Beauty of people

Recommended Wordpress plugins

Over the past two years I have set up several Wordpress installations for myself and others. These are the plugins that I install every time:

• FCKEditor. A great editor. The newest version with its colored buttons looks ugly (use an older version if you still have that), but it does a good job.
• ReCaptcha. Of course. Akismet does a good job catching spam, but ReCaptcha adds another layer of spam protection, and your contributors do ’some good’ work at the same time. You have the addiotional benefit of activating MailHide, which hides email addresses.
• Raw HTML. Wordpress occassionally messes with you inserted HTML (embed) code, especially when you prepare post with Youtube embed code (for publishing later). If you come back to your post at a later time with the intention of publishing it, the embed code is gone – ‘interpreted away’ by Wordpress.
• TweetMeme. This allows your readers to tweet your posts.
• My category order. This allows you to determine the order in which your categories appear, so you can have the Other… category at the bottom.

There is a plugin for database backups that I have not tested yet, because I download my Wordpress database from the Plesk control panel at the providers that I use.

I’ was also experimenting with the Websense Defensio spam filter, but this had a serious conflict with FCKEditor. I had to disable Defensio to edit, forgot to re-enable it a couple of times, and ended op with 1000’s of spams ;-(
That’s too high a price, so I reverted to Akismet and reCaptcha.