First WordPress Site Complete With My Favourite Plugins

UPDATE: This blog is quite outdated, therefore some plugins may not be in active development.

I have just finished making my first site using WordPress (the site you are on) and I have to say I am quite impressed. For years I have made all my websites using the Joomla content management system, which despite its annoyances is a really great piece of Open Source software.

WordPress immediately impressed me with its extremely simple, streamlined install. Within a couple of minutes I had my blog live and felt at home in the ACP. The WordPress ACP is a lot more intuitive than the Joomla one in my opinion. The integrated installer for themes and plugins has already saved me so much time that I would have spent searching, downloading and uploading in Joomla. The integrated updater just takes it to another level! No longer do I need to subscribe to 40 different RSS feeds and numerous twitter users just to keep up to date with the latest updates. My only gripe with the plugins I have installed is that there doesn’t seem to be a standard place to access them in the ACP. Some appear under ‘Tools’ others ‘Settings’ and some create their own category at the bottom. Hopefully WordPress will introduce some form of consistency in the future. So far I have installed the following plugins:

• Akismet – A needed plugin for every WordPress site, it has already blocked one SPAM attempt on my site
• All in One SEO Pack – This dramatically increases the SEO value of the site
• Contact Form 7 – Simple but flexible plugin allowing you to customise a contact form
• FollowMe – A nice tidy plugin to direct people to your twitter (the button of the right of this page)
• GoCodes – Great plugin for affiliate links (only provides simple tracking but does the job)
• Google Analytics for WordPress –  Quick and easy way to add your Google Analytics code
• Google XML Sitemaps – Top quality plugin for producing sitemaps
• Login LockDown – This plugin was recommended to me to increase my sites security slightly
• NextGen Gallery – I haven’t tested this yet but it has great reviews (I will use it when I get some of my photography up on this site)
• Redirection – I am sure this will come in useful in the future
• Sociable – I think this is the best social networking/bookmarking plugin around, it looks great and works
• TweetMeme Retweet Button – Seems to work perfectly (follow me on twitter)
• WP-DBManager – A nice little time saver (no one likes having to load phpMyAdmin)
• WP-RelativeDate – You have got to love relative dates! (same link as DBManager)
• WP Minify – Always nice to speed up your site
• WP-Syntax – A required plugin for anyone who plans to share their code
• WP Security Scan – This gave me a few nice security tips
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – I am yet to test this but reviews seem to say this is the best related posts plugin

As you can see I have already given quite a few plugins a good test and I will probably continue to feedback over time. Joomla seems to have a larger and wider choice of components when it comes to big components such as ecommerce and directories but WordPress seems to generally have well established high quality plugins. With Joomla I am quite familiar with installing three or four modules before I find one that does the job well.

WordPress is an extensive, well thought out and designed piece of software. There are many parts of WordPress which I prefer over Joomla but there are also some components that I would miss too much if I moved away from Joomla. I will definitely be recommending WordPress to clients who it suits.

Please comment if you either like/dislike the plugins I am using or have some you think I should know about. Share your thoughts below.

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