Sunday
April 29
2007

Pluggin’ two WordPress plugins

Yeah, right. Like you don’t know about WordPress plugins. Of course you do. That said, indulge me as I post briefly about my experience with one plugin you surely know about and another that maybe you don’t. Both are all but indispensable to the health of Webdogs 2.0.

The first is Akismet, an extraordinarily effective comment spam filtering system that is automatically included in current versions of WordPress. If you disable commenting in your WordPress installation, you don’t need it. But if you do allow comments, whew … will you ever need it once the comment spammers find you. And they will. Webdogs 2.0 caters to as modest a niche audience as you can have, and even it gets 500+ spam comments a week. (Ah, if only it received a real comment from time to time!) Akismet is phenomenally effective and will relieve you of what is undoubtedly the most annoying and thankless task of maintaining a blog site. But to take advantage of the Akismet plugin you have to take the initiative to activate it. And you’ll need to get a free Akismet API key to do so. Just do it.

The second WordPress plugin is Matt Read’s Custom Query String (CQS) plugin, which once installed provided me with a modest but heartfelt TIAG moment. I recently installed it to deal with the need to control how many archive and category posts are displayed at Webdogs 2.0. The WordPress admin panel offers a generic option for selecting the number of posts to display, which controls the number of posts displayed on any site page:

But what if you need or want to vary the number of posts displayed in different templates, e.g., archive or category post listings? Sure, you can hand code your templates to exploit The Loop. But for all the average joes among us holding on to their day jobs, the CQS plugin is a relatively easy install, i.e., just upload it to your plugin subdirectory and then work it from your WordPress admin panel. The CQS plugin requires no special coding and adds a nice functionality to the WordPress admin panel allowing you to customize the number of post displays for a wide array of template tags: