One of the great strengths of WordPress is its plugin system. In the upcoming 2.1 release, there is very little you can’t do as a drop-in plugin. This makes it easy to use WordPress as a CMS and keep your customizations separate from the main codeline; which in turn simplifies upgrades and maintenance.
I used the plugin architecture extensively to customize WordPress as I wanted it for my new site. Almost all of the functionality I added was done as plugins – many of which I’ve already released, others are still being polished for release.
I currently have 23 active plugins, and that doesn’t include my 404 Notifier plugin or Dougal’s Talk Like a Pirate plugin (both of which I activate as needed).
I think it’s easiest to just go through them as a list. Anything that isn’t linked is probably available on my WordPress plugins page (I’ve tried to note exceptions).
- 404 Notifier – this was written by me for my new site. It logs 404 (file not found) errors to help you fix them. This one is no longer active.
- Admin Drop Down Menu – written by Ozh, this is a great time saver.
- AK Custom Code – this was written by me for my new site. It includes the URL and query handling stuff to keep my golf blog separate from my main blog, custom template functions, ad handling code and a bunch of other misc. little stuff. This one isn’t released.
- Articles – this was written by me for my new site. It allows you to choose posts to highlight outside of the normal blog chronology. You can see it in action on my articles page.
- Do Follow – written by Kimmo Suominen. This turns off the ‘nofollow’ on your comment links after a certain period of time.
- Google Sitemaps – written by Arne Brachhold. Create a sitemap of your WordPress content, suitable for submitting to Google, Yahoo and MSN.
- Inline AJAX Comments – written by Peter Kashou. This is the plugin that loads the comments below the post on the home page, etc. I made a number of changes to this for my needs, at some point I might get around to making it both IE friendly and generic enough that I can send changes back to Peter.
- Last Modified Function – written by me a while ago. This simply shows the last modified date/time of a page.
- Limit Posts to Parent Category – written by me for my new site, based on Ryan Boren’s Front Page Cats plugin. This is the main SQL filtering for separating the golf blog from the main blog. It’s heavily customized for my site and isn’t suitable for release.
- Link Harvest – written by me for my new site. This creates a links list from the links in your content. You can see it in action on my links page. I’ve been working for the last few weeks to get it ready to release.
- Link Mojo – written by me for my new site. This is some basic link blog functionality, working the way I wanted it to. I’ve just about got it ready for release.
- Old Post Alert – written by me for my new site. This shows a banner in the comments area indicating the age of the post being commented on and encouraging commentors to look in the more recent posts to see if their comment is still relevant.
- Page Friendly Excerpts – written by me for my King Design web site. This creates excerpts on the fly for all posts and pages so that I can show them all together in my search results. Very simple, but I could release it if there is demand.
- Popularity Contest – written by me a year or so ago. This tracks which of your posts are most popular based on your visitor’s interaction with your site.
- Search Everything – written by Dan Cameron, updated to WordPress 2.1 compatibility by me. This plugin allows searches to include content from pages, comments, etc. as well as just posts.
- Share This – written by me for my new site. This wraps the “post to social site” and “e-mail to someone” functionality in a single friendly link.
- Shortcut Macros – written by me for my new site. This allows you to define little snippets to be expanded as longer text strings. It’s great for the lazy.
I expect to have this released pretty soon. - Spam Karma 2 – written by dr. Dave. Geof Morris recommended this to me a while back, it does a pretty good job.
- Title Reverser – written by me for my new site. This reverses all aspects of the page title in WordPress. There are similar plugins out there already, so I don’t plan to release this one.
- WordPress Mobile Edition – updated by me for my new site. This presents a mobile-friendly version of your site to visitors on cell phones, PDAs and other handheld devices.
- WP-CC – written by Firas Durri. This adds a machine readable Creative Commons license to each of my pages. Development on this plugin is dead and it has been superseded by WpLicense. However WP-CC worked exactly as I wanted it to, so I’m using it instead.
- WP Photos – updated by me for my new site. This is the system I use to manage adding images I’m hosting on this server to my blog posts. There are lots of other photo gallery plugins out there now, so I do not have plans to release this again.
- WP Since Last Visit – updated by me for my new site. This shows the little ‘New’ indicator by new posts and comments. I’ve got the old version available for download still, but the installation steps will probably keep me from releasing the new version. People had a really hard time with similar requirements when I first released Share This and I got a lot of rude e-mail as a result of the installation frustration.
- WP Unformatted – written by me a long time ago. This turns off the default WordPress auto-formatting on a per-post/page basis.
Whew – that’s a lot of plugins! Is it too many? How many is too many? I’ll try to cover that next time.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Gregory Pittman adds this Comment:
Very insightful. Thanks, Alex. I was hoping to use the Since Last Visit plugin because I find it helpful when visiting your site and I haven’t seen anything else like it out there. But thanks for the explanation as to why it won’t be updated.
December 13th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Mr Papa adds this Comment:
hard installation for Share This???? wow…
release em all I say
I too was hoping for the since last visit plugin…
very nice job indeed…
Mr Papa
December 13th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Dan adds this Comment:
Thanks for reminding me that I needed to update you as a contributer and to update that page.
Thanks again for the help.
December 13th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
parrott adds this Comment:
Do you know how long it will be before you are willing to release the WP Photos plugin? And the Link Mojo sounds good – is this for internal linking?
December 13th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Erik J. Barzeski adds this Comment:
Does anyone know when WP 2.1 will be available (or have a good guess)?
Alex, you should consider adding the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin.
December 13th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Looks like January for WP 2.1
I’ll think about the ’subscribe to comments’ plugin – since I’ve yet to fix the broken per-post comment feeds it’s an exceedingly reasonable request.
December 13th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
dvg adds this Comment:
I’m shocked that you don’t have the plugin which shows which plugins you have.
src: http://www.viper007b[...]lugins-used/
in action on my site: http://www.davidgagn[...]page_id=6195
December 13th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Viper007Bond adds this Comment:
Speaking of which, I really need to update that dang plugin (last updated over a year ago).
It’s currently a pain to use for the novice user and just needs a general recode. *adds it to his big list of things to do*
December 13th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
Good gracious, Alex!
And folks, if you want Alex to release a plugin, toss him a couple bucks. That’ll give him some incentive: he’s already done the hard work, and all that would remain is time to polish it up and write up a simple README. As much as we love his work and how he provides us for free, he’s an indie developer and has bills just like the rest of us.
December 13th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Actually, this is what you’d expect, but it’s really the opposite. Creating the code so that it works for me is probably 40% of the time spent. The other 60% is spent testing on WP 2.0.x, 2.1a, with the default theme, adding configuration options and writing up the README.
Yes, 60% of what I do to release a plugin is all for you guys.
December 13th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
Thanks for the correction, Alex.
December 13th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Weiran adds this Comment:
Can’t wait for Link Harvest
.
December 14th, 2006 at 1:40 am
Kyle Korleski adds this Comment:
Personally, I like WordPress for it’s simplicity as well.
December 14th, 2006 at 3:08 am
danithew adds this Comment:
I like the plugin infrastructure as well. Your since-last-visit plugin looks great (as it appears on your site) and I’m hoping to install it on my site.
December 14th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Gregory Pittman adds this Comment:
Alex, You have chosen to display entire posts on your blog’s front page, rather than just an excerpt. Different developers have different thoughts on this subject. Can you describe why you chose to do it the way you did?
Just curious.
December 14th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Alex adds this Comment:
:shrug: I can’t think of a good reason to only show an excerpt.
December 15th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Sara adds this Comment:
It was a great list Alex. I don’t think there can really be such a thing as too many or too little plugins. Plugins are designed to give us extra functionality and I think if that functionality is wanted or needed, no harm in adding a plugin. Since they are stand-alone; they shouldn’t interfere with anything else on the blog.
I completely agree with you about writing plugins. Well over a year ago I wrote a plugin for myself and I had started to get it ready for release but then I just got bus with other things Just recently I picked it back up and it has been a major chore to really get it to work so someone can just drag and drop it into multiple versions of WP. My most recent conflict was when I upgraded to php5 on my new server. So hopefully it will be released before the new year. Keep up the good work!
December 18th, 2006 at 1:42 am
Mike adds this Comment:
Alex,
I’d like to see the latest WP Since Last Visit as well even if it is distributed with tons of disclaimers – “Stop do not use unless you know what you are doing”, “Unsupported so don’t email me”, etc.
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
The currently available version works fine (I used it until a couple of months ago). The new version just works with my internal theme better.
It would take a long time to document how to implement the new version – if someone wants to pay for that time I’ll be happy to do it and release it.
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:53 pm
nop adds this Comment:
hi
February 26th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
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April 18th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Ryan Park adds this Comment:
Are you still planning on releasing Link Mojo? I’d love a simple and easy way to make “link blog” posts like you do.
By the way, I *love* your weekly “Around the Web” feature. You always pick a great selection of interesting links!
May 15th, 2007 at 3:19 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Thanks for the reminder, yes I still plan to release it.
May 15th, 2007 at 7:38 am
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