One topic that seems to be a common interest among WordPress users at all levels is the vast variety of plug-ins available, so I’m going to conclude my coverage of WordCamp Toronto with a look at some of the plug-ins recommended by the speakers, as well as a couple of new ones that were demonstrated.
Not surprisingly, many of the speakers advocated the use of tried-and-true plug-ins such as Contact Form 7, All in One SEO Pack, and Akismet, but with over 9000 plug-ins currently available, there are lots of unique ones which are worth learning more about. Here are just a few which I heard about for the first time at WordCamp and that you might want to check out, depending on the goals of your WordPress site.
- Broken Link Checker – if I need to tell you what this does, you probably shouldn’t bother reading the rest of this post
- Flickr Photo Album – pulls in your Flickr photosets and displays them as albums on your WordPress site
- Google Maps for WordPress – allows you to easily configure Google Maps and insert them into your blog.
- Post-Page-Association Plugin – lets you attach the posts from one or more categories to a page
- SlideShare – allows you to embed SlideShare presentations in your posts
- Socialite – automatically publishes blog posts to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace
- Su.pr – sends notifications of new blog posts to Twitter, using URLs that are attached to your StumbleUpon account so you can track the number of clicks
- WordPress Exploit Scanner – searches the files on your website and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious, and examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames
Pretty interesting stuff, eh?
The two plug-in demos were pretty cool too.
Author Avatars List is a plug-in for multi-author blogs that allows you to display a list of author avatars on your site. You can also insert individual author avatars on appropriate posts or pages. This is going to be really handy for a new project that is on my horizon!
Trailmeme for WordPress is a really amazing plug-in that provides your readers with a navigation aid over and above the standard categories and tags. It is ideal if you create a series of related posts, especially if they’re not published one right after the other. The best way for me to explain it is to let you see it in action at http://trailmeme.com/trails/WordCamp_Toronto_2010, which is a “trail” of posts about WordCamp Toronto 2010, including links to the presentations and related websites. While you’re checking it out, you can also find out what else you missed by not attending!
By the way, I haven’t tried any of the above plug-ins yet, so if you have, I’d sincerely appreciate your feedback.
Janet:
Thanks for the great shout-out
I added your latest post to the WordCamp Toronto trail: http://bit.ly/bJnz3z
One clarification. The trails on trailmeme.com are overlay trails that cross multiple sites. The one you linked to is that type of trail.
The plugin supports in-site/local trails, which show up organically on your own site. An example is this trail on our blog, http://blog.trailmeme.com/trails/the-future-of-content/
In the future, blog-level trails can be uploaded to trailmeme.com through an API, but let me not add to the confusion by attempting to explain more right now
Venkat
Venkat, thanks very much for that clarification, and for posting a link to an actual blog trail.
I understood it while you were presenting it, but I guess that’s what happens when you wait two weeks to write about something you learned…
Hi Janet,
Don’t you just love plugins! There always seems to be a plugin (or several) to accomplish whatever I’m trying to do in WordPress. Have you tried any of these plugins yet?
No, not yet, but I want to try the Broken Link Checker. Since I launched this blog nearly two years ago and even Your Organizing Business a year ago, I’m sure there have been a lot of changes.
I also want to try Google Maps for WordPress on the GHVA site so we can easily display a map for all our events.
What are your favourites?
Plugins are indeed fun. The SEO plugins bug me though, as some themes, like Thesis render them redundant.
That’s true, Gary, but there are a lot of people who aren’t using an SEO-optimized theme, so those plug-ins still have an important role to play.