WordPress is a very powerful system, almost too powerful for the free pricetag it comes with (free as in beer). We’re more than happy with WordPress though, unfortunately we find quite a few things about the system lacking in various ways. No internal stats system, no ‘advanced’ control over category visibility, the pinging control is dismal (sometimes you have to edit a post several times, this shouldn’t ping the services every time), and the list goes on. Here are some of the plugins we’re using with WordPress here on Bunch of Nerds that make our lives a little bit easier…

6. EmailShroud
We hate spam and most definitely spambots spidering our site searching out email addresses to add to their lists of poker or porn spam. That’s why we installed EmailShroud from OddThinking. EmailShroud is an anti-spambot plugin which uses JavaScript to obfuscate email addresses linked (mailto:) or simply typed into the contents of WordPress pages, posts, excerpts, RSS feeds and comments. There are some drawbacks, such as basing the plugin on the fact that most browsers support JavaScript or are not trying to be strict XHTML1.0 compliant (a bug which will be fixed in coming updates), but the plugin does try and handle non-JavaScript browsers gracefully, by giving the user several options for rewriting the email address or bouncing a user to a page describing their lack of JavaScript support. Naturally this isn’t a total solution to spam harvesting, but it’s certainly a powerful tool that works together with other such anti-harvesting methods.

5. WP Tiger Administration
The default administration theme for WordPress is a bit, eh, for lack of a better term. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usable, but, I found myself wondering if it couldn’t look better. Well, naturally it can, this is the internet after all! There are several admin themes which have been created to turn your administration panel into a hot designer-friendly machine and one of the best is the Tiger Administration panel from Ordered List. Tiger unfortunately is no longer being updated as a new variant is currently in production, we look forward to it!

4. WPStats Beta
WPStats is a full-featured stats logging system with an iconic display, IP cloud by country, and much more. It’s very much in a beta state, but still has a pretty bright future if the developers can keep up with adding new features. Usage is extremely simple, with the system only requiring one statement into the header.php file of WordPress. It’s no Google Analytics, but, it’s an extremely easy solution for those wanting basic statistic reporting for their WordPress systems.

3. Category Visibility
A WP 2.0+ only plugin, this is a very handy plug to have when you want to limit certain categories visibility throughout your site and/or feeds. In our case, we use it to create feed-only posts, where only users subscribed to our newfeed see feed-only post, articles and announcements. Naturally there are some issues with other plugins, but, those are easy to overlook and easy to fix with a little elbow grease.

2. Smart Update Pinger
Ping services are a great way for promoting your blog, by ‘pinging’ an update service which updates search engines of your recent blog posts and changes. WordPress’ built-in ping functionality is sufficient, but unfortunately pings these services for every edit you do to a post, which is not only wasted bandwidth but also inefficient and could possibly get you banned by these services for pingspamming. That’s all fixed by Smart Update Pinger, an extension to the WordPress ping function which only pings services on new post entries, rendering edits silent. Smart Update Pinger also keeps a status log, easily viewable by the administrator to track error messages and ping status to the various ping services.

1. AutoMeta
Technorati is the premier weblogs search engine, so any blog worthy of the term is smart to design with Technorati in mind. AutoMeta helps you in several ways, first by automatically creating HTML meta tags based on the content of your posts and second by converting those meta tags automatically into Technorati Tags. Although it’s highly recommended you not rely 100% on the tags auto-created, AutoMeta gives you an easy and handy field to enter your custom tags per post. There is also functionality to output a Technorati tag cloud anywhere you’d like on your WordPress system, making it that much easier to turn your blog into a lean-mean Technorati-loving machine.

There are of course hundreds, if not thousands of plugins for WordPress and these are but a few of the ones we use behind the scenes here at Bunch of Nerds, see the WordPress list of plugins for more which may suit your particular needs.