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I always use these plugins on my wordpress sites:
Askimet (comes default anyway)
Yoast (lots of great features and makes it easy to edit different SEO aspects of your websites)
Jetpack (also lots of great features)
Disqus Comment SystemWhat other WordPress plugins do you love to use or you think are the most useful ones?
I use:
Akismet (essential)
Ninja Firewall
One I wrote that handles SEO stuff and shortcodes that I use for things like video embeds
Enhanced Text Widget (only use it when I need PHP in sidebar widgets)I highly recommend spending the time to learn to write your own plugins. It’s really not that hard and you know exactly what’s happening in the code on your site.
I think it deepens largely on what the site is about and what needs the content aspect of it might call for. First thing I always do is install the security scripts, either iTheme or Wordfence. I also use a database optimizer, which I find helpful, gallery plugins and video plugins are next on the list. Sometimes, but more rarely these days, a stats plugin.
The lightbox style gallery plugins generally work well, but video plugins have given me a few problems over the year, I think largely due to conflicts with updates. I wrote my own embed script a couple of years back, still works today, but I tend to used the hosted embeds from my sponsors when they are available, however they’re not always the best either. The one I do like is the flow player WP plugins, seems very sound so far.
I’d love to hear more of what people are using, but again I think the decisions are predicated on what your site is and what the needs are based on the product or content.
Oh yeah, something I’ve been meaning to ask (not trying to bump the thread), obviously there are a couple of embed methods to use, javascript, iframe, etc. I’m seeing this in a lot of sponsor codes %3A%2F%2F which obviously translates to :// Is there some advantage to using that, or is it simply how the internal program spits it out. Or does it compensate for the browsers discontinued use, or lack of flash.
They’re going overboard on “URL Encoding”…
blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
Basically only certain characters are allowed in URLs. If you use another character it has to be encoded. But any character could be encoded and some CMSs go overboard when they encode special characters and encode characters that don’t actually need encoding.
It’s actually more complicated than you’d think. One of the biggest problems with URLs is when there’s a URL within a URL. Sounds weird, but it’s more common than you’d think. The CCBill link codes are a good example…
http://refer.ccbill.com/cgi-bin/clicks.cgi?CA=917833-0000&PA=1701975&HTML=http://tour.cocksuremen.com/home.phpIt’s not a problem here, but sometimes those URLs within URLs have things like ? and = in them. When that happens the browser can get confused since the ? and = are delimiter characters in the main URL. So they get encoded, but then they don’t always get unencoded properly so you see visible encoding.
Thanks a bunch Jay, would it be safe to say this is a common occurrence in many mainstream links, like amazon?
An absolute must on my blogs are Akismet and Wordfence. Anything else is like what others said, it depends on the type of blog and type of content as to what other plugins you’ll find most helpful.
I’ll add Wp Optimize which optimizes your db, and saves valuable space there. But as everyone else said, the others depend on the blog, but it should be noted, “less is better” when it comes to plugins. They are huge security holes, and resource drains on system resources, as if WordPress itself isn’t enough of a hog.
I try to do everything server side with tools like fail2ban, clamav mod_secuity etc. which keeps WordPress overhead down ie. the fewer the plugins the better. Lately for WP I’ve been using a brilliant plugin called: GoodBye Captcha that does a lot in a small package and works very well.
Statcounter, Broken Link Checker, Wordfence, Infinite WP and Yoast SEO are the plugins I install on most of my blogs.
