WordPress Extensions Used in this Site

Technical Details of the blog:

Blog Software

• WordPress 2.5 (upgraded from WordPress 2.1)

The great thing about a WordPress blog is its amazing level of extendibility. There are hundreds of usedplugins and hundreds of good looking themes available freely. I have tried out a number of themes and plugins before settling down on the minimum set I would like on my blog.

A little note on WordPress 2.5 would be appropriate. This version quite ground breaking in terms of refinement and new features. The admin panel has been refreshed. Plugin updates can be done right from the admin plugin panel itself. It bring support for multiple uploads, building of gallery, features embedding video & audio right out of the browser based editor. For most of these functionality earlier I had to use additional plugin or often need code changes. Upgrade to version 2.5 has been the most painless upgrade for me.

Here is the listing of the wordpress extensions used in this site

Theme

• Antropov Theme : This is now the default theme for the blog. It is very fast, clean & polished. The developer has done a fantastic job with it.   It supports all WordPress 2.5 features right out of box, for most people now code edit will be required.

Plugins

• Akismet : This plugin comes default with the WordPress 2.0 installation. I need to register at wordpress.org to get the activation key needed for running this plugin. I have found this plugin very effective.
• All in One SEO Pack : Just installed, right after the upgrade to WP 2.5. This plugin allows the page header and meta to be optimized for search engines.
• Google Analyticator : This allows me to collect website usage statistics using Google analytics. No code change was needed.
• myGallery : This is the latest plugin I have used on my site. This allows me to create pages with photo gallaries and even add galleries to blog posts. When activate, this plugin adds a icon on the edit page of blog. This makes using photos and galleries in the blog quite easy. However, WordPress 2.5 brings the gallery functionality natively built in, at some point I could consider moving all my galleries to the gallery functionality build into WordPress 2.5.
• TagThePress : This is a new plugin I have added to the site. This plugin get tag suggestion for posts. This integrated well with the tag functionality built into WordPress 2.5. However, I have found that the tag suggestion provide are not very good.
• WordPress.com Stats :  This is a must have plugin for a WordPress blog. It collects all sorts of useful statistics on the blog – visits, pages, referrer, search key words etc. All statistics can be viewed from the blogs admin dashboard. The best thing is that stats are kept in the wordpress.com’s remote server, this does not load up the limited mysql space that my hosting package provides, Using this plugin requires the wordpress API  key like the Akismet plugin.
•  Similar Posts :  This plugin provides related posts listing. The plugin comes with a lot of customization options. This plugin is not entirely based on tags for finding related posts. It utilizes key words parsed from the post body and header in conjunction with the the tags to find related posts. By default it provides a side bar widget that can be easily added to the blogs side bar. However, the listing in the side bar module is not very good and generally shows completely unrelated. I think this is because of other text in the sidebar. Later, I edited my theme to add the related posts at the bottom of the post. After that the related posts have been quite accurate. This plugin has dependency on  Post-Plugin Library , which must be installed first. Overall this is a quite decent and promising plugin.