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Complete List of OMB WordPress Plugins

John P.

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One Man’s BlogI 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.

To start out with, I use my own Rapid Access theme, which I built from the ground up to be fast, accessible, and skinnable. Feel free to grab it and to modify it.

Performance

  • WP Super Cache – My main man Donncha massively improved WP Cache to increase performance by about 300%! No blog should be without this plugin, and if you’re using WP Cache you need to upgrade immediately!
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith – redirects RSS feeds to FeedBurner to relieve burden from my server and provide for better tracking.

Revenue Generation

  • No Adverts for Friends – Again Donncha changes the character of my site! This plugin allows my regular visitors to NOT see ads, while ensuring that transient visitors DO see them. My Ad revenues increased even though regular readers never see ads.
  • MightySearch – Although WordPress has decent search functionality built in, if you switch to MightySearch and use your Google AdSense account you can earn a little cash from their embedded search.
  • Donncha’s Competitive Ad Filter is also compulsory reading. My AdSense revenue doubled because of him, so you might wanna pay attention!

Spam Protection

  • Bad Behavior – provides protection against automated script-bots.
  • Akismet -checks all comments against a known spammer database. Catches 99% of em’ and also flags a few incorrectly which I have to manually release later.
  • Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – after getting off to a bit of a rocky start, we got things sorted out and I’ve installed this plugin for spam free feedback and to demonstrate there are no hard feelings.

SEO and Navigation

  • WP Admin Bar Reloaded – Adds a small admin bar to the top of every page. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it!
  • No WWW – Matt Mullenweg built this little gem to redirect all domain requests from http://www.yourdomain.com to http://yourdomain.com. This improves search results.
  • Other Posts from Cat plugin for WordPress – Notice the related links below each of my posts? Well, this is the plugin that handles that.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – creates a sitemap which helps search engines fully index all pages to ensure better search performance.
  • StripTease – Strip “#more” fragments from “Read More” teaser links so the short article summaries on the home page link to the top of the individual page.

Commenting

  • Comment Quicktags Reloaded – provides the handy little buttons for “Bold”, “Italics”, etc. at the top of each of the comment boxes.
  • WP AJAX Edit Comments – allows you to edit your own comments for up to 15 minutes after you submit them. This lets you correct those horrible spelling mistakes you notice AFTER you post a comment.
  • Comment Referrers – Again my boy Donncha comes through with a plugin that appends referrer info to comment e-mails.
  • Paged Threaded Comments – one of the greatest plugins of all time, this functionality should be incorporated into the WordPress code! It threads the comments so people can respond to specific comments and keep related responses grouped together.
  • Recent Comments Widget – A must have, this shows the most recent comments over in the sidebar – a very popular feature on the blog here.
  • Subscribe To Comments – allows commenters to check a box to receive notification of follow ups.
  • Show Top Commentators – creates a highly customizable list of top commenters on the blog. You’ll see it over in the sidebar as I use this in conjunction with the Executable PHP widget.

Site Functionality

  • Executable PHP widget – Allows you to execute PHP commands from a plugin within the sidebar. I use this in conjunction with the Show Top Commentators plugin you see over on the right.
  • PJW Mime Config – used to add new upload capabilities to the built in WordPress uploader. I use it to add unusual file types like the Google Earth KML or KMZ files on posts like this.
  • runPHP – Allows you to put PHP code into a post and have it be executed.
  • Wikipedia nofollow – Searches for links to Wikipedia.org, and adds a rel=”nofollow” tag if necessary. Why? Because they do it to you!
  • WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling.

Graphics and Multimedia

Comments

  3. Ah ok, I was thinking it might be my computer, because the bar is still showing, just thinner and no text / edit link / countdown in it :)

    Kim

  4. Yeah, sorry… that plugin was eating up a ton of resources on the server and causing the site to crash every time it got Dugg. Given the frequency of home page visits this site has on Digg I removed it to save my sanity. :-)

    If anyone has any suggestions for other versions that work better I’m all ears!

    John

  6. This is the one I ended up going with.
    All in one SEO

    I’m pretty impressed so far, I can edit the meta descriptions for each post/page

    and don’t worry about it John, I couldn’t keep up with all the comments on your blog, I’m just happy to see what new stuff you post each week. :)

  7. I implemented the competitive ad filter, and while it didnt double my figures there is certainly an improvement… Broke records 3 times since installation :)

    Thanks a lot for posting this.

    Kim:)

  9. Sorry Brandon, I missed your questions previously… volume is picking up a bit lately. :-)

    I’m not aware of any meta description plugins that I’d recommend. The ones I’ve encountered have been resource hogs and impacted site performance. I’ve got problems handling all the load around here already so not looking to implement this.

    Having said that, the mata description is not going to deliver much in terms of SEO, so you have to weigh that against performance.

    Check with WebUrbanist though. I know he was using one…

    John

  10. still nothing ? all my results from my blog post are showing the same meta description :(

    I’ll go look at the plugins again, but last time I wasn’t impressed.

    cheers

  11. none ?
    I looked around the wp mods site, but there are so many.
    I just want to pull the meta description from each post.
    Like the first 150 characters. :)

    Anyone know of a wp plugin that will do this ?

    Thanks

  14. Great question, and I should have mentioned that.

    I use FeedBurner to deliver my daily RSS feed and e-mail subscriptions, and I use their FeedFlare script to serve the social networking links. I highly recommend them because not only is it one simple javascript, but it offloads the work to their servers to keep track of Diggs, and other stats you see reflected.

    John

  15. What do you use for your social networking links above your post? I’ve been trying to find out what plugin this is for quite a while and I’ve noticed alot of sites use it.

    Also WP Admin Bar sounds like a great plugin. I’m going to install it on my site.

  17. John, thanks for this, I could use a couple of these :)

    The Competitive Ad Filter link doesn’t work though?

    Also, the paged comments, does it preserve nested comments? I have one article with 400+ comments and the thing I hated was that paged comments were necessary for performance, but it killed the nesting which made it hard for people replying to other people to carry on a debate/conversation :(

    Considered it a necessary evil but if there is paging that preserves nested comments (using brian’s threaded comments plugin), I’ll swap it in a heartbeat =)

  18. Thanks for a very useful reference.

    The link for “Competitive Ad Filter” does not work and searching OMB for “Competitive Ad Filter” does not turn up any matches.

    Can you please include a link here for that plug-in?

    Thanks, John Williams

  19. I always like to post the plugins that I use on my blog as well. Although as of late I’ve been posting about particular plugins. I haven’t made a complete list in sometime. However, I also don’t use as many as you do! You have a lot!

    I’m gonna try out that Super Cache plugin, and see how that works out (although not because my site gets hammered or anything). It’s always nice to be faster, huh?