WordPress Plugins Used at TECK.IN

TECK.IN have been undergoing a series of design changes for many months. I have designed my own simple theme, named the Sky. My favourite colours are sky blue, orange and silver.

A few friends who are planning to make their own WordPress blogs inquired me about the plugins we use at TECK.IN. This list is not a general recommended list of plugins, but fits the best to the theme. For example, I do not use any SEO plugins like All In One SEO Pack or Headspace2 or Platinum SEO Pack, because I have taken care of it in the theme design and other plugins. But I suggest my friends to use an SEO pack for their blogs. See the list of SEO friendly themes at Mani Karthik‘s blog.

OK, here goes the list of plug-ins used in TECK.IN.

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1. Adman – for inserting ads in the middle of posts or wherever you mark.
2. AJAX Comments – Post comments quickly without leaving or refreshing the page.
3. Akismet – checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
4. BetterWPReadMore – Cleans up WordPress “read more” links
5. Clean Archives Reloaded – A slick, Javascript-enhanced post archive list generator.
6. Dagon Design Form Mailer – Secure php form mailer script for the contact us page.
7. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap.
8. Dean’s Code Highlighter – Highlights source code in your posts.
9. Feed Footer – Custom footers (copyright, notices, advertisements) to the bottom of your posts in your RSS feed.
10. Google XML Sitemaps – Generates an XML sitemap supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
11. Gravatar – Generates a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options.
12. HowToGeek Spam Filter – Automatically delete most spam from dirty rotten spammers. Works fine with Akismet.
13. Mail From – Change the default address that WordPress sends it’s email from.
14. Other Posts From Cat – At the bottom of every post, links are shown for the last X posts from the current category.
15. Simple Tags – Extended Tagging with Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Related Posts and Mass edit tags.
16. Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
17. This Day – Lists posts that were created on this day in previous years.
18. WP-Digg Style Paginator – Adds a digg style pagination to WordPress.
19. WP Super Cache – Very fast caching module for WordPress. Very useful.
20. WP YouTube – WP YouTube allows you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time.
21. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – The most useful plugin updates the WordPress core files when a new version is released by WordPress.org.

It is very important to configure the plugins after activation and carefully integrate with the theme. For example, in post theme (single.php), I have added the tags just below the post title. The tags are essentially the keywords used in the post. Having the keywords at the start of the article will be a simple search engine optimisation.

I would soon be posting an article about the design, SEO and usability techniques I used at TECK.IN. 🙂