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WordPress and plugins for a new blog

I've started a couple new blogs in the past few months, but I've always used my custom-build content management system on all my blogs. In the past week I've seen so many neat plugins for WordPress, I figured it was finally time to give it a shot.

I haven't spent very much time looking at themes, but right now I'm using VectorLover from Theme Lab. I'm going to do some editing or maybe look for a new theme soon. Let's move on to plugins.

I'm sure I'll find more great plugins, and I'll update this list each time I do. These are the ones that got most of the features I had on my own CMS, in WordPress.

Akismet. This comes with WordPress and you should activate it right away, nobody likes spam comments.

All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. This lets you customize the way your titles are displayed, and optimized your whole website for SEO.

Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi. A simple Ajax-based web contact form.

FireStats by Omry Yadan. I use Google Analytics too, but I love stats so I installed this one too.

Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. Generates a valid sitemap that automatically updates everytime you add a new post.

RSS Footer by Joost de Valk. This lets you put copyright information and links back to your website, in your RSS feed. This is great to thwart content scrapers, or at least get a backlink in the worst case.

Tweet Stats by Improving The Web. Tracks all tweets with a link to your website and adds them as comments. You can also add widgets to your sidebar that shows your top tweeted content.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin by Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine. Scans your articles for related content and adds a related posts section to the bottom of your articles. You can also add related posts to your RSS feed.

These are the plugins that got WordPress blog up and running, while keeping look and feel of the pre-WordPress design. I must say I like WordPress a lot, the plugins and themes are very easy to install and configure, and you really have control over everything. I might convert some of my other sites to WordPress, but only time will tell.

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