Interface Lift And An Awesome WordPress Plugins List

As you probably have already noticed, depending on your sense of observation, I changed my blog’s design again today. The main reason for that change is that I wasn’t satisfied with the header and sidebar of the past theme. So here it is, a new theme, minimal again, but effective. There are absolutely no images in the whole design except for the RSS icon. I kept the footer unchanged since I like its look and feel and I couldn’t find anything to ameliorate.

But since I am not a professional designer and I can’t write a full post about the characteristic of the layout I chose or the typography concepts in use, I will write about the WordPress plugins I use in the theme. As you may already know, this blog is driven by WordPress and plugins play a big part in this CMS. However, I am not a huge plugin user, but there are still 10 that I consider essential to a good blog.

Askimet
The first in my list is the only one that actually comes with a fresh WordPress install even if it is desactivated by default. Askimet is one of the most powerful and useful plugin. It is a spam filter that becomes especially handy when your blog starts showing up in search results. With approximately 99% of the comments posted on my blog being spam, I can’t live without this one.

All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack, as its name says, is a plugin that faciliate the search engine optimization of your blog. Using a simple administration interface, you can change the title of your pages with simple rules and it automatically adds various information to your pages headers like keywords or descriptions.

Google Analyticator
I first installed this one in a moment of lazyness. I didn’t want to manually integrate the Google Analytics code into my footer template in case I change theme in the future. However, it is when I visited the settings page that I realised all the power the plugin offers. Not only does it allow you to embed the analytics code automatically in your blog, but it also offers a variety of advanced options to tweak the service to your needs.

Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is a complement to All in One SEO Pack. Don’t be tricked by its name, it doesn’t only generate and submit your blog’s sitemap to Google; It also does so for Yahoo!, Live Search and Ask.com. This is a really good plugin if you want your blog to come up in search results. It also leaves a lot of place open for the user to customize the creation and the submission processes of the sitemap.

ShareThis
ShareThis is an essential for social bloggers. Like AddThis and other similar services, it makes it easy to embbed links to delicious, digg, Twitter, Facebook and other social services to your posts. The difference between ShareThis and these other services is that it does it better. The way the plugin is designed lets you position it wherever you want and change its appearance to match with your website.

Simple Tags
Simple Tags is a ninja plugin. In no way your user will ever notice you are using it, but that doesn’t mean it is not useful. It allows you to manage your tag really easily in the administration interface. You can mass tag as well as auto tag your posts using different auto tag services. On the front-end side, it offers more functions to display your tags the way you want, whether it is in a list or in a cloud.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
This one is a must for coders. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved is the most complete code highlighting plugin I found. It supports a wide array of languages and offers different color schemes to match your design. It also displays your code in a concise and effective way. If you write code often, you need this one.

Twitter for WordPress
For the Twitter fans out there, this plugins allows you to integrate the twitterfeed of any public profile. It lets you choose what information to grab, what to display and how to display it. Twitter being pretty minimal, the plugin is also pretty minimal, but it does what it should do and it does it well.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
Another plugin for the lazy bloggers, WordPress Automatic Upgrade does what it says it does, it automatically upgrades your wordpress install when a new version comes out. It does so step by step, asking for user input between each step to make sure nothing goes wrong. It also gives you links to backups of your database and system in case something breaks during the update process.

WordPress Related Posts
The final plugin in my top ten list is WordPress Related Posts. This one is a plus for your reader and yourself at the same time. It displays links to posts similar to the one currently displayed by analysing the tags and categories of each posts. This hopefully keeps visitors for a longer time on your blog, giving them more to read.

So this is it. A new interface and a new awesome list of wordpress plugin. I hope you enjoy your new reading environment and never forget: stay KISS!

Tags: Web Design, WordPress