Brandon Muramatsu

Blog Updates (October 2009)

Here’s an update to my previous two posts about The Technical Details and Blog Updates.

New plugins (or ones I forgot to list before):

  • Dublin Core for WordPress (embeds Dublin Core metadata in header)
  • Enhanced Recent Posts (allows more control over Recent Posts widget)
  • Exclude Pages from Navigation (lets me choose which pages to show/not show in the navigation)
  • NextGEN Gallery (the defacto standard for Image Galleries for WordPress)
  • Sociable (adds social media tools to each post such as Facebook and de.licio.us)
  • Template Override (sneaky little plugin that lets me override the CSS of any of the other plugins, in other words this CSS loads last)
  • WordPress Admin Bar (adds a top navigation bar to the admin areas of the blog to allow for actions like on WordPress.com hosted blogs)
  • WPTuner (lets me see the performance of the blog for tuning purposes)

(Read more about the disabled and deleted plugins)

Plugins I’ve disabled because I’m not using them:

  • Random Image (puts a random image in the sidebar) <replaced with NextGEN Gallery>
  • StatPress (realtime stats for WordPress) <disabled to check on performance implications>
  • Slideshare (to more easily include Slideshare slide presentations in WordPress) <I’m not sure if this is working right>

Deleted plugins:

  • Yoast Breadcrumbs (puts breadcrumbs on each page and post, though I suppose I could have coded this by hand) <not needed in the iNove theme>
  • CiteThis (creates a citation for each page, to meet the attribution requirements of my terms of use) <I didn’t like the way this worked>

TIP: I’ve kept a changelog of the tweaks I’ve made, in addition to making a copy of the site before I upgraded it.

/by