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Finding WordPress Plugins

A weekend full of a nasty head cold kept me offline and unable to work on a post on plugins for today. Actually, it kept me from doing much of anything at all, including a training class I was supposed to take all day Saturday. I did finish re-watching Firefly, then Serenity, so the weekend was not a complete waste, just mostly. So for today’s post, I am just going to list a few places you can find out about plugins.

Where are they?

The Obvious place is the WordPress Plugin Directory. It is accessible directly from your dashboard and the recent improvements in the search engine make it much easier to find both specific types of plugins and the exact plugin you want if you have one in mind.

The Weblog Tools Collection is a good place to get a listing of the recent additions and updates to the plugins in the directory. They also cover themes, and have good articles on improving your use of WordPress, as well as in depth looks at specific plugins.

Essential Plugins

Most sites that cover how to blog do some kind of post about what they consider the essential plugins for WP users. You will find a lot of overlap on most of these lists, because the really popular plugins are popular because they are good. But there will be some differences, because different writers have different priorities and preferences about what they want a plugin to do. And because of the fast turnover on plugins in the directory.

One way this type of list is useful is giving you an idea about the types of plugins you may want on your blog. They may agree or disagree about specific plugin choices, but they will almost always agree on the need for something to cover a specific area that WordPress doesn’t handle well alone, like spam comments.

Final Words

Not much to cover today. I would use the lists of plugins to get an idea of what kind of plugins you might need on your blog, then use a site like Weblogs Tools Collection, David’s Technical Musings, or maybe some of my earlier plugin posts, to get an idea about what plugin can best match your specific needs and how well they work.

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