Two WordPress Plugins That I Use

On my personal blog there are certain WP plugins I use that make life a whole lot easier when blogging. If you use these, I guarantee you’ll really like them.

Before continuing, you should be running the latest version of WP, which at the time of this writing is version 2.7.1. Makes for installing plugins a whole lot easier as there’s no FTP required whatsoever.

For you WP users that don’t know what I’m talking about, login to your WP, expand “Plugins” on the left, click “Add New”, then search for what you want and install it that way, or just click “Browse”, find the ZIP of the plugin you downloaded and watch WP do its magic. Works very, very nicely. Like I said, no FTP required.

WP-Optimize
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-optimize/

Trust me, there’s a reason this plugin has a 5-star rating across the board. It cleans up your database like you wouldn’t believe.

A problem with the current WP is that it has absolutely no way of removing worthless post revisions. But with WP-Optimize you can with two clicks.

My MySQL database was 18MB before WP-Optimize. Now it’s 12MB. That’s an unbelievably huge whopping difference because it means that over 30% of my database was junk.

In addition to removing needless revision blog posts it also optimizes the MySQL database for you. I consider this plugin mandatory for anyone that locally hosts WP on your own web server.

Viper’s Video Quicktags
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/

This is the be-all/end-all of video embed plugins for WordPress. It does YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, MySpace Video, several others and you’re own local FLV files on your server (it has an FLV player built-in!)

The way in which Viper does video is stupidly easy. I had been searching for months trying to find a simple video embedding solution and when I found Viper, my search was over.