Plugins

[5/07/09] Wordpress — the publishing software we use here at the Smitten Kitchen — is a wonderful, but sometimes terrible, thing; wonderful because it’s better than any other publishing software I’ve worked with but terrible because the core code is so “clean” and “pure” (as developers like to describe it as they wax poetic about the software) that getting your site exactly the way you want it can require anywhere from two to twenty extra plugins, plugins that need to be updated each and every time there’s a new Wordpress release. Which is every ten days. (Okay, I’m being dramatic, but tell me it doesn’t feel like that sometimes?)

Thus, for those of you who have requested, this is a list of the plugins currently used (but we’re always adding more) to make the Smitten Kitchen vroom and go go go:

  • 1 Blog Catcher: Caches pages in order to increase the response speed and minimize the server load. Wordpress likes to rebuild pages every time people hit them. Servers hate this.
  • Akismet: Hands down, best spam catch I have ever seen, used or been aquanted with. Learns from it’s “mistakes” as you correct them.
  • Author Highlight: Gives you a way to set your comments apart.
  • Feedburner FeedSmith: Filters all of your existing RSS urls into Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to do all sorts of extra things with your RSS feed, including but not limited to tracking subscribers and readership patterns.
  • Get Recent Comments: Allows you to plug them into your sidebar.
  • List Category Posts: Your results may vary! My Wordpress Guru has hacked this to make Smitten Kitchen’s Recipe Index.
  • Live Comment Preview: Shockingly, Wordpress doesn’t come with a preview button for comments. But Live Comment Preview is way cooler than a standard old preview button, anyhow, showing people how their comment will look, as they type it. When it works. It’s not compatible with the most recent Wordpress upgrade but I’m sure it’ll catch up soon.
  • Ozh’ Better Feed: They say it better: “Your feed, on steroids.” It is what allowed us to do this the way we wanted.
  • Random Redirect: The genius behind the Surprise Me! feature.
  • Smart Archives: Currently not in use, or hidden. But will be useful when I get to tweaking it again.
  • Wordpress Database Backup: You backup your site, don’t you?
  • WP-Email: So posts can be emailed.
  • WP-Print: So posts can be printed.