Devon Biere’s Blog

I use WordPress to power this site and have been thrilled both with the core blogging components and the great plugin ecosystem.  I’m glad I avoided the temptation to roll my own little blogging system this time.  It would have been a fun exercise, but I wanted to get up and running quickly and WordPress saved me tons of time.

Trevor Davis has a nice Tuts+ post highlighting 13 of the most important WordPress plugins (hat tip: DZone).  I use several on his list, including:

• Akismet - Identifies and filters comment spam
• Google XML Sitemaps - Generates sitemaps and automatically notifies search engines of updates
• No Self Pings - Supresses trackbacks that would have been generated by linking to your own posts
• WP-DB-Backup - Enables scheduled database backups
• WP Super Cache - Generates and serves static html files instead of dynamic scripts to reduce page load times and protect against traffic spikes

I also use and recommend these plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack - Supports search engine optimization
• Contact Form 7 - Provides a simple contact form
• FD Feedburner - Redirects the standard WordPress RSS feed(s) to Feedburner
• Google Analyticator - Easily integrates Google Analytics code into your blog
• TinyMCE Advanced - Provides many useful extensions to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing toolbar, including table support

I’ve only scratched the surface of what WordPress can do, but it does the job very nicely so far.  I’ll be sure to share any tips I come across or extensions that I find helpful.