While Wordpress is a pretty awesome blogging script, it definitely warrants spicing up with tweaks here and there. Below are the plugins that are currently active for this site. Rated on userfriendliness and usefulness.

Admin Theme Preview

Type: Site
Rating: 5/5
Comment: Useful plugin for changing layouts! Allows the administrator to tweak and test themes that they don’t want to launch to the public yet.

Akismet

Type: Anti-Spam
Rating: 5/5
Comment: One of the default Wordpress plugin since v2.1.2 and seems to be quite a powerful anti-spam script. Now I don’t have to close past entries anymore (though that’s a really good way to not have spam at all). It allows the default anti-spam aspect of Wordpress as a second barrier. Very easy to use, only need an API key.

Author Highlight

Type: Comments
Rating: 4/5
Comment: This is pretty handy plugin which differentiates author comments on a post from visitor comments. I find this particular helpful if one doesn’t have a threaded comment plugin and you need to reply to visitor responseswith a separate comment. There’s not too much user documentation for it, just note that the “class_name_else” part of the class you edit refers to the class for visitor comments. That totally confused me. [NOT IN USE CURRENTLY, but recommended]

Brian’s Threaded Comments

Type: Comments
Rating: 4/5
Comment: I *love* the concept behind this plugin. It basically modifies the comments to allow people to more explicitly reply to other’s comments. Unfortunately there’s not much support for it and being a php noob, I’ve found it very difficult to integrate other comments plugins with it. There’s a hack that allow author comments to be highlighted using this plugin.

Categorical Links Page

Type: Pages
Rating: 3/5
Comment: A useful plugin which allows you to sort links into a wordpress page. My biggest gripe with it is that (for at least people who don’t have php knowledge) it’s difficult to have other content on that page other than just links. I’d need to look into either getting content in somehow or finding a similar plugin.

Maintainence Mode

Type: Site
Rating: 4.5/5
Comment: Allows you to put the blog into “maintenance mode” for when you want to test out scripts or change/test layouts. Only the admin (or users you choose) can see the site as it is, everyone else sees a page telling them the site is unavailable for maintenance. The only minor gripe I have is that the plugin’s “the site will be back in” field only allows input in minutes. If your site is planned to be down for days, we’re talking about thousands of minutes. But it’s easy enough to just remove that option.

dofollow

Type: Site
Rating: 3/5
Comment: Just removes the “nofollow” part of visitors’ URL. Not sure how beneficial that is, but I gathered that it’s better to have that part removed than not.

Edit Comments XT

Type: Comments
Rating: 5/5
Comment: Great idea! Allows for visitors to edit their comments for a short duration (e.g. to get rid of typos and grammatical errors) but not to later delete their comments or alter their comments after a more substantial amount of time. [NOT IN USE CURRENTLY, but recommended]

Is Subpage Of

Type: Site
Rating: 4/5
Comment: Perfect for the navigation structure I wanted! Allow subpages to be coded according to the parent page. The only downside is that you need to be familiar with how conditional tags for wordpress work.

Optimal Title

Type: Site
Rating: 3/5
Comment: Easy to use, though I’m not sure how much effect it has in “optimising” my titles.

Post Levels

Type: Privacy
Rating: 5/5
Comment: A must have for people who want to control who gets to see what on a blog. It allows for a number of user levels to be set for registered users so you can screen posts to whomever you want, without people who don’t have access noticing. Easy to use too, from memory, you don’t need to edit any wordpress files, only plugin option.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

Type: Pages
Rating: 4/5
Comment: A very powerful form seemingly designed for more professional/commercial wordpressed sites. Tweaking the form took me a while as it was a little confusing as to how to have content embedded within the form (I ended up using a conditional tag) as well as where to tweak the form layout (it’s the section at the very bottom of the huge script).

Subscribe To Comments

Type: Comments
Rating: 4/5
Comment: Simple script to allow visitors to subscribe to certain comments. It’s easy to use and I haven’t had any problems with it so far.