Website - Do It Yourself - Add Functions to Wordpress

Add Functions to Wordpress

Written by Administrator

Friday, 26 January 2007

Plugins give you tools and new features. I want to take up plugins, or the add on software that allows you to modify Wordpress functionality.

The first thing I recommend is to get a better editor than the default that comes with Wordpress. I know of two good ones.

WYSI-Wordpress this is an advanced WYSIWYG editor by MudBomb.com
Editor Monkey 2.5 - Another WYSIWYG editor that matches the FCKeditor from Joomla. ( they say it is no longer supported, but it works well in 2.0.7 )

Because I liked the FCKeditor in Joomla I was glad to see the Editor Monkey in Wordpress. It works very good. Especially for adding images to your articles and formatting the text.

And the latest version of Wordpress is 2.1 instead of 2.0.7 which I'm writing on.
I'll test the plugins on 2.1 and report here.

The second thing I would add is a database backup plugin. This allows you to painlessly save the content of your site to a file and download it to your own computer. Then if anything should happen to the site ( like an act of God ) , you can reinstall the data into a new database and all your articles will be saved.

WP-DB Backup 1.7 by skippy net

Third thing, add a contact form to your site. It makes it easy to let people contact you without publishing your own email address for spiders to read and collect.

WP-Contact Form by Ryan Duff

Forth thing, add spam protection to your blog.
I recommend Challange. It provides a simple math test that must be solved before you can register or comment. The old image based spam filters do not work well enough to be used in my opinion. The spam robots can read the images as well as most humans.