Category Archives: Tools

I figured it would make sense to quickly review some WordPress plugins that I can comment on with very little thought. I’m thinking that it’s important to get a reasonable population of plugins commented on for the sake of anyone who wants to use this as a resource.

Akismet[SinglePic not found]

Akismet checks comments entered on your blog postings against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches, and after I’d installed it I did that for many weeks before I realized that this spam catcher is impressively accurate. Now I just delete everything it marks as spam. This is a better spam blocker than anything on any email service I’ve seen. So far no false positives. Some bloggers prefer to use a captcha capability but if you do you give the commenter more fields to fill in, which I think unwise. Akismet comes ready to roll when you install Wordpress, so you don’t need to download it. Imho it’s a no-brainer.

Lighter Menus[SinglePic not found]

This, imho, improves the WordPress admin interface by adding drop-down menus rather than the horizontal menus of WordPress. It also lets you choose some colors and gives you a bit of configurability. Imho it makes the admin interface easier to use. I turned it off for a while a few weeks ago to see whether I missed it. I had turned it back on within a day. I get the feeling that this plugin could do more and I hope it will in time. It’s a good capability but not essential. This plugin is actually based on another one called  Admin Drop Down Menus which I’ve not tried.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade[SinglePic not found]

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows you to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. It takes the pain out of an uograde. I’ve used it twice so far with zero problems. But please, please back-up anyway. This is software remember and bug-free software is as common as a winning lottery ticket. Nevertheless the evidence so far suggests that this plugin is a no-brainer.

WordPress Database Backup[SinglePic not found]

If you’ve worked as a developer or on the operational side of IT, you get nervous of back-ups, or you should. Systems always fail at the wrong time. Bullet-proof back-up is a must. I was doing back-ups manually whenever I remembered and then I came across this plugin while looking for something else. It’s simple, you select frequency (I back-up daily now) and you select the database tables to back-up. After that you forget it. (You can also do back-ups on demand if you have the need.) This neat little utility runs to a schedule and sends you a backup by email (if you want that – and I do). Fit and forget.

Random Quotes[SinglePic not found]

If you’ve noticed the quotes on this blog at the top of the screen that regularly change with each new page, they are provided by this plugin. You can make quotes appear wherever you want by inserting a call into one of your theme modules. Of course you have to fill up the database of quotes yourself, which actually took me several days. Anyway if you want this capability then Random Quotes does the job. There are several other plugins that do the same thing. I took a look them (but not for long – life being short) and could find no obvious differences in capability. They might be better or worse. I just happened to start with this one.

Share This[SinglePic not found]

I used to have a whole series of buttons for Digg, Reddit, etc. This little plugin does everything, throwing up a form that connects to every social network tagging recommendation sirte on the net (and then some). Also it has a send to a fired capability (so it allowed me to ditch another pluin I was using). It’s all completely configurable. The neat thing is that it is maintained for you. If new tagging/recommend sites emerge it adds them to the list for you. Genuine no-brainer this.

Scoring

I don’t use a 1 to 5 range and score everything 4, or above. I use the whole range. Nothing will score below 2.5, if I still use it. Anything below 2.5 should be avoided. For anything 2.5 or above you might consider a donation to the author and anything scoring 5 almost mandates it.

• 2.5 means worth using, if it fits your need – but there may better plugins for this.
• 3 means worth using and a good capability – but it may be bettered in time.
• 3.5 means very good capability
• 4 means definitely best in class, imho
• 4.5 means best in class and highly valuable capability
• 5 means close to perfect, awesome, superlative, etc.[SinglePic not found]

The Have Mac Will Blog graphic depicts the score. If I believe that a plugin is a no-brainer – it can be a no-brainer without necessarily getting a high score because it may do something simple – then I indicate that with: the no-brainer symbol. This means “just get it.” A no-brainer symbol implies almost no learning curve.

Please Provide Feedback

I’d particularly appreciate any comments that recommend other plugins (for me to try) or alternative opinions on anything written here. I’d like to establish a useful resource here for WordPress users. I will be reviewing more plugins in time.

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