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I decided to try out a few WordPress plugins. Here’s the status:

  • WayPath for WordPress: List related posts on other blogs. Nice, but cluttered and slows things down. If we keep this, we’ll need to get caching to work. Active, seeking comments.
  • Spell Check: Only for posts so far. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to actually work. Disabled.
  • Link Relationships: Adds next/previous post elements for search engines and browsers that support them. Painless to install, simple and elegant. Active.
  • Staticize Reloaded: Cache each page so that the server doesn’t have to regenerate it every single time. Very nice, but unfortunately isn’t compatible with HTTP compression right now. Disabled.
  • Live Preview: Add an instant preview to comments. A bit of tweaking to install, though I managed to modify it to play nicer with WP’s plugin API, but very cool! Active.
  • Random Posts: Add a list of random posts to the sidebar. Simple and possibly interesting. Active.
  • SameCat: List posts in the same category as the current one. Combined with the Related Entries plugin, this provides a good set of links to similar posts. Active.

Other ideas I’m looking at (some of which I’ve seen plugins for):

  • Comment threading (Katie suggested this, but the last time I looked for plugins the only one I found required serious database changes)
  • Email notifications
  • Polls
  • Category and author icons
  • True-a-Day sidebar

So, any opinions on the new features? Any suggestions for others? In particular, any thoughts on the WayPath feature? I’m not sure whether it’s worth keeping around or not.

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3 thoughts on “Plugin Experiments”

  1. Interesting that “Related Posts – By Content” only seems to pull up(ooh, I’ve got that shiny bug with the input window again!) posts with words in common. I was looking at “Cookbook Anarchist” courtesy of the Random Post feature and it didn’t list my other two craptastic-recipe posts as being related. Hell, it didn’t list *any* posts as being related by content, which is amazing considering it’s s long post…..

  2. I would greatly appreciate the code of your modified Live Preview. The instructions in the file are a bit confusing and I don’t like to modify core WP files.

    As for comment threading… this plugin seems to do the trick, and only needs one extra database column.

  3. Actually, I don’t use the modified Live Preview anymore. I dropped a lot of plugins when I upgraded to 1.5, and I’ve slowly added back the ones I still wanted to use. The changes aren’t needed anymore, though. The current version, now called Live Comment Preview, works automatically with Kubrick. All I had to do was activate the plugin.

    Thanks for the tip on comment threading. I’ll have to check it out when I get a chance!

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