The buy me a beer plugin is not the only plugin I have been trying out recently. Here are some other WordPress plugins you might want to try out
- Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – sitemaps are not just useful for visitors but can help your posts get indexed also. This plugin makes creating a sitemap automatic and painless. I had to tweak the look of it a bit, perhaps in the next version there will be more formatting options.
- Comment Timeout – I noticed a lot of the spam was appearing on older posts, particularly manual spams which Akismet isn’t fantastic at catching. My assumption is the spammers were looking for pages with Google pagerank. Here is a solution, close comments after a certain duration. Combined with setting comments containing links as spam this has cut down my housekeeping quite a lot (obviously not all comments with links are spam and the few that are not I can retrieve from the spam queue, but 99% of the time they are and stay there, and yes I regard “signatures” in blog comments as spam, comments already link back without the extra clutter of a “signature”).
- Better Comments Manager – Once you have spam sorted you need to reply to your real comments. The new version of this plugin makes it easier to work with comments by creating a special control panel page that allows you to read and reply all on one screen.
- WordPress Database Backup – I am not sure why WordPress does not contain this in the default install any more but backups are essential. Use this plugin to automatically email you a blog database backup every week.
Those are my new recommendations, which plugins have you found particularly useful lately? Let me know in the comments …