Chosing the right plugins when starting a new blog can be a bit overwhelming, especially when there are over 1,9000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Whether you end up setting up one blog or a couple blogs a month, you’ll eventually have your unique collection of WordPress plugins. Some add social functionality to your site, some optimize your blog for the search engines, some are simply for fun and some make the administration of your blog a lot more easier!
WTFlugin are plugins?
Think of plugins as simple extensions or extra code this will allow your blog to do more things. Simply drop them in to your WordPress directory and they should be good to go.
Where do I upload my new plugins?
- Locate your WordPress directory
- Within the WordPress directory, navigate to ‘wp_content/plugins’
- Upload your new plugins to this directory
The following is a simple list of plugins we use by default for all new WordPress installations for ourselves or our clients.
Get Google, Ask.com, Yahoo and MSN search to your site with XML compliant sitemaps. A must have if you want your pages indexed in the various search engines.
Manage your tags with Simple Tags
Integrate and link to Technorati, Delicious and Flikr tags with ease.
Limit your teaser to 100, 150 or even 400 words. A great plugin if you do not want to have your full post visible on the main and category pages. If the reader is interested, they click in to read more about your post.
Your post teaser may look something like: Read more of An example post (462 words, 3 images)
Display source code in your blog [download]
Stop wondering how to apply formatting to your PHP, Javascript, C or other code. This simple plugin helps developers share code online.
How to use it:
Use the following syntax within your blog post: [ source:php]your custom code here [/source] (take out the space)
Example:
[ source:php]
// your custom PHP source code
echo “Hello Web Developer World”;
[/source]
If all works well, should output similar to the following
Where are all these cool plugins and more?
WordPress Plugins Site is the best place to start: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
