I recently completed the upgrade to WordPress 2.3 and thought it was about time I gave some credit where credit is due. So, the following is a complete list of all of the plugins that are in use here on OMB.

Perhaps others will find these plugins of use as well, but more importantly I want to thank the hard work of all the developers that make OMB what it is.
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Donncha O’Caoimh, one of WordPress’ lead developers spent the last few weeks working on a brand new plugin called WP Super Cache which is, without a doubt, the biggest advance in WordPress performance in years. (Please Digg it fast!)

Donncha has not only improved the existing ubiquitous WP-Cache system for users that are logged in (bug fixes, added plugin capabilities, etc), he’s literally invented a new methodology for static caching of documents for visitors which renders at least a 2-3X performance improvement over WP-Cache.
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As a result of three Digg homepage appearances over a period of a few weeks bringing my blog to it’s knees I decided to make a few changes. In addition to acquiring a new server and finding someone to optimize the heck out of it for me, I also decided to re-vamp my Wordpress theme.

I’m probably a little pickier than most, but I was looking for the following list of features in the new theme:

• Speed – Along with the rapid growth of traffic on this blog I noticed a decline in page responsiveness. That is not something I want to subject hundreds of thousands of people to monthly. But most of the themes I came across suffer from “PHP bloat”, or the author’s feeling that more is always better.
• Accessibility – being one of the founders of HTMLHelp.com, it’s important to practice what I preach. So themes need to be accessible by any Web browser, on any operating system at any screen resolution – including screen readers for the visually impaired. This is currently very, very hard to find.
• Search Friendly – Although almost every theme claims to be “Search engine friendly”, I found that many could use quite a bit of improvement.
• Extensible – Webmasters have different tastes, so themes need to be flexible. Unfortunately the majority are poorly documented, use illogical naming schemes for CLASSes and IDs, and generally make it hard to modify them.

After having no luck finding an appropriate theme out of the hundreds that are publicly available I decided to just build it myself. The theme is currently in use here on One Man’s Blog, and I’m now making it available to anyone that would like to use it.
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There is a new advertising mechanism being offered by AdBrite called BritePic which allows Web authors to place advertising on or around photos on any Web site. However, Web authors need to be aware that this service can have some fairly drastic consequences.

The way BritePic works is, you simply replace a direct link to an image with a JavaScript link from AdBrite that includes the image link. Anywhere on your web site that you would normally insert an image, you now insert the BritePic link.
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WP Admin Bar is an indispensable Wordpress plugin which displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page – but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.

I find this plugin to be absolutely essential to my enjoyment of Wordpress. It allows me to easily jump back and forth between viewing the blog and various management functions on the back end. If you’ve never used it before you’re going to wonder how you got by without it all this time.
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The Google Translator plugin allows Wordpress to add a number of alternate languages to your blog.

This plugin is derived from Scott Hough’s WP Translate, but makes a number of changes:

• The Google Translate service is used, which does a much better job of maintaining page layout then Babelfish.
• Height and width attributes are included for all images.
• ‘rel=nofollow’ has been added to all links to prevent search engines from following them.
• Alternate text for all images have been improved.
• The plugin fully validates under XHTML.

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It pains me to report this, because the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form version 2 from Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley seems to be a nice contact form for Wordpress, but the fact remains that this plug-in is dangerous and designed to secretly Spam blogs on which it is placed.

This stems from the fact there is an option that users believe will disable the display of credit links back to the author’s web sites; however, this option does not actually remove the links. It merely makes them invisible – and this is enough to cause Google to remove a site.
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