The cost saving involved in using open-source software is usually quite small and definitely not worthwhile for a commercial site, if it means working with an inferior product. But when a product is solid and has a huge user base providing both support and modifications, open-source software offers many advantages. WordPress is “free” software at its best and credit must also go to the people who wrote the various plugins which are used on this site.
- Bad Behavior stops comment spam before it starts by trapping and blocking spambots before they have a chance to post comments. Use this even if you have comments closed, to prevent direct access to the comments script.
- Chicklet Creators adds RSS feed subscription buttons to your blog
- Dashboard Editor allows you to customise your admin dashboard to speed up loading.
- Disable AutoP is the answer if you find WordPress entering paragraph tags where you don’t want them.
- Duplicate Content Cure is a solution to the concerns some have that the search engines might penalize blogs for showing the same content on multiple pages (index, archives, single, etc).
- Feedsmith (formerly known as “Feedburner Feed Replacement”) this forwards regular feed traffic to the Feedburner version of your feed, while letting some (SE) User-Agents see your feed directly on your site. I strongly recommend the use of Feedburner, as a free way to extend your feeds compatibility and and also to get some useful exposure via Feedburner’s directory. Nice stats too!
- Google Sitemaps Generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog
- Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the separator to after the title rather than before. Much more friendly for those scanning SE directories.
- Page Link Manager lets you choose which pages appear in your site navigation.
- Recent Posts displays a customizable list of recent posts (with/without extracts).
- Related Entries uses full indexing to display a list of posts similar to the one being viewed. Good for visitors, good for keeping older posts exposed.
- Search Everything improves dramatically on the default search script, by allowing pages and comments to be searched if desired.
- Search Meter logs what people are searching for on your site.
- Secure Form Mailer secure php form mailer script.
- Sitemap Generator generates a customizable sitemap containing all posts and pages.
- Sociable automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites
- Slim Stat produces useful stats for your blog.
- Spam Karma stops all forms of automated blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. Combined with Bed Behaviour (above) Spam Karma will allow you to keep comments open, unmoderated and yet free of spam.
- Tiger Admin changes your WP Admin interface to a quicker and more friendly version. Only works with fully CSS2-compliant browsers.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior allows tags to be used either as a navigation aid and/or for SEO. Tons of functions, not such great documentation.
- WP-Cache is a very fast cache module which can manage the whole sites. Once installed, make sure it is working, otherwise your blog will actually run more slowly.