Tech and life

Since I started blogging, I’ve always been interested in what WordPress plugins other bloggers recommend. So over the last couple of years I’ve bookmarked 63 favorite/essential/recommended/must have WordPress plugins type posts that I’ve come across. I thought it would be useful to get an idea which were the most recommended plugins in these posts so I keyed all 300+ recommended plugin names into MS OneNote and totalled the recommendations (or votes) for each plugin. I imported everything into Excel then sorted on the vote column, excluded plugins with less than 5 votes and plotted a graph in Excel. I’ve only listed plugins with more than 5 recommendations (or votes) so as to pull out the most popular 36 from the 300+ recommended WordPress plugins.

You can probably guess which would be in the top picks but anyway here’s what I found

I’ll briefly run though the top 15 recommended plugins. Out in front were Google XML Sitemaps (39 votes), All in One SEO Pack (36 votes), Akismet (33 votes) and WP Super Cache (21 votes) which I guess everyone should have on their blog.

Google XML Sitemaps (39 votes): Generates a sitemap which helps search engines crawl your website content. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post.

All in One SEO Pack (36 votes): You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines. Easy for beginners to set up.

Akismet (33 votes): Blocks the majority of spam comments. Checks your blog comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP Super Cache (21 votes): Generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Your server won’t be as busy as before. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking sites.

Contact Form 7 (15 votes): Plugin to place a contact form on your Contact page.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) (14 votes): Gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Subscribe to Comments (14 votes): Enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent comments.

Sociable (14 votes): Automatically add links to your favourite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.

Broken Link Checker (13 votes): Monitors your blog for broken links and lets you know if any are found.

NextGEN Gallery (12 votes): A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

FeedBurner Feedsmith (11 votes): Will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

WP-PageNavi (10 votes): Improves your website page navigation including the ability to jump several pages and links to jump to the start or end.

Wordpress.com Stats (10 votes): Focuses on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provides them in a clear and concise interface. Collects information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.

Redirection (10 votes): Manages 301 redirections, keeps track of 404 errors, and generally tidies up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Google Analytics for WordPress (10 votes): If you are using Google Analytics then it makes sense to add this plugin. It automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.

I actually use 6 of the top 15 plugins on my blog and during the course of preparing this post I’ve spotted a few in the list which I should consider. But at the same time, I don’t want to overload my blog with plugins and slow it down given Google’s stance on page load speed.

So if you’re just starting out blogging with WordPress, or if you’re looking to add some plugins recommended across the blogosphere, have a look through these.

Are there any WordPress plugins you can’t do without which aren’t on this list? Drop a comment below.

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With the ever-expanding smartphone market these days, it’s important that your blog is mobile ready, meaning for example, that it can be rendered nice and clearly without having to scroll around too much on your phone. If you have a WordPress blog, there are a number of plugins which will remove the sidebars for example and convert the blog to a nice clean format for viewing on a cellphone. But which WordPress plugin to choose? Here’s a quick run through of how I narrowed the field down.

I went through my Diigo bookmarks and found I had bookmarked blogs discussing quite a few plugins: WordPress Mobile Pack, WPTouch, MobilePress, Wordpress Mobile Edition, and Wapple Architect Mobile to name just a few. But what I really wanted to get hold of was a comparison to see what people thought was the best mobile plugin.

Comparisons of WordPress mobile plugins

I found it hard to track down any blog which had reviewed and compared mobile plugins. In fact, if anyone’s interested and has access to a range of cellphones, there’s an opportunity for a really useful blog post here. WPFeed compared a number of plugins and chose Wordpress Mobile Plugin (but when you click the link now you’re directed to WordPress Mobile Pack), and the only other site I came across was Alpha2beta which I had Google translate from Chinese. They also compared a few and chose WordPress Mobile Pack.

I know that WPTouch is being quite well received, particularly for iPhone and Android platforms. Technically Personal uses the WPTouch plugin. In a reply to me in the comments there, Raju said he had tried quite a few plugins and found problems with them all. Wapple was a disaster he said.

Narrowing the choice down

On Mahalo Answers, I asked ‘What’s the best Wordpress plugin to make my blog mobile friendly?’ I received three answers recommending WPTouch, Wapple Architect and WordPress Mobile Pack. I was getting the feeling now that it was between these three. I liked the Wapple recommendation:

Finally, I tried a search on Twitter for wordpress AND mobile. Jumped into an interesting lead:

@dannybrown Did you test other WP mobile plugins before you settled on Wapple Architect? I’m finding it hard to pick one for my blog

@techandlife I did. Tried WordPress Mobile, WP Touch (good for iPhone, not so great others). Wapple best one I found

@techandlife And Rich Gubby of Wapple is just awesome http://bit.ly/7z2qwx

I checked back on my own bookmarks and Wapple Architect sounded really promising even though it doesn’t work for some. So I thought I’d try it first.

Installing Wapple Architect

Wasn’t just a case of downloading and installing the Wapple plugin. Had to register to receive the Developer Key, click a link in an email to complete registration, then received a Developer Key which was required to set up the plugin. Didn’t take too long though. During set up, you can upload an image to use for your mobile header and which would be automatically resized. Didn’t work for me on this occasion but I’ll try that again later. Incidentally, 2 days after registering, I received an email from Rich Gubby the Lead Developer at Wapple offering to help with the mobile styling – that’s a nice touch.

Testing Wapple Architect

I found a testing tool online to check mobile-readiness at mobiReady. My blog checked out okay.

At mobiReady, you can also check how your blog renders on a Nokia N70, Samsung Z105, Sony Ericsson k750i, Motorola v3i and Sharp GX-10.

I don’t have a smartphone but I fired up the browser on my LG Cookie and had a look at my blog:

Finally, at the top of the sidebar on the desktop version of this blog, I’ve also tried to indicate that it’s now mobile ready.

I’d love to hear how this blog renders on your mobile. Any annoyances you’ve noticed or any improvements you think I can make? If you do comment, let us know what mobile you’re using.

As a native English speaker I’m really very fortunate. In the western world, English is the dominant language used for publishing even though globally only about 720 million out of about 6.8 billion people speak English, about 11% of the world population according to WolframAlpha. Every blog I’ve subscribed to publishes in English even though in many cases the bloggers are not native speakers but do a great job nonetheless.

But what about those many millions globally for whom English is not their native language, indeed many of whom can’t speak English at all. Are we reaching them with our blogs or could we do more? Yes I know there are online translation sites such as Jollo which can be used to translate text but should we all be providing an automated translation service on our blogs to help? After all, the net is global and so is our readership.

There are WordPress plugins like the Global Translator WordPress Plugin, widgets like the new Google Translation Widget, Microsoft Translator and others but are they really effective? Surely automated translation will never be as good as a human translation so are they worth it? I’ve always shied away from using one because I just can’t judge how good they are – I only speak English and minor conversational French.

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration goes into some of the difficulties behind language translation plugins in terms of storing translation results in the blog database and more recently looks at Google Translate.

So I’d really like to know from my readers just what you think of automated translation plugins on blogs. Have you used them to translate blogs into your native language? Do you find any useful and if so which? Is the tech field with its specialized vocabulary just too much for these plugins? Do you prefer to do your own translation into your language? Please add your thoughts below and from the responses I’ll judge whether it’s worth adding this service on this site.

I hadn’t experienced any problems upgrading WordPress in the past …until yesterday. Tried the automatic upgrade from version 2.8.1 to 2.8.3 and got a memory php error along the lines:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 228968 bytes)

The upgrade then terminated without installing. Tried googling this error and came up with a reasonable suggestion to change the memory limit on line 13 of wp-settings.php to 64M from 32M. After doing this, I retried the automatic upgrade and got an error along the lines:

Fatal error: Class ‘Translations’ not found in /home1/techandl/public_html/wp-includes/l10n.php on line 407

This time the situation was more serious. If I tried to access this website or my WordPress dashboard, I got this error message on a white screen with no way to access my website. I’m sure others trying to access the website got the same greeting. Thankfully, I had run the WordPress Database Backup plugin and saved my posts to my hard drive just before attempting the upgrade so I had my content safe.

‘So what next?’ I thought. Well I tried changing the memory limit back to 32M in wp-settings.php but this didn’t work. I then googled the phrase “Class ‘Translations’ not found in” and found that quite a few others had experienced the same problem when upgrading. Tried several suggestions before concluding that the best route was probably to downgrade WordPress back to version 2.8.1. This was a little daunting because, having not experienced any problems since the initial WordPress install last year, I was a little hazy on how to proceed. There isn’t an easy downgrade route, so I had to treat the whole thing as relearning the WordPress install.

Thankfully, there’s a reasonably good tutorial on the WordPress website. I only had to go to step 8 in the tutorial to downgrade the installation. Briefly:

1. I backed up the complete website to my hard drive in case I messed up and had to retrieve some important deleted files.
2. I downloaded WordPress version 2.8.1 from the Release Archive, then extracted the zip file to my hard drive.
3. I deleted all the files in the root of the /public_html directory online (not the subfolders) except for .htaccess, wp-config.php and sitemap.xml and uploaded the equivalent files from the extracted zip file.
4. I deleted the wp-admin folder online and uploaded the complete wp-admin folder from the extracted zip.

I then tried accessing this website and thankfully everything was now okay – I could see all my posts and the plugins were still activated.

So what have I learned here? Well, I now have a complete backup of my site on my hard drive which should help in downgrading a failed WordPress upgrade in future. But I shouldn’t have to downgrade a failed upgrade. The automatic upgrade should work and if it doesn’t, there should be an easier way to restore a previous version. I do have the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin installed which I used until WordPress included this feature. Perhaps I’ll go back to using that but I don’t know if it works with WordPress version 2.8.

Hope this will be useful to anyone in a similar situation. Have you had any problems with the WordPress automatic upgrade? Let me know in the comments.