Thursday 13: Thirteen must-have WordPress plugins

1. @Reply – allows you to do Twitter-style replies to people who leave comments on your entries
2. Akismet – awesome spam protection
3. BM-TrackPing – separates pings and trackbacks from regular comments (very useful when organizing giveaways and selecting winners!)
4. CommentLuv – share the commenting love!
5. Comment Timeout – automatically close comments after X amount of weeks/months. This is especially great if you have a giveaway for baby shower games, and don’t want people entering after the contest has ended.
6. CR Post to Ping.fm – send notifications of new blog entries to Ping.fm
7. Custom Smilies – should be self-explanatory
8. Flickr Manager – makes adding Flickr photos to blog entries a no-brainer
9. Math Comment Spam Protection – more spam prevention
10. Search and Replace – run “find X and replace it with Z” queries from the admin panel
11. Spam Karma 2 – awesome spam prevention
12. TTFTitles – use fonts to generate custom title images
13. WP-PageNavi – add numbered pages navigation to your posts

Seeing as how I upload photos to Flickr on a regular basis, and regularly include photos in my blog entries, it only makes sense to span the distance between Flickr and WordPress with a plugin. Only, I didn’t think of that until recently. Now, there are several Flickr plugins available, but there’s only one that does what I want — include a handy link of sorts, that when clicked, will open up to display X amount of recent photos (and include links for searching by keywords, through photosets, etc.). And that plugin is WordPress Flickr Manager.

WordPress Flickr Manager does exactly what I want it to. It adds the Flick logo to the Upload/Insert ribbon that is located above the text editor on the Add New Post page. When clicked, it launches an overlay window that shows your recent photos (the number shown is customizable, of course). Clicking on any photo takes you to an individual photo customization page, similar to what WordPress’s Add an Image page does. There, you specify alt/title/caption (if desired), choose the size and alignment of the photo, and then click Insert to insert it into your post. The HTML coding goes wherever you have your cursor at. Simple, eh? That’s what I love about it. Intuitive, rich with the features I need, yet simple and quick. You can use this plugin to show off photos of your kids, the baby shower favors you’re thinking of having at your upcoming baby shower, photos of the products that you find effective at getting rid of blackheads, whatever. Whatever you upload to Flickr is there for you to add to your posts!

I will caution you, however: WordPress Flickr Manager, by default, does not work with newer (2.9+) versions of WordPress. But hacking it to make it work is quite simple. Simply open up the four .php files located inside the /js folder, and do a mass search/delete for the @ symbol. That’s right, find any instance of @ and delete it. Save, activate the plugin, customize your settings, and you’re good to go!

Lately I have been getting a lot of spam. And by a lot, I mean A LOT. And it’s not like I’m not accustomed to spam. Sadly, I am. But we’re talking hundreds of comments per day per blog. And that’s despite me using Akismet, Sparm Karma 2, and Math Comment Spam Protection. After a few days of deleting thousands of spam comments from all of my blogs combined, it dawned on me: instead of being reactive, I should be proactive. Why delete thousands of spammy comments about anti wrinkle treatment if I can prevent the comments from being left in the first place?

So after searching around, I downloaded and installed Comment Timeout. Comment Timeout is a simple plugin that allows you to specify, on a global base, that comments should be closed after X amount of days. A small options area is also added to the Add New Post page, in case you want to leave comments open longer on a particular post. You can set different options for trackbacks as well.

So far, the plugin is working great. I have noticed a definite decrease in spam, and that always makes my day!

A lot of bloggers use social networks as a way to keep in touch with family and friends. Additionally, these and other bloggers use social networks to promote new blog posts. I’m one of those bloggers, and if you’re reading this, perhaps you are too. You can manually update your social network status to reflect a new blog entry, or you can use plugins that update just a particular social network. Or, you can get yourself a copy of the fabulous CR Post to Ping.fm and allow it — and Ping.fm — to update all of your connected social networks for you.

CR Post to Ping.fm sends a new blog entry notification (the exact notification is 100% customizable) to Ping.fm, who in turn distributes it to any social networks you have connected to your Ping.fm account. The plugin allows you to specify the categories in which new posts will trigger notifications. You can choose all, or specify the categories you want to include notifications for, or categories that you would like to exclude notifications for. This is handy if you participate in paid blogging, don’t want to start a war as a result of an opinionated post on the electronic cigarette, or simply don’t want to update your social networks every single time you hit the Publish button.

CR Post to Ping.fm is incredibly easy to install, and simply requires you to input your Ping.fm application key in order to get started.

Tonight I spent quite a bit of time upgrading WordPress and an assortment of plugins on about 45 WordPress-powered blogs. Yes, that is a lot of blogs. The subjects on the blogs vary from office furniture supplies to wedding favors to online shopping to baby shower invitations to cooking to general topics. There’s definitely a lot going on with these blogs. The upgrading isn’t too bad, though at the same time it’s a royal pain. It’s a lot of clicking and navigating, really, but it can be both tedious and tiresome! I swear I’m getting a case of carpal tunnel right about now. My right wrist is not too happy with me.

I wish there was some type of WP feature (or a plugin, haha) that would enable plugins to upgrade themselves. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

By default WordPress allows you to display an extremely customizable list of blogroll links in your blog’s sidebar. But what if you want to display links on a separate page? Manually coding in links is redundant and inefficient, but WordPress disables PHP coding on posts and pages. Fortunately, there are two workarounds:

First, there’s a plugin called WP Render Blogroll Links which will quickly and easily allow you to make a customizable links on a page or post (yes, post) of your choice.

Or, you can do things the hard-coded route and create a page and an accompanying template file to display your links with. For this method, you’ll need to create a new document and title it links.php. Here’s how mine is set up (note: you can copy and modify index.php or even page.php to get a “base” for your links page):

‹?php
/*
Template Name: Links
Author: Jenn
Author Email: x@jenn.nu
Author URL: http://www.jenn.nu
*/
?›

‹?php get_header(); ?›

‹h2›‹?php the_title(); ?›‹/h2›‹br /›
‹p›
‹strong›Links‹/strong›‹br /›
‹?php wp_list_bookmarks(‘title_li=&categorize=0&category=0&before=&after=‹br /›&show_images=0&between= of &show_description=0&orderby=name’); ?›
‹/p›

‹?php get_footer(); ?›

The important part is Template Name: Links. This makes your new template file easily recognizable and listed within the Admin Dashboard.

Save the file as links.php, then upload to your current theme’s folder.

Now, login to your dashboard, create a new page, title it “Links”, and select the links.php template file you just made as the template for the page.

Congrats — your links page should work like a charm!

P.S. Check out the wp_list_bookmarks page on the WordPress Codex to determine what parameters to use to display links as you see fit.

I came across the coolest WordPress plugin today: Render Blogroll Links. It allows you to create a post or page of bookmarks from your WordPress blogroll in one easy step. Typically creating a page for blogroll links entails creating a template page that has the necessary PHP functions on it, then creating a page and pointing it to that links.php template. Not difficult, but definitely time consuming. If you have multiple blogs to set up with pages for blogroll links, or you don’t want to be hassled with managing more template files, then this plugin is for you!

How does it work? Simply install, and plop on whatever page you’d like to display blogroll links are. Check out the included documentation (also listed on the Render Blogroll Links page made in your admin dashboard upon plugin activation) for how to tweak what types of links are displayed and how they’re displayed. One great tweak is the ability to include or exclude specific categories. This means having the capability of displaying all of your links, or maybe keeping links like baby shower favors and baby shower themes separate.

Has anyone noticed an increase of spam on their WordPress powered blogs? I know I have. What’s odd is that the blogs that are being hit the hardest aren’t even that popular. jenn.nu has a Google Page Rank of 4, yet it’s in-my-bag.com (PR of 2) and kitty.nu (PR of 2) that are being hit the hardest. Go figure?

With that said, what is your favorite anti-spam plugin? Or plugins? I need something robust and powerful and kick-ass. Help a girl out!

WordPress 3.0 has finally arrived! With the thirteenth major release of WordPress comes a new default theme, Twenty Ten, the merge of WordPress and MU (WordPress Multi-User), easier bulk updating of plugins (with just a single click), and a sexy new look for the dashboard.

Check out the video for a nice little tour:

Now go download!

Search and Replace is a WordPress plugin I would seriously be lost without. It does exactly what its name implies — it searches for a certain word or string of words and replaces them with whatever variable you’d like to use instead. It’s definitely great for application performance management. Recently I was playing around with stylesheets and renamed the elements I use to style the look of certain images. With Search and Replace, I was able to quickly go through eight years worth of blog entries and change all instances of Term A to Term B. It was done in under a minute!