My Favorite Little Wordpress Tricks and Plugins

After having Problogger.net’s – Darren Rowse on my show yesterday and Matt Mullenweg (wordpress creator) on the show last week I thought I would keep with the blog theme and share my favorite tricks and plugins that I do with my blog.

Favorite Plugins

Akismet: Do I really have to say anything? Its already caught almost 70,000 spams for me. I used to spend so much time weeding out spam emails …. anyway akismet is the bomb.com

Bookmark Me: To Be honest I am probably going to dump this one in the next shoemoney.com revision (which should take place in the next few weeks). After using crazyegg on my blog for a while I hardly EVER see anyone use anything other then the delicious button so I think I am going to focus more on del.icio.us and my RSS. It is cool though and easy to implement.

Brian’s Threaded Comments – This is by far my favorite fun plugin. Its what lets me respond inline to others comments and also lets visitors do the same. It inspires conversation on your blog almost like a forum. Very Cool.

Comment Karma – This is what lets you vote (digg look alike) on comments. I am not sure if I will keep this plugin going. My original intent was to make it so I could display the most liked commenter ala weblogsinc but Its looking like I might just write my own custom plugin for that but for now this one is letting me know atleast people might like something like that.

Democracy – This is a new plugin that I am really liking. It is a poll plugin that lets you display polls in posts and also in your sidebar. It also has options so you can show archives of polls and archive/increment them. It is also extremely customizable and easy to implement.

Digg This: This plugin is what makes the little digg icons on my site. Basically when someone comes to the url from digg it automatically detects the url and adds the button. This is really nice cause you dont need to keep track when someone diggs your posts.

podPress – This is the BOMB if you are going to do anything with media…. even word/pdf files to video you MUST get this plugin if your doing anything with media at all. It also provides easy inclusion and feeds for Itunes.

Favorite Trick – Wordpress Title

This post was inspired by First Page Fitness

Wordpress Title – there is a function in wordpress it looks like this – wp_title() If you look at your theme you will see it. Its probably there in the title tag and other stuff. What you may not realize is that you can give this function 2 arguments.

wp_title() by itself defaults to wp_title($sep = ‘& raquo;, $display = true)

For non h4×0rs – the & raquo; is what gives you the >> before each post. That is why you see that so much on every wordpress blog at the begniging of the title is because that is the default. The second part and this is more geekier says to display the page title (true) or return it for use in PHP (false) lets not worry about the second part.

So what fun can we have with this? Well lets say the title of the blog post was “Apple Iphone Is Cool”. Now by default if someone went directly to your post it would look like:

>> Apple iPhone is Cool

If we want nothing infront of the title then we just send a null string like wp_title(”",”False”) That would make it look like:

Apple iPhone is cool

Basically anything you put in the first set of quotes is going to lead your title. Good luck and have fun…..