Widgets and Plugins

[boyohazard]

Hi fellow Thesis users
I thought it would be a great idea to share the plugins/widgets we are using to enhance our Thesis powered blogs

I've only just installed Thesis so I've only added one so far:
Add This button - lets readers submit your post to social bookmarking sites
AddThis Blog Blog Archive AddThis Wordpress Plugin

So what are you using and how has it improved your blogging experience?

I'll post back here when I discover/add more and put a link to my site when it goes live, hopefully this week

[hitthosekeys]

I am using a few plugins: the Broken Link Checker and the Dashboard Widget Manager. (The latter let's you clear stuff you don't want to look at out of the admin dashboard.)

I had a stats plugin running, but I think it's incompatible with WP 2.5.1 -- at least, SOMETHING took my blog down today and from the error logs at my host it's looking like this was the culprit.

[boyohazard]

I like how you've styled your site and based on one of your posts I have just installed the Typogrify plugin

WordPress › wp-typogrify « WordPress Plugins

- Marc

[jfhscribbles]

Here's a few I use and like:

1. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator - generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
2. Homepage Excerpts - makes blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly and gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.
3. CommentLuv - leaves a link to a commentors last post under their comment.
4. Contact Form 7 - simple and flexible contact form.
5. Maintenance Mode - adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.
6. RSS Signature - provide a simple administration interface to allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds. You can add any kind of message, tag, or even images — as long as it can be displayed in an RSS feed, it’s up to you.
7. Sociable - adds social media buttons to your posts.
8. WP-DBManager - manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
9. Subscribe to Comments - allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.

[boyohazard]

Thanks for the list, I'm going to check those out especially the contact form, I need one of those.

[buzzardian]

Just installed Thesis, but so far I'm using:

Breadcrumb NAVTxt
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (Not XML)
Framebuster
Google Analytics
Wordpress Database Backup

A few more to install...

Robin

[phoenixreguy]

Originally Posted by boyohazard

Thanks for the list, I'm going to check those out especially the contact form, I need one of those.

You might also want to check out cformsII if you're looking for a contact form. Very robust and feature filled!

[rshillary]

I don't want to inundate my readers with social media buttons.
So I need to know which ones are being used the most and scale
down from there.

Is there a plugin or widget that will show me the analytics as to which social media buttons are being clicked and the number of clicks?

[boyohazard]

According to a Nielsen's Online report the top ranking social media sites in the UK are:
(YouTube>Wikipedia>)Facebook>Blogger>MySpace>Bebo> Slide>Yahoo!Answers>LiveSpaces>TripAdvisor
Top Social Media Sites In The UK - Jan 2008 | AccuraCast Search Daily News

If I were you I'd stick to Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us

Anything else depends on the audience of your blog

[rshillary]

Excellent. However, Sociable doesn't offer icons for MySpace and Blogger unless it's using a spin on the name. Are you sure they have social media icons? I have Facebook, Digg, Stumble and Del.icio.us. In addition Technorati but I'm itching to take that off.