Finally! WordPress Reveals Favorite Plugins
August 16, 2008 by Chris Heuer
Per Matt’s request, I held this under embargo until he started his address – may need to update wiht more facts once he explains the whole story
One of the things that struck me when I started using WordPress was that the Plugin and Theme universe was extremely vast. So vast, that I could never tell very easily which Plugin I should use, especially when there are 7 flavors of “recent comments”. So at the first WordCamp (or sometime around there) I was talking with Matt Mullenweg about this need.
I was thinking this might be a neat side business as a site to run, but Matt told me about this idea that he just announced as a reality during the “State of the Word” today – where WordPress would be actually looking at the statistics of which plugins people are actually using, rather than what people explicitly rate. This is a unique side benefit of the auto-update feature of the latest version of WordPress.
This new reality opens a new path to easier WordPress configuration. More importantly, it is a path to learning our collective best practices, doing what Web 2.0 and Social Media is best at, making things visible that previously were not.
While I anticipate some people in a privacy uproar over this, I don’t really see a problem with the fact that they have been collecting these statistics. The reason is very simple. I know Matt personally. I know Tony personally. I trust them to do the right thing. I trust they thought of this issue. In fact, when Matt told me about this announcement a short while ago, we both laughed nervously and expressed that, “oh shit, what are people gonna say when they find this out” look to each other.
This is just so cool, I am so happy to finally be able to see what other WordPress users are doing with their plugins. In fact, on the way here to WordCamp, I twittered a question for the people in attendance, asking which are the essential plugins? The answers I got are below. The real answers will soon be seen through WordPress’ new feature – I can’t wait to play with it…
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jjtoothman: @chrisheuer wrote a post on that exact subject earlier this week: http://snurl.com/3fqrj (expand)about 1 hour ago · View Tweet -
thornley: @chrisheuer Essential WordPress plug http://www.friendsroll.com – at least I’d like it to become essentialabout 1 hour ago · View Tweet -
mabernathy: @chrisheuer headspace 2about 1 hour ago · View Tweet -
sfdesigner: @chrisheuer CodeBox for me — I blog about coding and teach programming, so it is essential for me.about 2 hours ago · View Tweet -
chrisheuer: Hey #wordcamp, quick poll – what are your essential plugins? Compiling a list for @socialmediaclubabout 2 hours ago · View Tweet
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Matt just listed the top 10 plugins that people have activated…
10 cforms
9 wp-polls
8 WP-Automatic Upgrade
7 wp-cache
6 wp-backup
5 wp-stats
4 next gen gallery
3 google site map
2 all in one seo pack
1 akismet
[...] Plugins stats [...]
[...] Finally! WordPress Reveals Favorite Plugins (tags: wordpress wordcamp plugins) [...]
one of my favorites is “Twitter Feed” which allows you to fuse microblogging with a regular blog.
[...] giving his State of the WordPress talk the guy next to me was excitedly publishing a post regarding WordPress favorite plug-ins. It turned out to be Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club. Being that I just spoke two weeks [...]
I don’t think this will do much of anything at all. Automatic upgrade numbers don’t mean too much… and for the professional bloggers out there operating multiple blogs or companies offering farms of WP blogs- talk about skewed numbers. Some companies can press one button on an admin panel and update 5,000 WP blogs.
More importantly, I imagine that most of the masses of WP blogs are setup entirely incorrect. I don’t know how many bad plugins there are that actually have wide usage… simply because they were marketed well. I also would imagine that the premium plugins that I use (I.E. paid for) are used on less than 1000 blogs.
In order to be really useful, I would actually wonder if they will limit it to certain site numbers. Having knowledge of what plugins the top 100 blogs in an industry use would be very useful information… but begin to creep in on the privacy issues too much.
We just released a new plugin that allows you to add interactive video capabilities to your blog! Enhance your blog with both basic and advanced video capabilities. Upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix video content, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more…
Check it out and download it here: http://corp.kaltura.com/wordpress_video_plugin?campaign=wp-comments
Examples and pictures are on the plugin forum: http://community.kaltura.org/viewforum.php?f=4
Good to see wp-cache in the top 10, although I really think it should be part of the core WP release. It’s so vital to cache all that can be cached on your site to give the server and database a break. How many times do we see WP blogs go down when a social media site links to them? Too many times! wp-cache can easily prevent this.
[...] Finally WordPress Reveals Favorite Plugins Social Media Club Posted by root 29 minutes ago (http://www.socialmediaclub.org) One of the things that struck me when i started using wordpress was that the and oh if you want a pic to show with your comment go get a gravatar Discuss | Bury | News | Finally WordPress Reveals Favorite Plugins Social Media Club [...]