So…
…if, while moving over to my new digs, I were to take advantage of the one-click WordPress installation offered by Dreamhost and finally dip my toes in waters other than those of Movable Type, are there any pieces of advice I should know about? Plugins I should pay particular attention to? Tips or tricks I should know or avoid?
So far, I’ve managed to track down PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants, and have activated Akismet, but that’s it (and all this is on a non-public test installation). I’m particularly interested in seeing if there’s a good (easy to implement) ‘tagging’ solution, such as I’m using here in lieu of categories. Googling for ‘wordpress tags‘ tends to bring up lots of information on the formatting tags used in WP templates, which isn’t what I’m aiming for.
Anything else?
“What Is Life” by Mullins, Shawn from the album Big Daddy (1999, 4:09).
Spam Karma. Seriously. It kicks the crap out of Akismet. Actually, there’s a plugin called Spam Karma Akismet (or something like that…) – basically it’s a plugin that just adds Akismet as another criteria to use when determining spam. AND it submits ham/spam to Akismet when Akismet misclassifies, which also helps.
As for tagging, do a google search for ‘WordPress tag plugin’ and you’ll find a ton of different options. I don’t have a particular recommendation as I stopped using tags some time ago.
I have to agree with Ryan. I use WP and Spam Karma is the best spam solution out there.
As for tags. Try using some of thje stuff listed here. Just do a find for “tag” on this page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Outside_Information
For tagging you’d probably want to use Ultimate Tag Warrior, I tried that but gave up after realising that retro tagging all my posts was probably the least constructive use of my time
Mike, I’m going to e-mail you a PDF that contains the plugins I use on my site. Let me know if you need any URLs.
I’ll second Ultimate Tag Warrior. It gets the job done.
There’s plugs for just about anything and everything you could want to do with WP. :) Anything in specific you’re looking for? (outside of the spam-prevention and tag suggested above?)
I am using two useful ones at the moment. Sociable gives you a choice of bookmarklets so people can add posts or your blog itself to digg, del.icio.us and others. I also use a plugin to redirect my feed to feedburner (don’t recall the name but I’d be happy to mail it to you).
I have Akismet running on my blog and while I have heard great things about Spam Karma, I am happy with Akismet.
As far as themes go, the k2 theme is a pretty solid theme which you could easily edit to suit your needs.