WordPress.org

1. healthgurl
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   Ok, so I've poured over the plug in list and have compiled a fairly lengthly list.

   Can a WP have TOO many plug ins?

   Are there any here that I should be wary of?

   AdSpace (http://www.semiologic.com/projects/ad-space/)
   Plugin: AdSpace -- Flexible Ad Real Estate management plugin, that can also be used to manage announcements and sponsored links.

   AdSense-Deluxe (http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/)

   Plugin: AdSense-Deluxe -- Define multiple Google AdSense ad styles for use in your posts. Globally enable, disable and change each ad style through options control panel.

   Bad Behavior (http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/)
   Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior intends to target any malicious software directed at a Web site, whether it be a spambot, ill-designed search engine bot, or system crackers. In that spirit, it is not limited to WordPress users; a generic interface has been provided whereby it can be integrated into virtually any PHP-based software.

   WordPress - Hashcash (http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/05/11/wordpress-hashcash-20/)
   By embedding a random hidden field, and then forcing users to compute an md5 hash of that field and submit it back to the server, we stop spam bots. Valid XHTML, requires Javascript. Supports advanced logging and email notification. 100% effective!!

   SecureImage (http://uberdork.supertwist.net/2005/03/13/plug-it-in-plug-it-in/)
   SecureImage is a dynamic, graphic overlay plug-in for WordPress 1.5 that generates a unique text key (requires ImageMagick's convert utility). Comment posters are required to enter the text code before WordPress will save the message in the database. SecureImage is very easy to implement and requires no alteration of other WordPress files.

   Force Word Wrapping (http://www.frostjedi.com/terra/scripts/wp/wrap.zip)
   Prevents long sentancesconstructedlikethis from horizontally stretching the page.

   Polite-ifier (http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/12/01/polite-ifier-wp-plugin/)
   Make your comments more polite. Replaces any swear words with asterisks and acronym tags to hide, but not destroy, the original foul language.

   Subscribe To Comments 2.0 (http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/)
   Readers can receive comment notifications on posts they subscribe to.

   Email Notification (http://watershedstudio.com/portfolio/software/wp-email-notification.html)
   Allows people to signup to be notified when a new entry is posted to your blog and once they're confirmed it sends them an email every time a new entry is posted to your blog.

   HeadMeta (http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2004/06/17/my-first-wordpress-plugin-headmeta)
   Provides per-post custom <link> and <meta> tags.

   Keywords (http://www.theonering.net/staff/corvar/software/wordpress.html#keywords)
   Append keywords into Meta tags from 'keywords' custom field.

   Subscribe me (http://www.semiologic.com/projects/subscribe-me/)
   Adds buttons at the end of your sidebar so your visitors can subscribe to your blog via services such as Bloglines and MyYahoo!.

   Translator (http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugin-automatic-machine-translation-for-your-blog-in-eight-languages-spanish-french-german-portuguese-italian-japanese-korean-and-chinese/)
   Plugin: Translator - Automatic Machine Translation for Your Blog in Eight Languages - Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese

   Optimal Title (http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/)
   Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the 'separator' to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead than having it appear first.

   Next/Previous Post in Category (http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2004/07/24/nextprevious-posts-in-same-category/)
   Display a list of next/previous posts in the same category as the current post.

   Smart link (http://www.semiologic.com/projects/smart-link/)
   Lets you insert links in your posts using natural language rather than urls.

   WYSI-Wordpress (http://mudbomb.com/archives/2005/02/02/wysiwyg-plugin-for-wordpress/)
   A hack to add an easy wordprocessor-like wysiwyg editor to the WordPress "Advanced Editing" screen. Also includes a built-in image browser that allows you to upload, preview, and add images to your post.(WordPress 1.5+ Compatible)

   Scripturizer Remix (http://laurenceo.com/2005/10/08/scripturizer-remix/)
   Adds admin interface and optional include ESV text inline options - update of Glen's version by Laurence O.

   Title Truncation (http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/12/12/truncate-title-for-mom/)
   Truncate all titles on your blog to fit your layout. Shortens by word.

   Yahoo/MSN Messenger Style Smileys Plugin (http://priyadi.net/archives/2005/02/27/wordpress-yahoomsn-messenger-style-smileys-plugin/)
   Use Yahoo or MSN Messenger style instead of the built-in WordPress smilies.

   Blogroll (http://anthropik.com/blogroll-plugin)
   Creates a links page that lists all the links in a given link category.

   SH-Autolink (http://www.rockschtar.de/wp-plugin-sh-autolink/)
   Transforms predefined words in posts and comments automatically into hyperlinks.

   WordSpew AJAX Shoutbox (http://blog.jalenack.com/index.php?static=ajax)
   This plugin gives you a shoutbox in your blog that refreshes on its own and allows for live chatting from within your browser. It works almost like an IM client! Features include an admin panel, color customization, pretty timestamps, and easy installation.

   wp Useronline (http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php)
   Enable you to display how many users are online with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).

   Amazon Media Manager (http://www.sozu.co.uk/software/amm/)
   Allows you to search Amazon and add books, music and everything else to your blog, with a host of options and configurabilty for what you want to show, where and how!

   AmazonWishlist (http://daryl.learnhouston.com/index.php?cat=20)
   Given a wish list id, adds a random Amazon wish list selection to the sidebar.

   WP-Amazon (http://manalang.com/wp-amazon/)
   Search and include items from Amazon.com to your post entries. This plugin adds a link called "Insert item from Amazon.com"? on the post page. This link launches a search window which allows an author to search for items from Amazon.com to be included on the author's post entry.

2. estjohn
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   These are the ones I use / like / found helpful

   http://www.aleeya.net/2005/10/18/wordpress-plugins-used-on-aleeya-dotnet/

3. vkaryl
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   *rolls eyes* The only plugins you need are the ones which optimize a functionality that you want. Try one at a time until you see what works with what, and what gives your blog a functionality that your users need and use.

4. estjohn
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   I agree. WordPress itsself does not "need" any... its what you wanna do.

5. healthgurl
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   I chose the list based on my needs, and based on specific functionality that I don't currently have, but want.

   While I wish I had the luxury of 'trying them one at a time', I don't. Sorry...I'm trying to be efficient, and this isn't a 'hobby' project for me.

   estjohn, thank you for your response. Your list is helpful.

6. estjohn
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   honestly, you are going to want to try them one at a time.. if you install 15 plugns at once and 3 of them have a problem with each other or need soemthing inserted in the WP loop on the post.php page.. or if 2 of them are trying to grab css headers at teh same time.. or if out of 15 3 dont work, youll never know which has the problem.

   The only SAFE way to install plugins is to do them one at a time and make sure it works, and you dont get any errors. Then move to the next. If the next conflicts, then remove the last one etc..

   Otherwise you will most likely destroy your WP install and have to start all over.

   If they were all just easy upload, click and it works .. then you probabally would have as many posts on this board.

   Even out of all the ones I posted.. they all SEEM to work fine together for me, but I also spent hours configuring them for my WP isnstallation and making them work the way I wanted. Some of them I had to really edit the CSS or the PHP in the plugin. Many of them it would take me hours to figure out how to get the one plugin to work and look the way i wanted. Its not a quick upload, activate and they work process for a majority of plugins you will find for WP.

   If you want to be efficient, then make sure you do them right the fist time.. one at a time.. or else effeciency will go out the window after the 10th time you have to reinstall WP. And I am not being light about this at all..

   Just a heads up for you. There are some that are easy upload activate and its fine, but most of them .. even the ones you have listed.. are not.

7. davidchait
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   healthgurl -

   If you are trying to build a site, we'd need to know what functionality you are trying to get out of which plugins. For instance, you have three different Amazon plugins, which all overlap at some level. Depending on what features you wanted, I might suggest one of the three or even a fourth alternative (CG-Amazon). Same goes for 'advertising' or adsense stuff -- depends on what exactly you want to do, and how you want to use it...

   But without seeing your site, or knowing your features/requirements, there's no easy way for us to necessarily suggest using particular plugins.

   Well... okay, that's not completely true. Something like Bad Behavior (I use my CG-Referrer to similarly block access) is a good start. You may find you don't need HashCash and SecureImage -- likely one will do.

   -d
   CHAITGEAR

8. healthgurl
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   Thanks for the advice, EstJohn...the 'one at a time' now makes sense, as it relates to compatibility issues.

   David, one if the reasons for the 'multiples' is that I couldn't tell from reading the descriptions whether one plug in would do everything I needed, making the need for others obsolete: (like Bad Behavior making HashCash and SI unecessary.)

   My news designs are being done now, and I'll be ready to deal with plug ins in a few. I was just trying to get a jump start, since the list was sooooo long.

   Generally speaking I need:

   Amazon:
   - Something that inserts my Amazon ID into post links.
   - Something that adds images from my wish list (Amazon Media manager sounds perfect

   Adverts:
   - Something that automatically adds adsense WITHIN posts, with the post text wrapped around it.
   - Something that allows me to rotate other ads (besides adsense)

   Comments
   - something that controls spam
   - something that controls foul language

   Formatting:
   - Title truncation
   - Word Wrap
   - Wysiwyg editor
   - Smart/easy links (which might be easier with the wsyiwyg editor)

   General:
   - translation
   - Yahoo smilies
   - shoutbox
   - blog roll
   - SEO

9. estjohn
   Member
   Posted 6 years ago #

   Adverts:
   - Something that automatically adds adsense WITHIN posts, with the post text wrapped around it.

   You wanna be careful aobut that one! If you insert an add in every post, then you could have more than 3 ads per page depending on what page you are looking at - archives, front page, category etc. adsense says they will only accept 3 ads per page.

   So, you wanna be careful where you turn off and on the ads. The best way i found to deal with it was post 2 ads on the side of the theme

   and have a 3rd ad only display on a post WHEN it is views in full.

   or 3 ads in side of template and none in posts

   or ads between posts.

   but not to display the add on every post. - unless you display only 3 posts per page... then you might be too short for word count to link ratio if , of if you use something like post teaser where it shows the 1st Xamount of words on a page till you click on the full page.

   SEO is a whole horse of a differnt hue. i have been concentrating on that and learning, reading, researching, practicing it for the last few years..

   content is the king no matter what you do, but a lot of the plugins I posted in that page earlier i use for SEO purposes.. I could write a brief page or two on that with wordpress if it would help. But, i am no 100% expert.

10. healthgurl
    Member
    Posted 6 years ago #

    Re: 3 ads per page - I was planning on using the Teaser. You wouldn't see the ad until you opened the entire article.

    At that point, there will only be two on the page - the one in the leaderboard, and the one in the article.

    In the past, I always used the ->more<- tag, but the teaser will make things easier for me.

    I used to have my adsense on the side, and recently experimented with moving it to the center of the page (thanks to an email from google). This DOUBLED the CTR.

    My content is related to another site I run, so it's not really a 'start up' blog. (my other site is #3 on Google when searching on my relevant key words).

    I'd love to hear your thoughts on SEO and WP.

    Estjohn, do you find that " WYSI-Wordpress" makes it easy for you to add images to your posts with 'text wrap'?

11. electrolund
    Member
    Posted 6 years ago #

    healthgurl, I'm a bit of a plugin junkie! I find that I have an "itch" every so often for a good new one.

    of your list I'm using (or have used):
    SecureImage -- I'm using CaptCha! instead, similar, easy to install
    Subscribe to Comments 2.0
    Email Notification v2.2
    WYSI-Wordpress -- I used this for a while but it was a tad clunky

    You might want to consider adding a couple to your list:
    Link Truncator -- this is nice when newbs post a comment with a huge (non-TinyURL) link.
    PXS Mail Form v2 -- this is the easiest and most robust mail form I've found
    Viper’s Plugins Used -- this is a nifty plugin that displays all your activated plugins on a page or post. very handy for people like us to see how the site was built! check out mine

12. estjohn
    Member
    Posted 6 years ago #

    healthgurl: "I'd love to hear your thoughts on SEO and WP."

    One of these nights (maybe tonight) after I get home from work, I will sit down and write up soem stuff. Right now, I have

    http://www.aleeya.net/category/seo/

    Titles, Description, and Keywords is one that I have used some of the WP plugins to SEO optimize some things quite a bit.

    The inner pages really havent been around long enough (This domain is one that I have had for years... but I recently split it up between 2 sites and gave it an overhaul) to do much with PR.. although I dont focus as much on page rank as I do true SE listings. I will sit down and see what I can put together on using WP and its SEO'nes.

    my http://www.girlgeekette.net site has done pretty well for SEO and PR. it had a 6.o after about 2 weeks.. so I was pleased with it (being a brand new site.. I was very happy.. and the Aleeya.net site has been out for years, but when it comes to PR, I think Google still sees the old unSEO PHPnuke I used to use since it still holds a lot of backlinks to the old site which arent there.

    "Estjohn, do you find that " WYSI-Wordpress" makes it easy for you to add images to your posts with 'text wrap'? "
    That is kinda a hard question for me. I like WYSIWYG for just that.. text wrap, and it makes it quicker in a way.. but I have been able to use CSS to acheieve the same reults. As you can tell ont hat page, i need to work with Spacing and CSS to get the pictures padded between the wrapped text. I have been focusing on so many things.. I havent had a chance to add 90% of the books, dvds and awards I have. Comes from rebuilding the site. I guess I am concentrating on structure more than anything right now then will go back and add posts in each category after I get the structure the way I want it.

13. davidchait
    Member
    Posted 6 years ago #

    CG-Amazon is great if you want to insert product links within posts, like <!--amazon:B0007Y79AI--> (more options, but that's the quick+basic tag using CG-Inline), also good for sidebar wishlists or now-reading lists, and along with my more recent CG-QuickPHP you can easily embed any kind of Amazon list/query into a Page or Post. Check out my site for some uses (including the Products section, which is included as a 'sample' script for more complex access to the stored database).

    I use a combination of CG-Inline image tags (which I've never really pushed, but it's entirely how my site functions...), and a bunch of important CSS, in order to get text wrapping around pictures. In addition, I then use the same CSS around more hard-coded HTML, could be affiliate links, could be adsense, whatever, in order to float other things in my text flow.

    I actually had/have code that throws an adsense ad into the single-page content blocks, but turned it off as I found it wasn't generating nearly the CTR of the side tower space (and it really made the articles difficult to read). Admittedly, I never tried the floated-right block, had only done the standard banner type. I also released CG-Inbetween to allow folks to pull in things like Adsense or other code at specified intervals, good for both single posts and multi pages -- it needs more work, but it also needs more feedback!

    Something like Bad Behavior is good for stopping scum at the gates. I might try it out at some point, but I've invested so much time into CG-Referrer (and it does search, bot, and other stat tracking) that I haven't wanted to throw something 'further in front' of my code. But definitely worth it if you're starting up a site. Definitely use an anti-spam tool of some sort as well, as BB only blocks certain kinds of things.

    As for SEO, it works the same as any HTML. Content rules, and it doesn't hurt to have your title, description, keywords, and H1s delivering key-word content to those engines that check it. I've also reworked templates to use H1/H2 for major titling on the page, whereas many default WP templates sometimes kick key content down to H3 -- no clue if it makes a difference, of course! ;) (I've seen rumors that Google ignores much of the Meta tags these days...)

    -d

14. David Law
    Member
    Posted 6 years ago #

    I'm an SEO consultant and out the box WordPress is very good if you have the rewrote URLs. I have several blogs and http://www.morearnings.com/ has a reasonably well optimised template (minor editing really). Still got a few things to do.

    Have rel="nofollow" any links I don't want indexing like the login links (basically everything under Meta on the menu). Just look for links that point to things you don't want indexing like login and rel="nofollow" them.

    Also removed the name of the blog from posts so here http://www.morearnings.com/2006/05/08/adsense-revenue/ the title is >> Adsense Revenue rather than Name of Blog >> Adsense Revenue. This means the title is better optimised. To do this I created a new template page (header2.php) removed the blog name in the title and referenced it rather than header.php for the single post pages (this means all the other pages get the name of the blog in the title).

    With regards adding Adsense to posts I added the code directly to the template. So editing singlepost.php I added-

    
<div style="float:right;">
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8325072546567078";
google_ad_width = 250;
google_ad_height = 250;
google_ad_format = "250x250_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel ="";
google_color_border = "E8E7D0";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "B96F17";
google_color_url = "B96F17";
google_color_text = "000000";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>


    Directly below

    
<div class="postentry"


    This means the Ad is within the text as the OP wants floated to the right. Should work on most templates and this means you only see the ad on the post pages, not index or archive pages.

    David

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