useless to most blog owners.
Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I’m just recommending what I think are best.
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