Cool and Useful Wordpress Plug-Ins
So, in another one of those periods where I could probably be doing something a bit more productive at work I decided instead to go on a hunt for useful plug-ins, and as I have many times in the past, given up in frustration after about 30 minutes or so…
I’ve found a few that I like a lot and I’m using on this blog:
- Akismet: Developed by the folks that made WordPress, this plug is a fantastic comment spam catcher. I’ve been using it for about a month now on the Cruise Planners site, and it’s caught every piece of comment spam thrown at it so far.
- Theme Switcher: Ok it’s just eye candy, and I’m not sure if any of the small handful of readers to the blog have tried it out, but I think the concept is pretty neat. Right now you have the option of switching between two themes that I really like. If you’re not a big fan of the theme that I have on the site right now, check out the theme switcher in the tool bar and see if you like the other one better!
- Bad Behavior: This one I just downloaded and installed today both here and on the Cruise Planners site. It’s supposed to look at all the incoming traffic to a blog and stop things like scraping the blog for e-mail addresses and other “bad blog visiting behavior.” You can check it out here.
Call me greedy, but I want more! Here’s some of my wish list, if you have suggestions for these plug ins (that work!) leave a comment:
- Spell Checker: A friend suggested just installing a spell checking plug-in to Firefox, which isn’t a bad idea. I use Firefox for about 95% of my web browsing experience at home and like it a lot… The trouble is I don’t always use Firefox, sometimes it doesn’t play nice for me and I have to shift to Internet Explorer. I also don’t have access to Firefox at work. In those cases, having something that was part of WordPress would be nice.  I tried this Ajax based one and didn’t like it at all… Any thoughts on one that works?
- Post expanding thingy:Â The wife first showed me this on a blog that she reads
(BTW Mir if you see this the wife thinks you’re pretty! 
) watch what happens when you click on her “more” link…Â I tried using this plug-in to do that, on the Cruise Planners site, and it worked kinda ok in Internet Explorer, and pretty much broke the blog in Firefox and Safari.
There’s probably lots of other cool plug-ins out there, but it looks like lots of them either do stupid things that I don’t want or are written for old versions of Wordpress…Â Got a cool plug in that works with the latest version of Wordpress, leave me a comment and maybe I’ll play with it…
on 10 Jul 2006 at 4:04 pm # The Queen
First, Honey, *YOU* need to tell Mir she is pretty. Thems the rules — and you won’t get in trouble if you tell her she’s pretty. Now if you run off with her — that will get you in trouble…but alas.
Second, Wordpress already does the “More” tag expanding thingie without the plug -in. Mir has upgraded her site TO WordPress and it no longer does the “ok, I’m done” or a Less tag. It is now all yummy WordPress goodness. Or is that what you were looking for?
(Yes, folks, we live in the same house. No, we don’t actually speak to each other. Is there something wrong with that?)
on 10 Jul 2006 at 8:36 pm # michael
She changed the tag on her site. It’s not the general Wordpress more tag that I wanted. Click on the link to see what the plug in is supposed to do.
Instead of adding the page break that the more tag does and jumping to a new page, I want to expand the post in the existing page.