23 Mar
My Theme! My Plugins!
Because some of you asked! 
My current WordPress theme is “blueline1.0″ by GPS Gazette.
And here are the plugins I use right now:
| Allow Categories | 0.5.4 | Per-category permissions for Wordpress. English + Allow version of L. Fargue http://stknights.free.fr/?p=69 By James Low. |
| Blogroll Autolinker | 1.1 | Automatically turns names from your blogroll into links in your posts. By Steven Berg. |
| Brian’s Threaded Comments | 1.5.12 | This gives you threaded comments and a “wandering” comment form. By Brian Meidell. |
| Broken Link Checker | 0.3.9 | Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. By Janis Elsts. |
| Countdown Timer | 2.1.1 | Add template tags and widget to count down or up to the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and/or seconds to a particular event. By Andrew Ferguson. |
| Cricket Moods | 3.6 | Allows an author to add multiple mood tags and mood smilies to every post. By Keith “kccricket” Constable. |
| Custom Smilies | 1.2 | Personalize your posts and comments using custom smilies. Previously named Custom Smileys. By Quang Anh Do. |
| Extended Category Widget | 1.2 | Replacement of the category widget to allow for greater customization of the category widget. By Peter van der Does. |
| Filosofo Comments Preview | 1.0.5 | Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them. By Austin Matzko. |
| Flexi Pages Widget | 1.4 | A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options. By Srini G. |
| Full Text Feed | 1.04 | Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed. By Ronald Heft, Jr.. |
| Irrepressible.Fragments Widget | 1.0.0 | Shows fragments of censored information from http://irrepressible.info. By e. |
| Lighter Admin Drop Menus | 2.3 | Creates Drop Down Menus for WordPress Admin Panels, just like Andy Staines’ original plugin, but without background pictures and special fonts. This makes it faster to load and more adaptable to customizations. By corpodibacco. |
| LiveJournal Crossposter | 2.0.5 | Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog. Editing or deleting a post will be replicated as well. Original plugin by Evan Broder. By Arseniy Ivanov. |
| LJ user ex | 0.2 | Replaces <lj user=”username”/> and <lj comm=”community”/> with correct HTML code. Like “LJ user” plugin, but supports both <lj user=”username”/> and <lj user=”username”> forms, plus communities. By Michael Elfimov. |
| Math Comment Spam Protection | 2.2 | Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Example of such question: What is the sum of 2 and 9? By Michael Woehrer. |
| My Link Order | 2.5.1 | My Link Order allows you to set the order in which links and link categories will appear in the sidebar. Uses a drag and drop interface for ordering. Adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes. By froman118. |
| Now Reading | 4.4.1 | Allows you to display the books you’re reading, have read recently and plan to read, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. By Rob Miller. |
| Page Category Plus | 2.0 | Produces a list of tags in the write/edit post pages - click to use By Andy Staines. |
| Post Avatar | 1.2.4 | Attach a picture to posts easily by selecting from a list of uploaded images. Similar to Livejournal Userpics. Developed with Dominik Menke. By Vicky Arulsingam. |
| Quotes Collection | 1.0 | Quotes Collection plugin with Ajax powered Random Quote sidebar widget helps you collect and display your favourite quotes on your WordPress blog. By Srini G. |
| Random Image Widget | 1.2 | Display a random image from a directory located on the webserver By Marcel Proulx. |
| Ravatars | 2.0.2 | A plugin for generating random avatars from user-defined source images By grokcode. |
| Sideblog Wordpress Plugin | 5.1 | A simple aside plugin. Licensed under the GPL By Kates Gasis. |
| Simple Tags | 1.5.7 | Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags ! By Amaury BALMER. |
| Subscribe To Comments | 2.1.2 | Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith. |
| WordPress Database Backup | 2.1.5 | On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Manage → Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko. |
| WP-Mythumbshot | 0.2 | allows visitors to preview your external links by using Mythumbshot. By Mythumbshot. |
| WP-Polls | 2.21 | Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. |
| WP-Polls Widget | 2.21 | Adds a Poll Widget to display single or multiple polls from WP-Polls Plugin. You will need to activate WP-Polls first. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. |
| WP AJAX Edit Comments | v1.1.5.1 | Allows you and your users to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. By Ronald Huereca. |
| WP Super Cache | 0.6.4 | Very fast caching module for WordPress. Once enabled, you must enable the cache. Based on WP-Cache by Ricardo Galli Granada. By Donncha O Caoimh. |
I have also the following plugins that either don’t work or that I don’t use right now :
- The Comment E-Mail Responder - seems to conflict with Brian Meidell’s Threaded Comments Plugin
- Role Manager - because it’s pretty buggy
- I keep “Easy Gravatars” as a back-up around in case “Ravatars” stop working
- “Extended Comment Options” - a batch editiing tool (I keep it around just in case I need it)
- “WP-Gatekeeper” as a back-up for “Math Comment Spam”
As you can see, I currently don’t have any spam fighting plugin. Since I enabled Gatekeeper on my other blog (and Math Comment Spam Protection works pretty much exactly like it) I haven’t had ONE comment spam anymore. If the problem ever arises again, I’ll probably get Akismet. I have had very bad experiences with Spam Karma - I got perfectly harmless comments blacklisted all the time (even my own!). It’s unwieldy and incomprehensible. And well, with Gatekeeper or Math Comment Spam Protection chances are that I won’t need it at all.
I’m still looking for a good polls plugin and a good stats plugin for the backend.
accomplished
Coding: Plugins, Online Life: Blog
So how flexible is wordpress to customizing colors and such? I’d love to be able to duplicate my LJ as my blog, at least in color scheme and header. I put a lot of effort into that!
Thanks for the list!
You do that manually in the CSS file, so you can use any colours you want.
Thanks for the advice. I’m using WP for my RL blog, and I’m not as efficient as you when searching for plugins
I have WP for my private blog and professional website as well. So by now I know more about WP plugins than I ever wanted to …
Some things I’ve learned the hard way:
- only use the “official” repository
- if it says “compatible up to” (not your WP version) AND there’s recent negative feedback, don’t even try the relevant plugin
- it really pays off to look at the most recent comments on a plugin homepage: if things stopped working, you save yourself a LOT of headache that way, and if there’s lots of “HELP ME?!?!!111!!!” comments and no replies, then it’s also a good idea not to try a plugin >:D
That said, the plugins I use here, do work (at least right now and for my WP version …).
[Though I have to say that the Role Manager does not work for me in the way it was intended (I only keep it around because it allowed me to change the name of "subscribers" to "friends" - the plugin for my flocked posts is the very simple, easy and perfectly lovely "Allow Categories").]
Oh, and by now I have a new version of the lj user plugin: *waves at![[lj user]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
alienor77310*!
Hey Juno!
How has the conversion to 2.5 been going for you? Any plugins that you really can’t get to work very well any more?
How are you liking the dual posting? Any features about WP that you can’t stand?
(This is all, of course, because I have some free time to waste and am looking at moving me off of LJ again. The mood will probably pass… ;) )
(And as aside, did the list of your plugins suddenly disappear on this entry? I can see the “here but don’t use” list, but other than that… Interesting.)
I’m still on WordPress 2.3.3 over here, but by now I’m on WordPress 2.5.1 on my other blog. The plugins have caught up and I’m loving it.
Since the lj crossposter plugin started working, dual posting is no problem at all - no work at all!
Any features I can’t stand … well, the nice thing about WordPress is that you are responsible for the extras. So it’s up to me which plugins I use! Of course a real blog is always a bit of a WIP, especially for someone like me who enjoys tinkering with code and design. But I really love the freedom of a hosted blog and the wonderful plugins - especially the Now Reading plugin and my random quotes!
The list of plugins disappeared because I needed to update it.
Now it’s back.
Have I told you recently how much I love you?
Thanks so much! This really cut my searching down to only a few dozen hours instead of years.
Can I ask you a question about the Math Spam protection plugin? Where exactly in the comment.php did you place that bit of code. I keep getting errors and I know it’s because it’s not in the right spot.
Ha!
Normally you don’t have to add code to make the Math Spam protection plugin work (at least I never did!). Or the WP Gatekeeper (which is even more fun, but for making that work with Threaded Comments you do have to add a line somewhere and I haven’t figured out how that works). Anyway.
Cutting a long story short:
Go here: http://www.howtospoter.com/web-20/wordpress/fixing-brians-threaded-comments-plugin
That gives you a new comments.php for your theme which already includes the right code for the Math spam and for making Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin work.
So here’s what you do:
1. save the comments.php of your theme
2. replace that comments.php with the one from TheSpot-er
3. upload Brian Meidell’s threaded comments plugin, activate it and change the options in the admin area to suit your needs
4. upload Math Comment Spam and activate
5. take a deep breath and look at things
Oh, and if you want to change the looks of some comment stuff with the Threaded Comments plugin you need to look INSIDE the Threaded Comments plugin. Because of the threading, there’s dynamic code inside the CSS so you can’t fudge with it from outside. I was going crazy because I couldn’t change the border colours of those damn boxes, ready to throw the whole computer out of the window … then I looked into that plugin file and felt really, really stupid.