So, you got yourself a #wordpress blog, self-hosted, all the bells and whistle, right? Except when you log into the dashboard, things look pretty simple. Where’s all the flexibility and functionality that everyone told you about?! Relax, friend – it’s all in the plugins. If you’re a casual blogger, semi-pro or even just starting out, these plugins are a must.
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Top 5 Essential Plugs for WordPress
(Install these before your write your first post!)
- FD Feedburner Plugin. If you’re going to be writing a blog, or if you’ve been authoring a blog for a while and you just migrated, I’m sure you know at least one thing: people will read this. Even if you are just starting out, eventually someone will read what you’ve published. Goshdarnit, you want to KNOW about it! Not only that, you want to know if they liked what they read enough to keep reading it again and again. Promoting your RSS feed will allow you to do just that, and you’ll need to set up a Feedburner account and use the FD Feedburner Plugin to make sure you know who can’t get enough.This plugin automatically and seamlessly redirects all of your feeds to your Feedburner URL (which you provide in the settings on your WordPress Dashboard). Even better, you can choose to automatically forward feeds for tags and categories as well – perfecgt
- WordPress Database Backup. Whether you spend minutes or hours a day working your masterpiece blog, you want to be sure that all of your hard work is backed up. I mean all of it. Don’t just settle for posts and comments. You want to ensure your entire database, including your widgets, general preferences, plugins, posts, comments – they all need to be backed up. This plugin will do just that. Not only that, but you can pick and choose which tables to back up, schedule backups, have them emailed or download them straight to your computer.
- CommentLuv. Share the love. This plugin will automatically insert the last blog post of your commenter(s) when they enter the URL of their website. It’s a nice feature, commenters love it, and it makes it a lot easier to find and visit their blog when they comment on yours!
- WordPress Thread Comment. This is a less-known plugin, but I love it. It’s the only commenting plugin for WordPress (aside from an entirely separate system such as Disqus) that will allow you to reply to comments on your blog and email that comment – the entire comment – to the original commenter. This helps you keep the discussion on your blog and ensures that everyone who takes the time to comment on your site knows that you’ve taken the time to respond!
- WP-Super-Cache. With all these plugins, your site has a lot more information to load. More information = slower load times = visitors are less likely to hang around if to see what you have to offer. Install, enable and configure WP-Super-Cache to help speed things up. It creates a server cache of pages, posts, comments and more so that visitors don’t have to wait for everything to load fresh; a cached version is presented to the visitor, in turn speeding up the loading time! Got a hot topic? Make your site “Digg-proof” by enabling lockdown or caching a specific page or post.
There are thousands of plugins out there for WordPress, and not all are created equal. Get your site outfitted with this solid choices and you won’t go wrong. Feel free to contact me or toss it out there in the comments with any questions you have about configuration or other WordPress plugins!
If you use twitter, a great plugin I just discovered is the Follow Me twitter badge plugin.
http://wpburn.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-followme-plugin
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You don’t really need that threaded comment plugin anymore since WP does that on its own now.
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MommyGeek Reply:
December 8th, 2009 at 6:27 am
@Jenny, the name of this plugin can be confusing, but if you read the description, the value in this plugin is not necessary threaded comments, but the ability to post a comment here on my blog, and have you automatically emailed that the comment has a reply. In addition to that, the plugin will also email the text of the reply directly to you – meaning you don’t need to come back to my site just to see what my reply was, while also enabling me to keep the discussion on the site as much as possible.
The commenter can then reply on the website, or continue the conversation via email if it needs to be taken offline.
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I know this post is super old but I wanted to make mention of the plugin Comment Reply Notification. It is the one that I use since threaded comments is now an option within wordpress itself.
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MommyGeek Reply:
May 2nd, 2010 at 1:54 pm
@Nolie, the “threaded comments” name of the plugin is pretty misleading
I really use it for the reply functionality that allows me to reply to your comment on my site, and also have my full comment auto-emailed to you as well. 
[Reply]
Nolie Reply:
May 2nd, 2010 at 2:54 pm
@MommyGeek, I responded back to you on the test comment you left over on my site to show that the plug-in I use works.
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