Plugins para WordPress

Un muy completo listado para quienes usamos esta tecnologí­a. Además el autor nos deja su propia experiencia del plugin / add-on.

AutoMeta
Authors Description: Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.
My overview: This is extremely useful if you want to see the search engines indexing your keywords or to get visitors arriving from the popular social bookmarking sites. I don»™t remember doing anything other than downloading the plugin, uploading the files and activating it.

Akismet
Authors Description: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
My overview: Us bloggers all love to receive comments about our work; however there»™s an ever increasing trend of bots that pretend to be people in order to spam blog sites with advertising. Akismet aims to prevent these spam comments from ever making it into the public view. Mine»™s been 100% successful so far; however I do remember getting and implementing the unique (free) key I needed from Akismet to be more complicated than it should really have been.

Akismet Spam Count
Authors Description: Display the number of comments Akismet has marked as spam
My overview: Simple to install and if you want some stats about Akismet it»™s great – pointless otherwise.

Cricket Moods
Authors Description: Allows an author to add multiple mood tags and mood smilies to every post.
My overview: See the little faces at the top of each of my posts? That»™s what this does. I remember when I installed it I had issues with the images not appearing because I was using sub-domains. Make sure you get the path of the image files correct in it»™s own config page.

Cron Monkey
Authors Description: Provides an interface to simplify management of cron jobs from within WordPress.
My overview: If you don»™t have SSH access (or equivalent) to your server then this will allow you to schedule task on your server. Very useful for some plugins – you»™ll know if you need this because the others will mention a dependency.

Calendar
Authors Description: Nice and simple Calendar with events support and full customization
My overview: Easy to use and easy to implement. There are a choice of colour schemes so it suits your board; however I stopped using it when I changed my template recently.

Counterize
Authors Description: Simple counter-plugin with no external libs – saves IP, timestamp, visited URl, referring URl and browser information in database, and can display total hits, unique hits and other statistics in WordPress webpages. Admin-interface available with detailed information
My overview: Can be database intensive if you start to turn on lots of reporting. Make sure you set it not to record your own visits otherwise you»™ll get false results.

Counterize II
Authors Description: I have just a new Counterize ii-version released. There is there some nose-fixed, new features and structural adjustments. Among other things the Counterize files lie now no longer unordered in the PlugIn listing, but receive their own file. There is now as the largest new feature an evaluation of the search words. (Translation from German to English)
My overview: Adds a few extra components to it»™s predecessor; however when updating to the new version the database doesn»™t seem to get updated therefore some manual editing is needed before it»™ll work properly.

Angsuman»™s Feed Copyrighter
Authors Description: Inserts copyright message in Feeds. The message is of the standard format (can be customized): Copyright © 2005 YOUR BLOG NAME. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@BLOG_ADDRESS so we can take legal action immediately.
My overview: If you intend to make use of the RSS and other feeds that your WordPress installation can generate then I can»™t recommend some kind of (c) appendment any more than this one. It»™s dead easy to add and very simple to configure.

SRG Clean Archives
Authors Description: A nice uniform way to display your archives
My overview: This plugin provides an excellent tree view of all of your past posts. To see an example click here to see my own archives. All you need to do to set it up is to install the plugin and get the Exec-PHP plugin I»™ll be mentioning shortly so you can run it as content on a page. On it»™s own it»™ll work in the sidebars and a few select other locations.

Digg this
Authors Description: Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer
My overview: That»™s pretty much it but I know some people have had issues with it when adding it to their templates. See the authors site for more on that.

Digg Defender
Authors Description: Uses Coral Cache to quickly buffer hits from Digg, Slashdot, Fark, SA, etc.
My overview: This plugin is a bit hit and miss for me because it relies on Coral Cache to do it»™s job properly and keep up. The idea is that when you get added to social bookmarking sites you»™ll typically receive an abundance of traffic which can overload your site. This plugin detects incoming visitors and redirects them to Coral»™s cache of your site so that you aren»™t overloaded.

WP-DBManager
Authors Description: Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize, backup, restore, delete backup database and run selected queries.
My overview: Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Exec-PHP
Authors Description: Allows tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files
My overview: Very, very useful if you know what you»™re doing and want to add PHP code to your pages. A must have.

WP-EMail
Authors Description: Enable You To Send Your Webblog Entry To A Friend.
My overview: Probably better described as «Tell a friend» button

Gravatars2
Authors Description: Implements Gravatars (global avatars: gravatar.com) with enhanced caching support, cron support, & administrative interface to control default options. Registered users can use local Gravatars (also cached).
My overview: This took a lot of work to implement into my theme for very little return. I think this is pretty overkill unless you must absolutely have Gravatars!

Maintenance Mode
Authors Description: Activate this plugin to make the site unavailable to everyone, except logged in users / admins.
My overview: Very useful and stops potential loss of data on busy sites after taking a backup and then making changes.

No Ping Wait
Authors Description: Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php
My overview: Download, Install, walk away and do whatever it was you wanted to do before because this speeds up posting on it»™s todd once installed.

WP-Print
Authors Description: Displays A Printable Version Of Your WordPress Weblog Post
My overview: Requires you to edit «the loop» in your template files but that»™s easy enough. If you»™re into plugins then you should be pretty au fait with this by now.

Post Email
Authors Description: This plugin allows user to register on your blog so they are emailed when a new blog entry is written.
My overview: Once installed it just requires a simple edit of your sidebar file (or wherever you want the box to appear). You can see this on my sidebar.

WP-PostRatings
Authors Description: Enables You To Have A Rating System For Your Post
My overview: I had it, I ditched it. I»™d rather people made comments. I»™m sure if you run a review site it»™d be more use to you. It»™s fairly easy to install and to add to your posts.

Sociable
Authors Description: Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
My overview: If you know and understand what «popular social bookmarking sites» are then get this installed, if not, don»™t worry, it just updates your individual post pages with a load of icons which folk can click when they want to link it to their bookmarking tool. You can select which sites to provide links for out of a huge list in the control panel.

Google Sitemaps
Authors Description: This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog
My overview: This is spot on. If you»™re serious about getting on the largest search engine then it»™s best to let them know you»™re about. This generator automatically creates a new xml compliant page every time you post a new thread. Brilliant and requires little configuration. (I»™ve since removed this since a script link caused my main site to fail to load)

Time Zone
Authors Description: Automatic daylight saving time switching. Optionally specify the time zone to be used.
My overview: Install it, configure it, forget it.

Translator
Authors Description: Translates blog dynamically (from English) to eight languages – German sample, Spanish sample, French sample, Italian sample, Portuguese sample, Japanese sample, Korean sample, Chinese (simplified) sample. The translated pages can be bookmarked for future use. Note: It assumes the base language of the blog as English. It requires curl libraries on your system and available from PHP. Internally Google Translator services are used.
My overview: This plugin increases your visibility around the globe since it»™s fast and very tidy. Install it and make sure the buttons are in a prominent place like mine are at the top of my sidebar.

WP-FLV
Authors Description: This plugin eases insertion of Jeroen Wijerings FLV Video Player
My overview: Only works if you disable the WYSIWYG interface, but isn»™t that the case with so many plugins these days! I prefer the Rich text editor anyway. With regards to other Video plugins I would recommend against the one that allows your to embed YouTube videos because it»™s a resource hogg and practically killed my site»™s speed til I realised so.

WP/GeoTrack
Authors Description: This plugin will allow you to keep track of every hit on your public WordPress site (note that it does not track admin activity)
My overview: This gives you a sweet interface where you can see where people are in the world who visit your site. If I remember rightly it was a bit of a pain til I spent some time with it because it kept telling me my key was a duplicate so make sure you actually spend some time reading the instructions carefully. I»™ve since removed this since it»™s external operations were so slow it was killing my page load time.

WP-Cache
Authors Description: Very fast cache module. It»™s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to «Options» and select «WP-Cache».
My overview: Rather than getting your database hammered with a request every time someone wants to view a page this plugin «remembers» the page view for a period of time and keeps it in a cache to reduce load when someone else views the same content. This is an essential add-on!

weather.com plugin
Authors Description: Display weather on your own site from weather.com
My overview: This takes a bit of configuration and there are lots of themes to choose from. If you aren»™t in the UK or US then there»™s not too much data available. I used to use it but then decided there was no point so removed it.

Lightbox
Authors Description: Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page.
My overview: This is a brilliant and cool way to add images to your posts. Simply upload to your webspace the standard size image and a thumbnail to go with it (of whatever dimensions you want). You then add images to your posts by clicking the button in the Tiny MCE editor and providing details of where the thumbnail and full size image are. The thumbnail is displayed wherever you want it and when click darkens the whole browser window and displays the full size image in the middle of the screen.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Authors Description: Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that»™s heavy on tag visualisation
My overview: The idea is that you give each post «tags». These are key words which summarise some of the points in your post. For example this thread will have WordPress and plugins as tags. This aids SEO and is also necessary if you want to create one of those funky Tag clouds like some folk have on their sidebar. The more often a tag is used, the larger the font appears in the sidebar. People can click the tags and should then be able to read related or similar posts.

Corrector
Authors Description: Corrector ortografico para WordPress. Spellchecker for WordPress
My overview: Finally! A spell checker for WordPress that actually works! It uses Google»™s dictionary and is dependent upon you not using the Rich text editor. (Not necessary if you use FireFox 2)

Trackback Validator
Authors Description: Eliminates spam trackbacks with surprising accuracy
My overview: Comment spam is a pain the butt, but so is trackback spam. Install this simple drop n go plugin to ensure all the trackback links you get are genuine.

Tiger Style Administration
Authors Description: After working with WordPress for several months now, I felt the Administration area needed a little «freshening up». I wanted the utility to feel more like an application, and less like a traditional website.
My overview: Looks neat – I»™ll be using this for the forseeable future.

WPG2
Authors Description: Embeds Gallery2 within WordPress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into your Blog & Sidebar Content
My overview: Whilst this didn»™t work for me on this site originally it has done on other sites that I»™ve created. If you»™ve got a Gallery 2 Installation then this plugin is essential but you MUST make backups before you start! It works for me nicely now, as can be seen from my sidebar.

Flickr Photo Gallery
Authors Description: This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts.
My overview: I installed this but decided that I preferred to do things manually and stuck with the Lightbox plugin instead (mentioned earlier); however it does work very well and allows you to place panels all over the place and add your Flickr images.

Feedburner Feed Replacement
Authors Description: Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from
My overview: Neat tool that won»™t lose any subscribers you»™ve already got.

Clean Archives Reloaded
Authors Description: A nice, uniform, single-query, moo.fx-enhanced way to display your post archives.
My overview: I used to use the SRG Clean Archives which this plugin is based upon; however it was a little intensive on the database and also generated a page which was a mile long. This plugin uses Javascript to produce a expandable tables for each month and looks/feels a lot nicer. Check my archives page for a demo.

Guestbook Generator
Authors Description: Generates a guestbook for WordPress blogs
My overview: The 1990s called, they want their feature back. Yup, so many sites used to feature a Guestbook. It»™s a bit of a Web 1.0 feature but sometimes people don»™t want to leave a specific comment on a post, they just want to let you know what they think of the site as a whole – that»™s what this feature is for.

Live
Authors Description: View your website activity in real time.
My overview: Sad, but very useful.

Ubernyms
Authors Description: Wraps up the functionality of the Acronym Replacer, AutoLinker, and then some. Can replace anything with anything, and includes (optional) domTT powered tooltips.
My overview: What? Speak English! Basically you tell the plugin acronyms and abbreviations and their associated meanings. When you then use them they»™ll appear underlined in displayed text. If users hover the mouse over them they»™ll get a box appear which gives them a description of what the word means. No more confusing your readers with silly acronyms that you insist on using! Want a demo? «I use VOIP to communicate with friends abroad». There – satisfied? It»™s fully configurable and has a useful interface to boot.

EditNPlace
Authors Description: Allows you to edit your post inline, right on the front page of your blog.
My overview: Simple and very effective. Cuts down on my admin time so that»™s a good thing.

The Alexa Traffic Rank Button Generator
Authors Description: Add an Alexa Traffic Rank Button or Graph to your blog
My overview: Great idea – useless unless you»™re in the top 100,000 most viewed sites on the Internet. Thanks to Ajay for contacting me on this. It»™s no use for graphs unless you»™re in the top 100,000; however there are other features worth utilising which I»™ve now looked at. You can generate buttons and banners for your site which display your Alexa ranks.

Antileech
Authors Description: Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth
My overview: Detects people stealing your content via RSS and feeds. Once detected you can feed these content thieves different stuff that will ultimately return traffic to your site as opposed to theirs.

Optimal Title
Authors Description:Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the «™separator»™ to after the title rather than before.
My overview: See the title at the top of your browser that says the name of the site you»™re on? Well, when you view pages or posts individually it would be default say Blog name > Post/Page title. This is pants for SEO. This plugin puts it the other way round.

WordPress PDA
Authors Description: This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda browser
My overview: This plugin sits quietly in the background and checks what browser you»™re viewing the blog with. If it»™s a mobile or PDA device it uses a custom theme to display the site therefore increasing readability.

Search Everything
Authors Description: Adds search functionality with little setup. Including the option to search pages, attachments, drafts, comments and custom fields (metadata). wp-admin options page added to customize default searches.
My overview: Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Kimili Flash Embed
Authors Description: Provides a wordpress interface for Geoff Stearns»™ excellent standards compliant Flash detection and embedding JavaScript.
My overview: Allows you to embed flash files into posts and pages – v useful.

In-Line AJAX
Authors Description: A very simple plugin that allows you to use ajax to retrieve post and comment contents as well as the add comment box in-line for your users. This plugin also submits the comment box using AJAX. For those that don»™t have javascript it displays links as usual.
My overview: Doesn»™t seem to work on my installation but I have seen it working on others – looks very cool since it allows you to consolidate your page whilst still having the content expandable for those interested in reading it.

AJAX Comments
Authors Description: Post comments quickly without leaving or refreshing the page
My overview: After failing to get In-line AJAX working I»™m pleased to have this AJAX facility installed for commenting. In short, when you click to make a comment you are taken to the individual post page. Once you»™ve submitted your comment, rather than reload the whole page, the AJAX tool adds your comments without refreshing. (Clashed with another plugin so had to remove it – may work for you).

CSS Compress
Authors Description: Automatically compress your CSS files: GZIP and remove comments.
My overview: Speeds up the loading of pages – never a bad thing. Activate it and forget it. I»™ve removed this one since it stopped my header image from loading!

Digg This Reloaded
Authors Description: Adds Digg story link/button on detection of Digg referrer, otherwise a submit to Digg link is displayed.
My overview: A massive improvement on the Digg This Plugin that I»™ve mention previously and personally had issues with. I»™ve seen this working fine elsewhere but won»™t work properly (at the moment) with Digg Defender. I»™ve been in touch with the author and they»™re hopefully going to work on a merged plugin tomorrow to resolve this issue. You can see the little Digg button at the bottom of each post.

Search Meter
Authors Description: Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog.
My overview: I great idea in principle however I»™m not sure how much people actually use the search box on my site. I»™ll report back on this one once it»™s had some time to tick over.

Secure & Accessible Contact Form
Authors Description: This easy-to-install form has many accessibility, usability, and security features.
My overview: This isn»™t really a plugin because you don»™t upload the files and activate them from the plugin folder. Instead it requires a bit of thought on your part – it»™s worth the time and effort to customise your own installation.

Bad Behaviour
Authors Description: Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site
My overview: Stop content thieves and spambots from even getting to read the data on your site. Light and simple. Install and go.

Spam Karma 2
Authors Description: Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress.
My overview: Another drop in and go plugin which should catch anything Akismet misses.

Digital Fingerprint
Authors Description: This plugin enables you to easily and quickly search the web for potential cases of plagiarism and content theft. It works by adding a customizable «digital fingerprint» to your RSS feed in posts that you select (or all posts if you wish). You can then easily monitor the blogosphere for your digital fingerprint in the hopes of finding potential content thieves and scrapers abusing your content.
My overview: Sounds far more complicated than it actually is. Simple to install and configure. Assists you in tracking down content thieves.

WP-Contact Form
Authors Description: WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
My overview: This is what I tried to use on my contact page since the Secure & Accessible Contact Form didn»™t work for me.

PXS Mail Form
Authors Description: Creates a mail form with multi part verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. Originally based on the contact form by Ryan Duff. Recent updates include referrer checks, exploit management and the ability to run with the Markdown plugin. New feature for this release allows the sender to CC themselves
My overview: This was the only contact me plugin that worked for me so I»™d recommend it above all others.

Snap Preview Anywhere TM
Authors Description: Add Snap Preview Anywhere(TM) to your blog
My overview: Hover over any external link and you»™ll see a preview of that site appear – neat!

404 Notifier
Authors Description: This plugin will log 404 hits on your site and can notify you via e-mail or you can subscribe to the generated RSS feed of 404 events
My overview: Those of us that are obsessed with web-stats often wonder why we»™re getting so many 404 pages being served when we thing we run a tight ship. This plugin is brilliant because it helps you identify if it»™s author error (deleted or moved page that has an old link) or user error (person viewing site made an error).

Simple Recent Comments
Authors Description: Shows a list of recent comments
My overview: Simple but very effective – this plugin is very customisable and will fit any template you care to throw it at.

XHTML Sitemap
Authors Description: Over time, you will likely accumulate tons of pages, and as this happens, the odds of certain pages getting buried to the point of becoming nearly inaccessible tend to go up. To combat this, you can generate an XHTML sitemap that contains links to every page of your site.
My overview: Having the XML Google Sitemap plugin installed is great; however to make sure you get proper Google exposure this tool generates a brilliant sitemap that folk can navigate and Google will suck it up too! I strongly recommend this addon (not a plugin) to all and sundry; however it doesn»™t work with WP2.1 yet.

Share This
Authors Description: Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites
My overview: A great idea that»™s based upon the original principles of plugins like Socialise. A simple link appears at the foot of all posts or pages which, when clicked, takes the clicker to a separate page where they can submit your entry to the more popular social bookmarking sites or allows the viewer to email the page to a friend.

WP Barunio Administration
Authors Description: This WordPress plugin changes the layout and visual design of the default WordPress administration area. In addition to changes in the color scheme, it modifies the layout so that submenus are placed on the left side of the page, and is well-stuied to the creation of nested submenus created with the Custom Admin Menu plugin.
My overview: A great idea but it uses awful colours. If the author could provide a page where you can choose your own colour schemes then it»™d be brilliant. I prefer the WP Tiger Administration Plugin.

Custom Admin Menu for WordPress
Authors Description: The Custom Admin Menu plugin gives you full control of your WordPress administration section, without requiring any changes to any files! All customizations are done using a very intuitive graphical interface. This increased degree of customization will turn WordPress into a real content management system.
My overview: A great idea and if you want to see it in action before you download and install it, the author has a brilliant little video on his site demonstrating it. I»™m expecting great things from this author since he»™s produced some brilliant plugins thus far.

MyAvatars
Authors Description: Tired of Gravatar? You can now use MyAvatars, a plugin that shows MyBlogLog»™s avatars in your comments instead of Gravatar»™s ones even if you»™re not subscribed to MyBlogLog.com.
My overview: A much needed replacement to the awful Gravatars plugins and service. Very neat and integrates easily.

Disclosure Policy WordPress Plugin
Authors Description: A Vital Tool for Business Bloggers to Maintain Ethical Integrity and Legal Security
My overview: More and more people are blogging in return for payment in order to supplement their income. There are others that have affiliate links on their sites or adverts. Whatever you might have on your site it»™s become more common that those you «work for» require you to disclose you»™re being paid for your services. This plugin makes the whole disclosure process much, much easier.

Gregarious 2
Authors Description:The ultimate social bookmarking plugin. Need I say more?
My overview:That»™s a bold statement to make; however I think the Author was right in what they said. I love this plugin. It took me a while to fathom the admin panel but then I went right in there without reading instructions. GET IT!

WP Admin Bar Reloaded
Authors Description:WP Admin Bar is an indispensable WordPress plugin which displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog»™s page – but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.
My overview:I normally have one page open with my admin pages and another with the actual blog. This simple plugin has changed that. I can now quickly access all my wordpress functions from the header of my blog. No one other than logged in users sees it – brilliant work and I»™d recommend to all.

I»™ll add to this list as I find other plugins and make use of them. I»™ll also edit this list as I remove or update the plugins I use.

I hope this is of use to others. Please feel free to comment if it»™s been useful to you and also to mention others I may have missed.

I need to go through and clean this up somewhat since I moved to WP 2.1.x in the last few months and some of these plugins may no longer work, plus there are several others I now use that I»™ve not yet mentioned here.

WordPress Plug-ins / Add-ons » My Bloody Great Nutshell