I thought sharing what plugins we all use in WordPress would make a good post. So as the title says, I’ll show you my plugins, if you show me yours.

Let’s start with the most important:

Akismet - If you are NOT using this plugin, you are…not…smart. That is the least insulting I can be with that. This thing has caught more spam than you can imagine. I mean a LOT. 488 spam comments to be exact. I’m talking viagra, porn, random crazy…you name it, it has caught it.

WP-Spam Free – Along the same lines as the above. Guess how many this one has caught? 511 as of this post. Insane right? I highly recommend these two more than you can know.

Login LockDown – This is a security plugin. Two things: if you login with admin as the username…you are again, an idiot. Create a new admin account with a different user name, then delete that one. Google it for more info. This plugin adds another step of security. It restricts the number of failed logins that can be attempted from a given IP range. Mine is set very low. I’m paranoid about this kind of thing, but I recommend it.

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I was making some changes to my blog, and one of them was to change the version of jQuery I was using. I wanted to go to 1.4.2, but to make sure I had the most updated copy of my functions page (cause I do stuff to it on multiple computers), I downloaded the page. I was using Dreamweaver to do the ftp, cause it was a quick thing. Well the formatting was off in code, but I didn’t think anything of it. I made my change, and re-uploaded it.

BAD IDEA. REALLY, REALLY BAD.

Because when i logged in, instead of going to dashboard, I got redirected to a completely blank page. This has happened to others apparently. I renamed my theme so it would it would load the default one. That worked, so I knew it was within the Web Machine theme. Then uploaded my old copy of the functions page, with the original formatting, and bam everything was fixed. But how do you know it was not something you coded? Because all I changed was a number, and after I figured out the formatting thing, I again changed the number and it was fixed. Scared the hell out of me though.

A menu manager. Thank you. This will make developing themes for sale on themeforest MUCH easier. Really they could have added just that, and I would have been happy. I am not a php genius (yet!), so creating a back-end menu manager myself is out of the question at the moment. One day though…I will do it. Until then, this solves a lot of problems. It’s developed by WooThemes’ WooNav, which I have taken a look at before, just never tried. Looks pretty intuitive. I can’t wait for this to come out!