Site Updates and Wordpress Plugins

I continue to slowly change things around for the website. At this point, I’m very happy with the look of the site. Tarski is a great theme to work with, my compliments to Chris and Ben on this wonderful theme. At this point, I’m mainly focusing on Wordpress plugins that will help the function of of the website, on the front end and back end. I’ll list just a few of the plugins I’ve been using and why after the jump.

WP-SpamFree - I actually just installed this plugin today. I’ve been having a bit of a problem with blog spam from bots, and honestly, who doesn’t have this problem? Akismet does a great job of keeping it from being posted automatically and set into moderation, but this plugin supposedly attacks it head on. It used a combination of Javascript and cookies to keep those bots out, bot of which these bots seem to have problems with. You can check out more about it at the WP-SpamFree plugin website.

Wordpress Stats - Wordpress stats allows me to see a pretty basic overview of my websites currently activity. Number of visits to some of my posts, incoming links, etc. It’s all pretty basic, but at this point, I don’t need anything over the top. It requires a Wordpress API key, but if you are already using Akismet, then you can use the same key.

All In One SEO Pack - The All In One SEO Pack add a few options to your pages and posts. It allows to you ad meta tags and better title tags to help with Search Engine Optimization.

Comment Timeout - This plugin is also one of those “anti spam” plugins. It with automatically close comments on old posts and pages after a specific time that you set. Could be a couple days or a few months. This is where a high majority of my bot spam was coming from. With the new plugin, WP-SpamFree, I may disable this plugin and see how things go, but over all, this is a great plugin to help combat spam bots.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - This is a really great plugin. It allows you to upgrade your Wordpress install quickly and easily. The way it works is that once started, it backs up your file and database and provides links to download. It then downloads the wordpress.org/latest.zip file and sets the site into maintenance mode. It will deactivate all your plugs, but remember which ones, and once you click the link to update, it reactivates them all and removes the maintenance mode. It’s pretty nifty.

There are a few other plugins that I use, nothing really spectacular, but these are what I like the most. Feel free to leave a comment or two listing some of your favorite Wordpress plugins.