Trumblog

Download Squad has a new Squadcast where they interview Alex King, Wordpress Guru and plugin developer, who certainly steered me in the right direction when I set up my blog over the summer. He has developed a wonderful set of plugins, of which I’m personally using Twitter Tools and Wordpress Mobile Edition and probably would use more if I had time to pimp this site out some more.

Download squad does includes their top five Wordpress plugins in their podcast notes, but links to the plugins that Alex talks about are missing. The podcast and links are below.

Popularity Contest – Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.

Articles – The Articles plugin allows you to display a list of posts you wish to feature/highlight.

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

Spam Karma – Spam Karma 2 is an anti-spam plugin, It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.

WP Chunk – wp-chunk is a WordPress plugin to gracefully shorten URLs within submitted comments.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Admin Drop Down Menu – Makes all admin links available in a neat CSS driven drop down menu.

I already use Akismet and Google XML Sitemaps, but some of the others are great tips that I’ll be adding soon. Links to Download Squad’s top 5 Wordpress plugs are on their Squadcast page.