Pisces Moon Studio

Previous entries:

• #1: Why WordPress?
• #2: Domain Names, Hosting Plans, and installing WP

One of the most versatile features of WordPress is the thousands of plugins available to make tasks easier or to add functions to the main program. Using plugins, you can set up WordPress as your entire website, as a PayPal shopping cart, as a membership site, as well as other exciting possibilities.

This week, let’s talk about the most useful plugins that I think every installation of WordPress should have. The first four are must-haves, in my opinion. #5 is optional, and the rest are ways to help increase reader interaction on your blog. Because who wants to write just to themselves without a conversation?

After the list, we’ll talk about how to install them.

1. Akismet

This indispensible anti-spam plugin comes with WordPress. It requires activation with an API key, which is free and only takes a minute or two; the plugin settings have clear instructions and links to follow for obtaining the key. Once you activate it, spam comments are generally not much of a problem. If some of them still get through, there are ways to tweak the settings on your blog so that your readers aren’t faced with links to beautiful Russian brides or online poker or those interesting pharmaceuticals that seem to be necessary to having a well-rounded life.

2. TinyMCE Advanced

WordPress comes with a visual editor that allows you to easily bold, underline, add links, and perform certain other operations while you are writing or editing your posts. Unfortunately, it has quirks. The most annoying of these is that if you write your blog post in another program and copy and paste it into WordPress, the visual editor removes all your paragraph breaks and formatting and runs all the text together in one big amorphous blob.

TinyMCE Advanced fixes that problem and adds a number of new features to the visual editor. If you normally write in Microsoft Word and copy/paste to WordPress, TinyMCE Advanced will automatically remove the useless MSWord code bits that don’t belong in your blog post. It also provides easier ways to change fonts, check your spelling, search and replace text, add and edit tables, and much more.

You can drag and drop any of these buttons onto your editor toolbar, so that if you don’t need spell check and never use tables, you won’t have those cluttering up your edit bar, yet you will have instant access to the tools you do use.

3. WP-DB-Backup

Every reputable hosting company provides automatic backups of your site and your databases. Generally, though, these backups run only once a week, often on Saturday or Sunday night when traffic to the server is low. So what happens if your site crashes on a Friday afternoon? Your hosting company can restore the database to their last saved state, but you would lose all your posts and comments since that copy was stored.

WP-DB-Backup puts backup control in your hands by emailing or saving a copy of your WordPress database on the schedule you set — once a week or once a day. On my servers, I have set automatic daily backups so that I will never lose more than a day’s worth of information. For your installation, I would recommend at the very least that you set WP-DB-Backup to back up and email you a file on Wednesday every week. You can discard the old file when you save the most recent one, so that it doesn’t fill up your hard drive with outdated information.

4. Contact Form 7

It’s usually not a good idea to post your email address on your blog “in the clear,” meaning to write it out in the form of YourName@YourDomain.com. Spam robots love this and they will scoop up your address and send you even more helpful links to those Russian brides and necessary pharmaceuticals. But you want people to be able to get in touch with you, so how do you do that?

This plugin makes it easy to set up — no juggling of Perl or configuring scripts or trying to figure out why it won’t work. Take a look at my contact form to see how the form looks. Send me an email to see how it works.

Note also the way I showed you my real email address — spam robots won’t pick that up, yet it’s easy for you to put it into your mail program and email me directly if you’d rather.

5. All in One SEO Pack

I don’t really have the space here to get into what SEO (search engine optimization) is or how it works. The easiest way to think of it is “Google magic.” If your blog uses good SEO practices, it’s easier for Google and the other search engines to find you and list your posts when people search for subjects you’ve written about. This plugin gives you control over the page title, meta keywords, and meta description that shows up in search engine listings.

If none of those terms make sense to you and you aren’t really concerned about being on the first page of Google with your blog, then you can skip this plugin.

Plugins that help increase conversation with your readers

We need an audience to read what we write and to talk to us. What’s the fun in it otherwise? So here are some plugins to help encourage readership and participation.

6. Add to Any OR Tweet This + WordBook

Add to Any makes it easy for readers to share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. It does a little voodoo magic reading of your visitor’s browser and places the services they use most at the top of the menu that they see. (This strikes me as just a tad creepy, but I may be overly sensitive.)

If that’s overkill, or if you too find it a bit unsettling, then choose Tweet This, which puts buttons under each post for social media services you select (Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, or any combination of these), giving your visitor a quick way to send a tweet or bookmark your post to share with others. You can also set up Tweet This to automatically tweet the post to your Twitter account. (I use Tweet This on this blog.)

WordBook does only one thing: When you publish a post to your blog, it automatically cross-posts it to your Facebook page. I’ve found it a little persnickety, possibly because Facebook has been tinkering with its software a lot recently. But when it works, it’s great.

7. CommentLuv

I really like this one. When someone comments on a post on your blog, CommentLuv will look at their website URL. If it goes to a blog, the plugin will fetch a link to their latest post and display it under their name when they finish and submit their comment.

This does several good things. It gives your commenter an automatic link back to his or her blog, which in turn brings it to the attention of people who might not know about it. If your commenter is good with post titles, there will be an intriguing link to encourage other readers to click back to see what that blog is all about. So it offers a reason for people to comment on your blog, and it encourages interaction among your readers. I’ve found a number of great blogs to follow by clicking on CommentLuv links.

9. Subscribe2

This plugin allows people to sign up to be notified by email when you publish a new blog post. It encourages return visits, because readers don’t have to remember to check in at your site every so often and don’t have to fiddle with RSS feeds.

10. Subscribe To Comments

This one serves a similar purpose, but it allows readers to subscribe to the comment stream on one particular post that is of interest.

Installing Your Plugins

WordPress now has plugin installation built in, so the process really couldn’t be much simpler.

Go to your Dashboard and find “Plugins” in the lefthand menu. Click on the down arrow next to it to open the submenu. Click on “Add New.”

Now you will see a new page with a search box.

Type in the name of your plugin and click on “Search Plugins.” Next you will see a screen with all the plugins that matched your search terms. Here I’ve entered “CommentLuv.”

Click on “Install” at the right, and you’re done. Easy!

What if it doesn’t work?

There are occasions when the easy installation process doesn’t work, generally because of server settings or time-out on a crowded network. In that case, plugins can be installed manually. Since that process is a bit involved and this post is already approaching Dead Sea scroll length, I’ll write that as a separate tutorial and make it available at a later date.

Next week: Setting up your initial options.