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So at last night’s Beer & Blog I asked Aaron Hockley & a few others to let me know their “5 must have Wordpress Plugins”. I figured since Aaron is a die hard Wordpress user like myself the list would be great and informative. His list was fantastic (led me to a new plugin that I had to have) and so without further ado here are my 5 plugins I install right away when doing a new Wordpress install (I’ve done about 50 total installs).

1. Akismet - Comment spam filtering for the masses. Comes with every single Wordpress install because it’s by the same wonderful folks at automattic who brought us Wordpress. Currently it’s been responsible for over 23,000 comment spams caught on my blog. I’m in total agreement with Aaron that activating this is the absolute first step in deploying wordpress. Here’s what Akismet.com says about their plugin:

“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again“.

Those last 7 words say alot about their confidence in their product. Are they true? Absolutely.
2. Sociable - A quick easy way to add social media buttons to your posts (or everywhere, easily changed from the settings page, not only that but it does so easily, and beautifully (see it in action at the end of this post and feel free to submit if you like).

I can’t imagine a easier to configure rock solid way to have the social media links I want all in one place.

3. Wp-Super Cache - This little plugin will help protect your blog from the Slashdot/Digg effect of huge amounts of links swamping your server. Here’s the description Wordpress superstar Donncha O Caoimh (the author of this plugin) gave it:

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.”

So far I haven’t been slammed here but if it happens I can rest easy knowing that the guy who’s done most of the work on WPMU (the multi-user version of Wordpress) built a plugin to protect a blog’s uptime, which is a pretty important thing for those folks for whom blogging is their life & work.

4. WP-DBManager - This is a pretty important one. I’m often forgetful about backing up my wordpress database before tinkering with it and so with one simple plugin I get nightly backups to my gmail account, scheduled optimization maintenance as well as the ability to repair it when ever I run into an early version plugin that may break something.

5. Wordpress.com Stats - This is one that should be installed with every copy of Wordpress. Quick clean easy to read stats that are supported from the Wordpress.com website. Rather than rewrite what the plugin site has to say I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.”

I love it and seeing that gorgeous little flash graph show the number of hits (right in the dashboard) at a glance is as easy as it gets.

6. Fluency Admin - I’m going to cheat and add this one these two to the list (it was a tossup between this one these two and Akismet since technically Akismet is already installed). Much like the author of Fluency says on his blog:

“Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn't work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.”

I loved the Tiger Admin theme and was going to write my own until I discovered Fluency. They made a massive amount of changes to the admin area in Wordpress 2.5 and not all of them seem well thought out or right. In short I hate some of what they’ve done (but that’s a whole other post). This wonderous little plugin changes and reskins the whole backend to make it; clean, simple and flow just like it should.

7. Wphone - I love my iPhone and the ability to surf the net anywhere on it is great. Posting to my blog via my iPhone though had always been a chore. Along came WPhone allows you to use a custom admin interface while interacting with your WordPress install via your phone. It contains two versions of the mobile admin interface, a full iPhone version and a “lite” version suitable for most every cellphone with a built in browser. I just noticed that local plugin author Viperbond007 (who modified rewrote and made usable my own humble CDC Clean Archives plugin into the awesome jQuery based plugin I’m now running here.

Alrighty, that’s my list of must have/can’t live without plugins. I’ll be updating with links to the other folks I invited to share their Top 5 lists with as they post them. Feel free to let me know the ones I don’t know about or somehow overlooked (I’m currently using 13 plugins total and always looking for amazing time saving, information delivery improving plugins).

So noticing that Matt Mullenweg blogged that there was a release candidate for Wordpress 2.5 up I decided to try an upgrade to see what the fuss was all about.

From the official Wordpress blog:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It's been in the oven for a while, and we're finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Pretty big list, but how easy the upgrade? Easy as ever. I did a quick backup at lunch (while sitting in the Roxy no less) including a database backup then deleted the site. Next I opened up Transmit (thanks to Verso for introducing that tasty little app to me). and uploaded the shiny new Wordpress 2.5 and then ran the upgrader. It finished in record time (about 5 seconds less than the last upgrade script I did) which was my first nice reaction. Logging in and seeing the new dashboard was fantastic. Nice neatly divided boxes compartmentalizing each different section. Seeing the stats graph integrated into the dashboard is a masterful idea. The only real wish I had is that they were rearrangeable using AJAX and some css (might be a nice plugin if I can find the time before someone else beats me to it. Speaking of plugins I did finally have to stop using Tiger admin plugin I’ve been using for a couple years. I will definitely miss having the navigation bar on the side instead of the top. Also a nice new feature to play with is the fullscreen editing mode. No other distractions on the page. Just a big huge word fillable area.

So after testing all the rest of my plugins I didn’t see any other problems. I did notice that Gravatar’s had an upgrade notice on the plugins page. I clicked the upgrade now link and after quickly typing in my server info it upgraded perfectly. Ironically I just noticed that I no longer need that plugin since the functionality has been written into the core code. Excellent!

Next up is an attempt at using the new media manager and gallery tool (now added to the neatly upgraded TinyMCE toolbar in the write window). I’m using some old artwork as well as an unused rough draft of the redesign of this site since it was handy.

Pretty easy to add. Select the files you want, click upload and then using some nice ajaxy goodness you can edit the description of each photo and alter the title.

All in all this is an amazing upgrade and quite a nice bit of work both under the hood and on the front. It’s nice that so much from the old “shuttle” concept has finally made it into the code. Looking forward to continuing to experiment with the theme design as well as figuring out what other surprises I might find as I explore the tasty goodness of wordpress’ php.

So I get a lot of requests from friends to reskin this and reskin that. I have no problem with this. I enjoy it and seeing friends smile when they look at their new blog, myspace profile, or just about anything else they ask me to reskin/recolor. Most of the time it’s a relatively quick job without any real issue.

Of course since it says annoyance up at the top of this post obviously there are times when it’s not. Some of you will probrably immediately roll your eyes at this little rant of mine but whatever. Go read /. or fark…

So I’m in awe of some of the open source developers out there and the amazing products they write/code/make/bleed their hearts into. But is it really that hard to take 5 minutes and write out a clean(ish) html page with all the divs/classes/tags in it that calls the same css they have running the layout of the actual app? Getting under the hood of an app is something I obviously love since I spend 50+ hours a week doing exactly that. But when I’m trying to learn the ins and outs of some new RoR or php app I don’t want to have to hunt through 500 files in the includes folder so I can find that view_penguincheese.php is what makes use of the #penguin div. Granted I just want to be able to see a big standalone html file with no php so finding the aforementioned php file isn’t something I necessarily care about (I just wanted to say “penguincheese”)

I understand that the OS movement puts an astounding amount of work into their projects and can’t always be expected to have the same graphic knowledge to compare with their php/asp/mysql/Ruby on Rails/Ajax knowledge. That’s fine. Just make it easier for those of us that do excel at making things pretty make your apps look better. Most of us will do the right thing and upload them to your site so more people can and will use your application because it looks more professional.

All that said (over a year ago when I first started writing this post) I’ll add one last thing: don’t skimp on making things use CSS without making sure it’s sensible. You won’t necessarily always be the developer/designer for something forever and it really makes those who follow in your footsteps admire your work as opposed to thiking you’re likely just drunk.

Oh yeah, I just overhauled the look of my myspace profile and it’s quite a bit nicer looking without all the ugly color combo’s myspace devs liked and most importantly it’s currently glitter graphic free (yay)

So just like last time I did the reboot, I find that every time I arrive at a “final” idea for the graphics I swiftly change over to something else. I suppose second guessing myself in an ever spiraling and timewasting distraction. Just like the last time though I assume when I have 3-4 days left I’ll go into a nightmarish frenzy of css, php and html coding before finishing everything up with 5-7 hours left before midnight.
It’s funny how when I’m working for clients other than myself I have no issue with completeing deadlines weeks in advance, everything flowing smoothly and surely towards the inevitable moment I cry eureka and am finished. When working for myself I can’t help but get frustrated by my own pickiness as a developer, designer and as is often said; I’m my own worst critic.

I’d post up a few of the elements that are mostly finalized but instead I’ll just dual purposely post a quick list of things I’m going to be adding to the redesign (partially to force me to do them and partially to help me remember them as I code):

• Lightbox the design page
• Single story on the front page everything else in the blog section
• Convert the sidebar blogroll into a Digg feed
• Feedburner the rss feeds
• Clean the snot out of the unweildy mess the CSS has become in the year and a half since I launched this look.
• Prepare the forthcoming soon to launch “sales section” where you’ll be able to purchase photoshop brushes, icons and whatever other sexy graphical goodies I’ve made or will make in the future.

Not altogether the most verbose difficult to imagine list that should be a snap to complete in two weeks. Will it happen? I’ll give it a definitive Yup! for now, but perhaps I’ll be singing a painfully different tune come October 31st.

So in my post the other day about MacZot I posted how I took advantage of my first MysteryZot. Well as of a little over an hour ago they revealed the contents of the mysteryzot and they’re all great apps!

Here’s the list:

• PHPStudio: PHP Studio is a complete, elegant, and hugely usable PHP code editor. It isn’t an extension to your PHP development workforce; it is your workforce. - $25.00 or try it free
• CastLife: Easily create RSS feeds that update whenever you “cast” audio, video, photos, and more. - $9.99 or try it free
• AppZapper: The un-installer Appler forgot. - $12.95 or try it free
• Soulver: A buttonless calculator that’s all intuition and no confusion - $12.95 or try it free
• World of Where: “Great way to learn the capital cities and countries of the world.” - $11.95 or try it free

All in all a really great selection of apps. I’m personally most excited about PHPStudio. I’ve had my eye on that for awhile but hadn’t taken the time to buy it yet. Thankfully my laziness pays off yet again as I get it for 1/5th the normal price.
All told my $5 investment has netted me a windfall of $72.84 worth of great software. I likely won’t use all of these applications but I’m thrilled to have participated in the MysteryZot and can’t wait for the next one.

For more amazing deals head over to MacZot.com and see what all the fuss is about.