

Ask HN: Must have Wordpress plug-ins for personal (tech) blog? - shahedkhan30

What plug-ins are a <i>must</i> for personal (tech &#38; start-up) blog?
======
whereareyou
Bit.ly Service - shortens links and works with Bit.ly Pro. <http://snippets-
tricks.org/proyecto/bitly-service/>

Google Sitemaps - easily generate XML sitemaps.
[http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-
plugins/googl...](http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-
plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/)

Lockout - good for when you F __* something up and dont want anyone to see
your site temporarily.<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lock-out/>

Robots Meta - lets you easily control what is followed and indexed by search
engines. <http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/>

Simply Show ID's - shows page ID's. Something WP should do, but doesn't.
<http://sivel.net/wordpress/simply-show-ids/>

Simple Redirect - makes 301's really easy.
[http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for-
wo...](http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for-wordpress/)

Gravity Forms - a super powerful form plugin. It is not free, but well worth
it's price. <http://gravityforms.com>

~~~
shahedkhan30
Thank you.

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FilterJoe
My list is pretty similar to this one:

<http://zemalf.com/713/most-essential-wordpress-plugins/>

though zemalf also discusses an alternative list:

<http://zemalf.com/1407/must-have-wordpress-plugins/>

Other ones that I would install:

Contact Form 7 (if you want people to be able to contact you)

Some kind of sharing plugin like addthis, addtoany or sociable

I so wish I had a resource like zemalf when I first started my Wordpress blog
2 years ago. Many posts on the site explain how to do things on Wordpress that
you really should be doing, with detailed step-by-step instructions. I
especially liked the series on Optimizing using W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN -
though you may not want to worry about Optimization until you get to a few
hundred page views per day.

Note that you also need to choose a theme. I suggest using a theme framework.
CSS and PHP get customized in your child theme, so when you upgrade the
framework or Wordpress your theme won't break. I use the thematic framework
but there are others (<http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Frameworks>).

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cheald
None. Seriously. Wordpress is fine for blogging out of the box. Once you start
getting traffic, you'll want a caching plugin, but you won't need to worry
about that from the outset.

That said, you may benefit from things like Disqus or Facebook comments and
social sharing plugins, if you don't want to code up the pieces yourself.

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ghurlman
Not true. Any blog should have some sort of anti-spam comment thing in place.

~~~
cheald
Required email registration ships by default with Wordpress and works well
enough. Something like Akismet or antispam baked into Disqus or Facebook
comments works better, but isn't strictly necessary.

