my 10 favourite wordpress plugins

Versions of this post have been sitting in my drafts for years.. it was interesting to go back and see the plugins I could not do without compared to today though I found that actually there haven’t been that many that have changed. Just new ones have come in and added to the funcitonality of WordPress.

Here are my favourite 10 today.

1. Akismet

I can’t really not mention Akismet. Made by the developers at Automattic, it stops spam in its tracks and is simple to use. What more do you need?

2. Disqus

I have dabbled with all the different third party social commenting tools over the years – Intense Debate, JS-Kit and Disqus – and lost comments as a result – but disqus seems to have a good balance of community vs features. There is of course Echo on the scene – which you can see here, which tracks reactions around the web – but whereas I initially thought it might blow Disqus out of the water, I am not so convinced now. Disqus already has that functionality. I think Disqus is already in a strong position to compete and grow.

3. All-in-One SEO pack

For all those SEO tweaks to help with your search rankings. Given the majority of people who reach this site come from search, its a pretty important part of the mix for me. I don’t use it enough.

4. Feedburner feedsmith

Another simple plugin which does what it says on the tin. Diverts people connecting to WordPress‘ RSS feed to my feedburner account. Keeps everyone in one place – handy if I ever want to change URLs. It also allows me to track the number of subscribers and measure interaction with my RSS feed. (The URL to the page hosting the plugin seems to have disappeared )

5. Google Analyticator

I have used a few Google Analytics plugins over the years and recently switched to this one, mainly as I saw it get a mention within a Google blog – its as good a recommendation as you will find

6. Google XML Sitemaps

One of those that helps make sure the various search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask) get updates of changes to your website.

7. Tweetmeme

I have used Sharethis in the past but this reduces the barriers to sharing even further (albeit with the loss of sharing with other networks) – from a rollover and click to just a click

8. WordPress Mobile Edition

iphones, androids.. they can all surf the real web.. none of that WAP stuff of years gone by but that doesn’t mean you cant make the interface more easy to read.

9. WP Super cache

Cache your blog, reduce the load on your blog server and increase the number of visitors your blog is capable of dealing with.

10. Zemanta

I started using Zemanta again last week. It adds value to your blog posts (links, images, related links). Before it did it in a way to really seemed to highlight Zemanta everywhere. Now it is more subtle and just as usable. This one looks like it might stay a while this time.

I think it is worth doing this post annually to see how it changes even if it means I might have to increase it to my favourite 15

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The domain move is complete – you as a reader probably have not noticed it all being well. All razorshine.com links should forward invisibly to the new riazkanani.com domain (in technical terms, the razorshine.com is using a 301 permanent redirect) and the existing feed should still work I would lov it if you could update your feed to this URL instead though: feeds.riazkanani.com/riazkanani

So how did I do it? Well there were plenty of options out there on the web for how to do this, but I think I have found an efficient way to do this:

1. BACKUP YOUR FILES AND DATABASE FIRST!!
2. Download the files and edit the wp-config.php file in the root directory. Change the database details from the old to the new domain. Note, if you are creating a new wordpress installation inside the same database, you will need to just change the table prefix (makes life harder later so avoid if you can!).
3. Copy all your files from your old domain to the new domain.
4. Backup and export your old database.
5. Create a new database and import the old content into it. (Note: if you are using one database, you will need to edit the file you exported and rename each of the tables to the new prefix – I really do not recommend this option though!).
6. Edit the wp_options table and change any occurance of the old domain to be your new domain (I just found siteurl, fileupload_realpath and fileupload_url).
7. I didn’t seem to catch everything in the tables, so go to settings>general inside your WordPress admin area (newdomain/wp-admin) and make sure all the values there show the new domain.
8. Finally 2 options:
   a. Download the Moving Your Blog plugin and install it on your old domain. Change the settings for this plugin to point to your new domain. Now any links coming into your old domain will revert to the new one. You can now delete all the old plugins, themes etc and reduce the WordPress installation on the old domain to be its most basic. This method does mean though that you need to keep an installation of WordPress running on the old domain.
   b. Add this line to your .htacces file (should be in your wordpress folder): RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] after the RewriteEngine On line. Warning: This will keep the old domain in the address bar after the redirect.
9. Go update all your links across the web

That is it, except in my case (and possibly yours) where I have 2 additional services I use on my blog. Feedburner and 3rd party comments. Here is what I did:

Feedburner: I changed the existing Feedburner feed url to point to my new domain. That meant existing subscribers will get the new content from the existing feed URL. But, as I did not want that URL long term, I also created a new feed at feeds.riazkanani.com/riazkanani and set that up as my new feed on all my links on the blog. The downside to doing this is slowly you will have to persuade people to move to the new one!

3rd party comments: I have used both Intense Debate and Disqus in the past. The good news is they both sync comments back to WordPress so when I moved the database all the comments came with me inside my WordPress database. If you want to use the same commenting account as before, it is as simple as reactivating whichever of the plugin you want to use. Again I wanted to use a different account (why make my life easy!) so I changed the settings and set it to import back to first Disqus (only 20 comments synced) and then after switching off Disqus,  I tried Intense Debate which seems to just be sitting there doing nothing. I guess I will have to update this post once that completes Disqus have offered to manually import the comments. It would be nice to know why they didnt import in the first place though!

Disqus released their new commenting system today. It adds:

# Comments are indexable by search engines (SEO-friendly)
# Export and import of comments
# Automatic synchronization between Disqus.com and your WordPress comments
# Uses the new Disqus API
# Moderate/administer your blog right from the WordPress admin

The important one there for me was the ability to import and export comments. It actually is not working for some reason right now (an export to Disqus gives an error) but I am hoping this is just teething problems. This feature meant I could move in the first place (as before moving to disqus meant a blackhole for any new comments), but it is also the trackbacks and larger userbase that makes me want to switch in the first place.

This does mean goodbye to Intense Debate for now – I loved the automatic export out of friendfeed provided by that service but the larger community of disqus hopefully will mean a greater number of people coming to this site. Not that I am ignoring Intense Debate – with the ability to import and export as well – I could move between providers with little pain – and not lose any comments in the process. This alone is going to make it interesting to see how this particular niche progresses. The competition is huge and with only minimal barriers to switch providers, somehow the commenting providers are going to have to balance innovation and stability to maintain their userbase.

I am far behind on completing posts lately (I have about 8 near completion) and now hate the back button on my mouse as I just lost a post I completed on push email for gmail using the iphone. I’ll try and remember it and write it up later now.

sighs.

(you would have thought WordPress could have cached it somewhere)

mutters.

So I finally upgraded to wordpress 2.5.1 (from 2.3). I was somewhat nervous thanks to some commentary by their biggest competitor (Typepad by SixApart). I can’t seem to find the link anymore. Mind you the follow up articles from people involved in creating WordPress with long lists of things to do in order to upgrade didnt help either! It definitely made me wait for a while longer than usual.

So how was it?

The upgrade was no different to previous WordPress upgrades. It was a simple process. Click a button to deactivate all plugins, upload some files, type in a URL and then reactivate plugins. (of course taking a backup beforehand!).

I worried about my plugins, and only my books plugin isn’t working. Irritatingly the author has a beta which might fix the issue but it requires a version of PHP I don’t have. No big deal. The books archive is there mostly for my own use.

Back to the installation, it is possible Typepad has an easier installation from scratch, I have not used it so I cannot comment. WordPress has been very flexible and always met my needs so for now Typepad doesn’t get a glance. I cannot see anything that would make me consider switching right now. Without that, WordPress would have to screw up big time to make me move as switching platforms is a huge barrier (it strikes me as being harder than an upgrade) and a quick search on google for “moving from wordpress to typepad” showed only one result with no method around it, the rest were all moving the other way! Even the Typepad site talks about WordPress categories and does not mention WordPress tags). That also implies to me that right now Typepad are not targeting WordPress users.