I’ve been running many blogs, I have even built many websites for customers using Wordpress.  This includes using Wordpress as a CMS, or as a blog system.  In every case there are a few core features that each site needs, and the plugins I keep going back to deliver these features just simply work.

Here’s my list:

1. Akismet

This one is a no brainer, it’s already included in every Wordpress Installation and the plugin works very well.  Akismet has been key to blocking the spam on many sites I’ve had the pleasure of working on.  It’s easy to use.  All you need to do is activate it, and get a key by creating a Wordpress.com account.

2. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

I don’t know if this plugin is necessarily the number 2 most important, but in the order that I get them installed this is number 2.  Pinging your blog posts is kind of an overused feature that isn’t entirely effective anymore.  But it’s still available and still can provide some benefits even if just a small amount of marketing.  The best part about this Wordpress plugin is that it ensures that you don’t over ping from your blog on accident.  Any time you edit a post, or schedule a future publish date, your blog can be pinging the same posts over and over, or even pinging when the post hasn’t published yet.  This plugin makes sure that it doesn’t happen, even provides a nice log so you can see it’s effect.

3. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This is a Wordpress Plugin that dynamically generates a visitor sitemap.  It’s lightweight, looks decent on a fresh install.  It’s easy to customize.  Has a lot of settings on the admin such as being able to set up the pagination which I think is important for the search engines.  This is not an XML Sitemap, this actually becomes a page on your site.  Visitors can use it to see all your pages, and the Search Engines will crawl it and find a link to every page.

4. Supr by StumbleUpon

I really like this plugin.  You can sign up for an account with su.pr add in your logins for Twitter and Facebook, then add the API keys into your Wordpress Admin and every time you post it will automatically post the title and a shortened link to your Twitter account and Facebook account.  If you are just starting out in blogging it can be a great way to spread what you are doing amongst your friends to support you.  As a business it’s a great way to spread the word especially when starting out.  Also from their control panel they provide tracking for the clicks, which is very handy to monitor the effectiveness.

5. TweetMeme Retweet Button

Here’s a plugin that adds a nice little graphic on your posts.  It makes it easy for people to retweet your posts right after they visit your site to read it.  It also shows how many times it’s been retweeted.  It will always show 1 if you are using the Supr plugin because you tweeted it yourself, if you have a couple friends supporting you it’ll easily get tweeted a couple more times.  It’s important to market your site, and your own group of friends can be a great place to start.

5.1 All in One SEO Pack

A quick bonus recommendation.  Personally I prefer to use the Thesis Theme, which includes many SEO improvements already and this plugin isn’t necessary.  But if you don’t have the pleasure of using a theme with these features built in, then I would highly recommend this plugin.  It adds in canonical URL’s, allows you to set custom meta tags, custom page titles and the list goes on.  This is also very valuable for CMS type sites.

I love it when I run across a certain kind of person.  You know who you are.  The type that has every possible FireFox plugin installed, some days just opening FireFox it takes 45 minutes to run through all the plugin updates.

One of the things I like best about Wordpress is how lightweight it is.  It’s simple, it does it’s job, highly customizable.  Plus, even though it is simple it can be made to be much more complicated through the use of plugins.  You can add just the features and abilities that you need for your site.

Something I dislike about other systems is maybe they are awesome because of the huge list of features, but those features can be a resource hog.

Quite awhile back I read an article that I can’t find right now to link.  It talked about some load tests on a few of the “frameworks” that are out there for programming.  One of them that they considered a programming framework was Drupal.  They included this because even though it is a CMS type script, it’s so robust and feature rich and can really be used as a programming framework.  The problem? Just to display nothing more than “Hello World” to a browser, it performed with a response time significantly slower than a lot of other systems to do the same.

I mean this makes sense in all reality.  It has so much capability that it has to dynamically load tons of classes, functions, etc.  even though all it’s doing is displaying “Hello World”.  It’s fine if you need all the features and your site is going to use them, otherwise it’s just a disability.

Wordpress is Lightweight, can you keep it that way?

That’s one thing that is really nice about using Wordpress.  It is so light.  And the way that plugins integrate is really nice.  You can add complete features with an upload and a click of the button.

Then I run into someone who asks me to help them figure out why their installation is so slow.  I take a look at their plugins screen, they have 70+ plugins uploaded, 30+ plugins activated, but only about 15 give or take actually in use.  The rest are just there because.

You know a spoiler might improve the performance of a race car, but not if you attach 15 of them.

There are always all kinds of reasons.

Well the reason I have 4 ad rotators installed is because I wasn’t sure which one I liked, and I tried them all out until I decided I liked this one

Here’s the thing, just by having them activated the functions that make up the plugin have to get loaded every single time a page loads. So maybe you are using one ad rotator, but enjoy the drop in performance of 4 just for fun!

Another point to be made, installing plugins always creates variables in your database.  Some plugins don’t properly remove these variables when disabled.  The larger your database becomes the slower it takes to pull content out of it.

How long will your visitors wait to see your blog content?

Keep your installations as clean as possible.  Normally, I keep extra installations of Wordpress around separate from my main.  Any good host should have the ability to create subdomains.  Install a plain installation there, or even make a copy of your installation, install the plugin there first.  ESPECIALLY, if you don’t even know if you’ll want it long term.

If you decide you don’t want it there is no reason to ever install it on your main Wordpress site.

Cause and Effect, chain of events.  Doesn’t matter if your content is good, if visitors get tired of waiting for your pages to load.

I’ve been working with Wordpress it seems like forever. I’ve tried so many different Wordpress Themes that I couldn’t count them all.

You have free ones, and if you try them you know you get what you pay for. But free ones can still work if you are a developer, they’ll at least put you at a starting point to make your own creation.

There are a lot of paid ones as well. As in any market some better than others.

It’s all about what features you need, and how well each theme can fill those needs.

The best paid theme I’ve ever had the pleasure of using, is the Wordpress Thesis Theme. There are many themes/templates out there that meet specific needs for a niche set of websites, but the Thesis theme is probably the most flexible theme I’ve found.

And they just released a new version with all new features:

• custom file editor in your WordPress dashboard
• dropdown navigation menu
• comprehensive font color controls and new design controls

There are a lot of other improvements in regards to the general design of the theme as well. Plus what more could you want with the included SEO abilities. I think this one theme replaces the need for several plugins, which is very cool if you think of plugins in terms of overhead. (watch our blog for an article on this later this week)

About Thesis — Find out more about Thesis and the DIYthemes philosophy

Here’s their motto:

Thesis Theme Motto

They really meet this in my opinion. It’s always being improved upon.

I’m going to put together a video later this week to show off some of the Thesis features.

As a blog publisher, one of the things I’m (and just about every blogger) always looking for is a new way to add more RSS feed subscribers and to get my blog to start out a bit from others.

There are a lot plugins to help with this out there, but not all plugins are created equal, if ya know what I mean.

Today, I want to show a plugin that I’ve fallen in love with, and that helps with getting those RSS readers and with making you stick out a bit in a over populated blogger’s world.

I found the plugin over at the WeblogToolsCollection.com website.

The plugin is call: WP Greet Box

And it does just what it’s name says it does (which is different for a plugin these days).

This plugin adds a box to the top of your blog posts that literally greets your visitors when they first hit your blog. It also offers them a quick way to subscribe to your RSS feed, and it even tells them where they came from.

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for, and what a bunch of other bloggers have been search the web for as well.

The main thing I like about it, besides the RSS feed feature, is that it does help a bit with getting your blog to stick in the reads mind.

If a visitor comes from Google to your blog, the WP Greet Box plugin knows this and throws up a “Welcome Googler” type of message so the visitors is welcomed in a nice and professional looking way.

It doesn’t only work with Google either. It’s also pre-setup for…

• del.icio.us
• digg
• stumbleupon
• technorati
• twitter
• search.yahoo
• msn
• blinklist
• blogmarks
• diigo
• facebook
• furl
• ma.gnolia
• mister-wong
• myspace
• newsvine
• reddit
• simpy
• tumblr
• plurk
• linkedin

Plus, you can add your own sites to greet people from just by entering some info into the plugin admin section.

Personally, I LOVE this plugin and think any blogger using Wordpress should grab it up and start using it right away.

There aren’t many plugins that make me feel that way either!

Another plus with this plugin, is that you can control where the greet box actually shows in your posts. Above the post title, under it or where ever you want.

If I were you, I’d go and get it now – It’s FREE

Plugin Home Page: http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-greet-box-wordpress-plugin/

Plugin Wordpress Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/

This is my first Wordpress plugin review here on Wordpress-Master, so I thought I’d do it on one I’ve been using for a while now on all of my blogs and one that will help ALL bloggers using Wordpress no matter what niche you’re in, why you’re blogging and whether you’re a newbie blogger or a seasoned pro.

The plugin I’m reviewing today is Post Ideas by Aaron Robbins.

The plugin provides an easy way to manage all of your future post ideas in a central location right in your Wordpress admin section.

I know I used to have little notes all over the place with post ideas on them and I would lose some of them and get frustrated.

This plugin solves that problem for all bloggers using Wordpress as a self hosted blog.

Post Ideas works with the current version of Wordpress 2.7 and is easy to access and use.

Just click your “Tools” option on the left panel and in the drop-down choose “Post Ideas”.

On the next screen you’ll find 5 form fields that allow you to enter some quick info on the future post idea you have and you can even give each new idea you enter a priority of 1 – 99 so you can pick your next post from the list using a weighted system.

If I had this Wordpress plugin a few years ago, life would have been much easy when I was blogging I tell ya that.

When you’re adding the info for your future post idea, you can add…

• A working title - A title you have in mind now, that can be changed later when you actually write the post
• Description – a place to enter a description of what you plan to blog about with that idea (for your eyes only)
• Target keywords - great adding a few simple keywords and tags you have in mind now but can change later of course
• Links - any links you plan on using in the post, or even links you can use to get info you’ll need for the post
• Priority - a priority rating of 1 – 99 so you can rate the best ones higher and the so, so ones lower

All of the info you really need to start a post from a idea you had earlier.

(Pic of the Add Post Idea section talked about above)

After you enter all you future post idea info and click the “Add Post Idea” button, it all get’s listed just below and sortable section where you can easily pick and choose the post idea you want to write about next, and remove it so you know it’s been done and don’t accidentally repost the same thing twice over time.

You can sort the view section by Newest, Oldest, Title and Priority. Which ever fits your needs best

(Pic of the Post Ideas view section talked about above)

All in all, this plugin is the perfect Wordpress plugin for all self hosted Wordpress users – new or pro!

I give it a all around two thumbs up!

You can get the plugin at Aaron Robbins’ website located at: http://www.aaronrobbins.com/042008/manage-your-blog-post-ideas-with-this-wordpress-plugin/

Once you download it, you can Wordpress’ new plugin installer to add it to your blog.

Let me know what you think of the plugin below!

My Over All Ratings:

[xrr rating=5/5 label="Should You Be Using It:"][xrr rating=5/5 label="Ease Of Use:"][xrr rating=4/5 label="Unique Plugin Rating:"][xrr rating=5/5 label="Over All Rating:"]