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WordPress Plugins
WordPress is my blogging platform of choice, and I use it as a CMS here and on several other sites too. I've taken a liking to writing WordPress plugins, small ones that help me out easily, or bigger WordPress plugins to fix larger issues. If you want to hear all my WordPress tips & tricks, be sure to sign up for my WordPress newsletter!
Over the last two years I've built quite a few WordPress plugins to enhance it:
Functionality Plugins
Some things should have just been built in in WordPress, these plugins make it look almost like it is.
Enhanced contact form
The original WordPress contact form plugin by Ryan Duff was cool (no link since the page is down), as it made a simple drop in contact form for your site. I've used it for a lot of my sites and was always quite happy with it. I just wanted a few simple additions: the referring page on the site, which made people decide to contact me, and the original referer, showing from which page or search... More »Yoast Breadcrumbs
This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Why you should do this is outlined in my WordPress SEO article.They could for instance look like this:InstallationDownload the plugin Unzip the package and upload the file to your WordPress installation's plugins folder Enable the plugin Adjust any settings you want under Settings -> Breadcrumbs Add the following code... More »FriendConnect commenting
With Google FriendConnect, you could already allow people to become a "member" of your sites community, and do all sorts of fun stuff with that. But when they were logged in like that, they still had to enter their name, email address and website. This FriendConnect Commenting plugin fixes that.Download this pluginYou can now allow visitors to log in with their FriendConnect ID, and leave... More »Simple Taxonomies
WordPress 2.8 introduced a "simple" way to add taxonomies to WordPress. It still required coding though. This plugin allows you to add taxonomies just by giving them a name in the backend. It then creates the taxonomy for you, provides a widget you can use to display a "taxonomy cloud" or a list of all the stuff in there, and it allows you to show the taxonomy contents at the end of posts and exc... More »
Analytics and Metrics Plugins
Want to know what's going on on your blog? Install one or more of these plugins and gain yourself the deepest insights!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics for WordPress is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Of course, you could just copy the tracking code into your theme and be done with it, but then you'd miss a whole lot of features that this plugin has to offer you. All the extra data this plugin can add to your tracking is what makes Google Analytics for WordPress into the most powerful tracking tool you've... More »Blog Metrics
Based on ideas in an excellent post by Avinash Kaushik this plugin calculates the following:Raw Author Contribution:average number of posts per month average number of words per postConversation Rate:average number of comments per post without your own comments average number of words used in comments to postsBoth for all the time you've been blogging, and for the... More »adCenter Analytics
Formerly known as Gatineau for WordPressThis plugin does one simple thing: add the Microsoft adCenter Analytics javascript tag to all your pages.... More »From RSS?
From RSS WordPress pluginSometimes you want to do something extra for your RSS subscribers, you might want to give them a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some annoying footer about subscribing to the RSS feed. This plugin facilitates that, you can simply do something like this:if (function_exists('from_rss')) { if (from_rss()) { echo "Hi there RSS reader!"; }... More »
SEO & Affililate Plugins
WordPress is superbly optimized by itself, for a content management system, but it can still use a few plugins here and there to get it to the absolute top.
Meta Robots
There's no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.A quick video on how to use this plugin:This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags. Prevent indexing of the... More »RSS Footer
This very simple plugin let's you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to "Post from: " and then a link back to your blog, with your blog's name as it's anchor text, which you can edit like this:To install, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it, upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder and enable it. You can then also choose to position the sent... More »Permalink Redirect
This plugin fixes all sorts of weird addons to your URL's by automatically 301 redirecting to the permalink for that post, page, category or tag page.Only use this plugin if you're 110% sure you know what you're doing.That way, a URL like this:http://www.example.com/page1/?q=ekWill be automatically redirected to:http://www.example.com/page1/It's easy to work with: just dow... More »Amazon Auto Affiliate Linker
By request of Michael Gray, I coded this plugin to Auto Affiliate Linker, which automatically adds your Amazon Affiliate ID to the back of all the links to Amazon you use in your blog!... More »Canonical URL's
This plugin helps you solve duplicate content issues on your site. It's not the cure for all evil, but it will make it easier by preventing tagged URL's from being indexed.Suppose you have read my Twitter Analytics post, and you've started tagging all the URL's you spread on Twitter with Google Analytics campaign variables. So at some point, a search engine would enter your site through this U... More »
Social Media Plugins
If you're the kind of person who is social or shares his content elsewhere as well, these plugins might come in handy!
TweetBacks
People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.If you're having any kind of issues, please... More »Upcoming
If you've seen my speaking page, you know what this plugin does, if not, you should check it out right now. Basically it gets all of your Upcoming events from Upcoming through the API, and allows you to show these to your users.InstallationDownload, and unzip the zip file Upload the upcoming directory to your plugins directory Enable the plugin and go to it's settings page Enter your A... More »SlideShare
This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code.It has one (!) setting, "default width". If you set that setting, it will make all presentations appear at the width you set there, allowing you to easily adapt the width to your theme's content width.Version history1.5 Added support for the updated shortcod... More »CrunchBase Widget
This is a plugin to easily include CrunchBase widgets in your posts. This way you can easily point your readers to more specific information on a certain person, company, product or financial institution.The syntax is easy, you write [cb type="company"]TechCrunch[/cb] and it will automatically include a widget like this one:[cb type="company"]TechCrunch[/cb]The other ty... More »
More useful WordPress info
Be sure to check out my info on WordPress SEO and WordPress hosting while you're looking around this site, and if you're looking to hire a developer, have a look at my WordPress consulting services!
Fixes and Tweaks
While WordPress is a wonderful system, you'll sometimes want to tweak a couple of things here and there, these plugins are here to help.
Blog Icons
Based originally on a request of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, I created this plugin to easily add an Apple iPod Touch / iPhone icon, a favicon and a feed image to your blog. Just choose to upload the files, or put the URL's to the files in the boxes, and enjoy!Check out what a feed image looks like:And see how easy the backend of this plugin is:... More »Search Suggest
Don't you hate it when you search for something on a WordPress blog, and only after being frustrated for a bit there there's no results, you realize that you've made a spelling error? Or that there's too many results and that you'd rather refine your search a bit, but don't know to what?Search Suggest offers help in both cases. Using the Yahoo! API for spelling and related searches, it retriev... More »Minimum Comment Length
Don't you find it annoying when someone comments with just a smiley? Or a "thanks"? On quite a few forums you have to leave a comment with a minimum of 15 characters to be able to comment, but WordPress doesn't allow you to set such a threshold. With this plugin, it does. If you install this plugin, you'll get a new option page with 2 input fields, in the first of which you can set the amount... More »Comment Redirect
Your first time commenters are precious people, once you realize that they're first time commenters. This plugin allows you to redirect just those people to a page of your choosing!Download it here.... More »Email commenters
Sometimes you want an easy way to e-mail all the people who commented on a certain post. Up till now that took a bit of work, now it's as easy as installing this plugin, and clicking the link you'll get underneath each post labeled "Mail the commenters on this post"!This link is, of course, only there when the person looking at the page has admin rights. It looks like this:... More »Users to CSV
Kickstart your mailinglist! Sometimes you have a well running blog, and you decide you want to create a mailinglist. What's easier than to kickstart it by exporting the list of your blog's users, or even all your commenters, to a CSV file, and importing that into your mailinglist software? Nothing. Right. But where's the export button?This plugin adds just that: an admin screen under users... More »Hide Tag Input
By default in WordPress 2.3 and up, you have a tag input section below your posts, which looks like this:Since I don't use any tags on most of my blogs, I found that tag input annoying, and wanted to remove it from my edit screen. This small plugin allows you to do that, by simply adding a bit of css the admin head, which hides the input field. Just download, unzip, put it into your plugin... More »Downloads
Most plugin authors host all their plugins on WordPress.org, and though this has huge advantages, it denies them of one thing: easy access to statistics of downloads. Recently, the WordPress team added a WordPress plugin information API to WordPress.org (which is very well documented here).Using this API I've built a widget that shows up in my dashboard OR can be used as a shortcode, showing... More »Optimize DB
MySQL is a great database, but it doesn't clean itself up the way it should sometimes. This plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. For a full explanation, see this article.The interface is very simple at the moment: just one button: Optimize Now, and some info on how much space wi... More »RSS Shortcode
This very simple WordPress plugin does one thing: it allows you to embed something like this:By adding a bit of code to your posts or pages that looks like this:[rss feed="http://yoast.com/feed/" num="3" excerpt="false"/]It has three variables:feed: required, the feed address. num: the number of items to show (optional, defaults to 5) excerpt: whether or not to sh... More »
