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WordPress plugins in use

There are a few WordPress plugins that help me publish this site as I want it. Here are a few of the key plugins I currently use on Stopdesign. Amazon Showcase by Aaron Forgue Drop in any ISBN and this…

There are a few WordPress plugins that help me publish this site as I want it. Here are a few of the key plugins I currently use on Stopdesign.

  • Amazon Showcase by Aaron Forgue
    Drop in any ISBN and this plugin takes care of the rest for Amazon reading and recommendation lists.
  • Live Comment Preview by Brad Touesnard
    Lots of plugins generate a real-time comment preview. This one seemed to be easy to configure and get working right away.
  • Postalicious by Pablo Gomez
    This plugin automagically pulls in my Delicious links on an hourly basis, publishing an entry for each link I create. (It can also be configured to publish sets of links in a single entry too.) It’s a useful plugin for automating posting of links created elsewhere — it can also handle ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes. Pablo, the author, is incredibly responsive. After I emailed him a casual suggestion on a Saturday afternoon, he had a new version of the plugin (with my suggestion incorporated) in my Inbox later that same evening.
  • Twitter for WordPress by Ricardo González
    Set it, and forget it.™ Once installed and configured the way I wanted it, I’ve never had to think about my tweets showing up on the site again.
  • WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh
    A must for speedy page-load times and to keep the server humming along, especially on high-traffic days.
  • Search Unleashed by John Godley
    Does several cool tricks with search for a WordPress site, including query term highlighting and searching across every post and comment field. I’m using the plugin for the results page, itself. But I wasn’t able to use the query term highlighting on entry pages because that conflicted with pages cached with WP Super Cache, and I wasn’t able to figure out how to prevent caching of entry pages referred by a search.

A friendly reminder: some authors put in lots of time and effort into plugins that are free for us to use at will. If you can afford to, send a donation their way, especially for plugins that do any heavy lifting for your site.