Following on from my last few posts on WordPress, I thought I would talk about the various Plugins that I frequently use, and imparticular, the Plugins that are built into Self Conclusion, as I have several sections which import information from various social sites such as Last.FM, Delicious and Flickr.

Akismet

I will start with the Self Conclusion Plugins, I just briefly want to mention the first plugin, which is actually one that comes built into WordPress. The Akismet plugin is often missed by alot of newcomers to WordPress but it is infact very useful for filtering out the dreaded SPAM comments. Once activated, you are required to register for a WordPress.com account, so you can retreive an API Key which will need to be entered into the Akismet Configuration page.

The image above is just a snippet from my Akismet page and you can see that two messages there are clearly junk, and Akismet has marked them as Spam, meaning I don’t have to deal with them.

The next set of plugins are by Ricardo González over at Rick’s HideOut. They deal with Twitter, Last.FM and Delicious Feeds, and require minimal setup.

Twitter Plugin for WordPress

I use this plugin to display the large ‘Twitter’ text at the top on my Homepage. The plugin doesn’t deal with the formatting of this text, it simply grabs it from your Twitter account and displays it on your blog. To install, download the plugin from the link below and upload it to your WordPress Plugins directory (eg. http://www.domainname.com/wp-content/plugins). Now go to your WP Admin area and activate the Plugin. To Display your Twitter status, simply insert the following code between a set of PHP Tags into your page, replacing the username:

twitter_messages('username');

This ofcourse is only the very minimal settings on this plugin, as there are many attributes you can tweak which can be found on the Plugin page here http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/.

Last.FM for WordPress

Similar process to the Twitter plugin, but this displays the recent tracks Scrobbled on your Last.FM account, in my code, I set it to display the latest 7 tracks. To install, download the plugin from the link below and upload it to your WordPress Plugins directory (eg. http://www.domainname.com/wp-content/plugins). Now go to your WP Admin area and activate the Plugin. Inserting it into your blog couldn’t be easier (Don’t forget the PHP Tags):

lastfm_tracks('username');

Again, there are many other attributes which can be set such as how many tracks to display. These can be found here http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/lastfm/.

Delicious for WordPress

The final plugin I want to mention from Ricardo is ‘Delicious for WordPress’. I won’t go into to much detail because the process of setting it up and building it into your blog is exactly the same as the previous two plugins, but using the following code (again put this code between a set of PHP tags):

delicious_bookmarks('username');

Like the previous two Plugins, the code above only deals with the default values, to tweak it further, visit the following page http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/delicious/.

More To Follow….

Right, thats it for this post, be sure to keep checking for Part 2 when I talk about the other Plugins I use on Self Conclusion, and other more favoured Plugins I have used in the past. I’d love to hear about any plugins you guys use or if you also use some of the ones I have mentioned and what you think of them.