Last update 23rd of July 2006

Since I started blogging about a year ago (at the time being), I’ve gathered a whole bunch of experience with the different plugins for WordPress that are available throughout the net, and I even have written a couple of them myself. Some plugins are updated regularly, some aren’t, but all of them that I am still using have something in common - they work with both WordPress 2.0 and 2.1 and with Binary Blue without any problems

So voila, here comes a commented list of the plugins currently used here at 4null4.de. It’s quite sure that this list will have to be updated on a regular basis, even though I’ll not post any version numbers. So for each plugin, my comments stick to the latest version currently available that I am aware of.

• Acronym Replacer
  I’m using a heavily modified version of this little cutie, as I had the need to support several more or less common German abbreviations and acronyms. Most of my additions are sort of ironical rants (like those to AOL or MS or the explanation of a TEAM (the German explanation means ‘great, another idiot is doing it’)).
• Alphabetical Plugins
  This young lady simply reorders the plugins page in the administrative panel. I don’t understand why Wordpress itself does not order the installed plugins alpabetically; so, up to date, this plugin has its virtues.
• Amazon Wishlist
  not much to tell about that, so just see it in action here.
• Better Feed
  This is a nice feed enhancer. You gain full access to the display of your feeds, as seen here onsite, like adding several helpful links into the posts display, add a copyright notice to every post and so on. It’s a nice and unobtrusive one.
• Brian’s Latest Comments
  This is a nice plugin that adds ability to show up the most recent comments on your blog. Together with my Sidebar Widget for BLC it works like a charm and has replaced Get Recent Comments on my blog.
• Code Filter
  It simply encodes <code>-blocks in your posts, so you can publish code syntax on your blog without having to think about the HTML encoding of all these entities on your own any more. Smart and simple.
• Extended Live Archives
  When using AJAX enhanced themes like Binary Blue or K2, it is merely mandatory to have it It offers a very convenient way for your visitors to gain access to each and every post you’ve published ever in your blog. A Must-Have and officially supported by Binary Blue
• Follow URL
  Now being shipped with wordpress together, it was and is a nice little tool that removes these nasty nofollow attributes from your links. In times of Spamkarma (see below) it’s useless to remove them, so using this is definitely no mistake.
• Gravatars
  This is a nice plugin that enhances your blog with gravatars support, these little avatar pictures you can see here onsite next to the comments. It has an implemented caching mechanism, so once a gravatar is loaded at your blog it won’t be needed to access the gravatar server again for this user. A nice gimmick, officially supported by Binary Blue
• Landing Sites
  This one is useful especially if you receive lots of visitors through search engines. With this plugin you can display a bunch of related posts to a visitor that respect the query contents of that visitor. This helps your visitors to find exactly the information they were looking for when they have hit the search result link to your site. Binary Blue has included full support for this one.
• Optimal Title
  For those of you who want their blogs at least a little SEOd, this is a Must Have, though it needs manual manipulation of the header.php of your themes in most cases (Binary Blue has support for this embedded, surely ;)). It rearranges the title tag, setting the post title in front of the blog’s name, thus adding valuable criteria for Google and Co. for better rankings.
• Redirection
  This one is pretty useful in case you change your permalink structure from time to time, or in case you change the page slug of a post for some reason. This plugin then makes sure your changed post is still available for visitors that come through the old links, delivering the page including the new address and a 301 (Page moved Permanently) response. This even makes sure that the data octopus (Google) and Co. update their indices as fast as possible.
• Sidebar Widgets
  Probably the most important plugin besides Spamkarma2, this jewel enables you to customize your blog’s Sidebar without the need to change a single line of code, as long as your WordPress theme supports Widgets. Since the publication of this plugin (it was publically betatested at wordpress.com before) many plugins have been "widgetized", and many themes have been updated to support Widgets. Needless to say that Binary Blue is one of them ;).
• Sociable
  A nice plugin that adds support for tons of social bookmarking sites to your blog.
• Spam Karma 2 Reloaded
  This is one, if not the most important plugin I’ve ever run across. Forget Akismet, bad Behaviour and all the other anti spam plugins. Once you’ve uploaded and activated this one, you won’t ever need the others again. There is, though, a nice addon (sort of a plugin for the plugin:D), which will enhance SK2 with Akismet support. You’ll need your wordpress API key then, to make use of it. Normal SK2 does not afford any one, though. Definitely my strongest recommendation (and works with Binary Blue as a charm)
• Time Zone
  There is still some old relic left from the time where electricity was rare and expensive (well, ironically it’s growing more and more expensive again now, but less for technical reasons than more for capitalistic greed), which resulted in the generation of the so called summer time and winter time (daylight saving in the english speaking world). For obvious reasons WordPress does not recognize the date when to switch between both timezones automatically, and per default it uses the time of the server it is hosted on. In a certain amount of cases this server time may differ from the time zone the blogging person is suited in, so this little plugin has its merits. Useful.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
  Once again a merely mandatory recommendation. Grants full access to assign so called tags to each post, build up tag based archives, add technorati tags to the posts and so on. Officially Binary Blue supported.
• WordPress DB Backup
  Another plugin shipped with wordpress v2 already, this is useful to have regular backups of your blog database. Comes in very handy with another plugin for supporting cron-timed automatical backups (which I am not using right now).
• WP Clean Umlauts 404-Edition
  Mandatory for German language blogs, this nice one converts the German Umlauts into their corresponding HTML resp. unicode entities.
• WP Mail Validator
  The only plugin with anti spam background I allow to co-exist with SK2 on my blog It simply can check each email address inserted in a comment for existence on the corresponding server, otherwise the comment postage will be denied. This results in fewer email addresses like donot@email.me posted in your comments. Handy especially in cases of flamewars between visitors

I used to work with WP ShortStat and the WP-ShortStat-Keyword plugin as well (the latter being supported by BB), but ShortStat imposes huge server load on the SQL database and relies on an external service to recognize the countries of the visitors, so I stopped using them about two weeks ago. Perhaps they will be readded some day, when ShortStat improves database behaviour and does not rely on a sort of snail slow external service.