A Fresh Start

People stop me in the street on a surpringly regular basis asking: “Which plugins do you use on A Fresh Start, oh buddha-shaped guru?”

After slapping them, I offer the following reply (posted here as it may be of interest to others):

Countdown by Owen Winkler

This generates the Dates to Remember section in the sidebar. An excellent plug-in as it’s surprisingly powerful for something so simple - it can even cope with dates like “1st mon dec” or even “every 3rd week from YYYY-MM-DD until YYYY-MM-DD”

Gravatar by Gravatar.com

To display gravatars, strangely enough!

Lazy Gallery by Nicholas Bruun Jespersen

Creates the Image Gallery linked in the sidebar. I’ve played with/tweaked this plugin a lot, I must admit, but it’s a good starting point.

Paragraph Numbering by Rowan Lewis

Very neat, it creates an automatically incremented class for each paragraph in a post allowing me to style the introductory paragraph differently to the others.

Google Sitemap by Arne Brachhold

Just installed this one to have a play - it’ll be useful for other sites I’ve built that aren’t blogs but use WordPress as a CMS (and no, I’m not going to give you the URLs or it’ll give away my secret identity).

PHP Exec by Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo

Allows me to have PHP code within pages and posts (not that I’ve actually got around to using this, you understand!)

WP-AddQuicktag by Roel Meurders

I mentioned this the other day. Very easy to use, I’ve added a few buttons to my posting screen via this plugin making my life a lot easier. Well, an infinitessimal bit easier, anyway.

Wordpress Mobile Edition by Alex King

Formats the site for viewing on mobile devices. Very clever.

My own WP Thumb

I need to debug this so that it works on other sites, but it’s basically added a bunch of tags to easily display thumbnails and the like in posts. As you can tell, I use it a lot!

WP Audioscrobbler by Marc Hodges

Picks up the info on music I’ve been listening to from last.fm

I’ve also installed, but don’t currently have activated, Owen Winkler’s Limit Categories plugin. This allows you to restrict users to posting in certain categories based on their user levels. If I ever have guest posters here, I’ll implement this to make sure all such posts go into a “Guest Posts” category (so that visitors will be able to filter out my own dross).

[A little later] And I’m now also test-driving:

Mini-Posts by Morgan Doocy

Suitable for a sideblog (see “Bits on the side” in the, um, sidebar) but can also show mini-posts within the loop. Documentation is here. I just fiddled with it a wee bit to get the post title to display, otherwise it was a plug-and-play installation.