BlogCrafted » Blogging with Wordpress

How to Handle Comment Spam Akismet Doesn’t Catch

Ms. Crafty — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:57:20 +0000

Recently, a number spam bots have been managing to get past Akismet to leave nonsensical comments with no actual link. Instead the link has read http://link with no .com. It seems likely that these bots are attempting to get these fake comments accepted on blogs so that when the same bots leave comments with links, they’ll be 2nd time commenters. People have reported a great deal of frustration at having these comments show up and sit on their blogs until they get a chance to mark as spam.

Here’s how you can either send these comments to your moderation queue or even send them directly to your spam. If you are reasonably certain that no one else will be leaving a valid comment on your site with http://link, then you might as well sent it to spam. If you’re worried that a real comment might left with http://link in the link, field, then there’s a way to sent it to moderation instead.

Sending These Spam http://link Comments to Spam

There’s a manual way to send these comments to spam, at least until Akismet picks up on them.

1. Navigate to Settings -> Discussion.

2. Scroll down to Comment Blacklist. You’ll see a box that looks like the one below (click image to enlarge). Enter http://link and save (bottom of the page). This way, any comment that leaves http://link as its link will get sent straight to your spam area, it won’t show up in your comments and you won’t even have to moderate it.

Sending These Spam http://link Comments to Your Moderation Queue

Using this method will mean you still have to moderate the comments, but they won’t show up on your posts.

1. Navigate to Settings -> Discussion.

2. Scroll down to Comment Moderation. You’ll see a box that looks like the one below (click image to enlarge). Enter http://link and save (bottom of the page). This way, any comment that leaves http://link as its link will get sent straight to your spam area, it won’t show up in your comments and you won’t even have to moderate it.

Using This Method on Other Spam

Most Wordpress users rely on spam killing plugins to keep unwanted comments off our blog. But sometimes the plugins aren’t smart enough or haven’t yet adapted. You can use this method for all kinds of things.

Got regular commenter who always needs comments edited or at least looked over before they’re posted? If they always use the same e-mail address, just put it in the Moderation or Blacklist box, depending on the approach you want to take.

Got an unwelcome commenter from a particular IP address? Put the IP address in there. (Won’t stop them commenting from different IPs.)

Got a commenter who always uses the same offensive terms, such as “whore”? Put them in there.

These fields are a great way to either keep a tighter rein on your blog’s comments by moderating certain kinds or to set and forget and send some comments to spam every time.

When Your Wordpress Blog Goes Blank – Possible Fix

Ms. Crafty — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:00:28 +0000

One of the many services I offer is migrating Wordpress blogs from one host to another. If you’re attempting to migrate your own blog, here’s one important tip: deactivate your caching plugin before you migrate (usually wp-cache or wp-super-cache).

You don’t have to deactivate any other plugins, if you’re migrating your entire database then it’ll automatically reactivate what you were using before. But caching plugins do not play well with blog moves.

If, once you’ve moved the site, all you see is a blank page—not an error page, your site is just a blank page with nothing on it—then check your wp-config file for the following line or something like it:

define('WP_CACHE', true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager

You can either disable the line by putting a “#” in front of it like so:

#define('WP_CACHE', true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager

or you can delete the entire line and trust the caching program to add it back in once you reactivate.

I encountered this issue on Media Temple. I don’t know if that’s because MT is a bit different or if I’ve always turned off the caching plugin before. It was quite easy to fix, but a real pain to catch.

So if your Wordpress blog is showing nothing but blank pages check your wp-config file–it may be an easier fix than you expected. (Also, check to make sure your new host doesn’t have an index.html file in your blog’s main directory. All you want is index.php and index.php.wpau.bak, index.html will keep the front page of your blog from showing up).

How to do a Thorough Backup of Your Wordpress Blog

Ms. Crafty — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:00:04 +0000

CathLawson, one of my favorite bloggers, recently experienced every blogger’s worst nightmare. Her host shut down her account and turned off her site. The site took 3 days to come back up.

I think this was shocking behavior on the host’s part, as there should have been ways that they could have let her easily access her files and database without keeping her blog live.

But the sad thing is that not all hosts will give you warning or let you get at your files (right away, anyway). So it’s important to have good backups. This way, if something happens to your blog, you’ll be able to restore without depending on hosts.

So, here’s how to run a thorough backup of your Wordpress installation:

Your Wordpress installation has two key components, the database and the files. The database stores all your settings and your content posts/comments/categories/blogroll/active plugins/active theme/widgets/etc. The files include the actual Wordpress schema that makes the site display…from the key Wordpress files to things like your plugin & theme files.

Backing Up Your Wordpress Database

This is the most critical part of your backup process. You can always re-add plugins that weren’t in your last file backup, make the same theme changes again (though always backup major theme overhauls) or use a different theme, and you don’t even have to worry about the core Wordpress components (they only change between upgrades, and you can always re-upgrade, or they’re available at Wordpress.org). As long as you have one file backup, you’ve got a starting point.

But if you don’t have a very recent backup of your database, you’ve lost every post you’ve written, every comment you’ve received, and every setting you’ve changed in the interim.

For backing up your Wordpress database, I recommend installing the Wordpress DB-Backup plugin. Once you’ve activate it, download a copy right away and then configure it for daily backups…unless you blog infrequently, in which case weekly might do as well. Err on the side of backing up. I save the last several backups, just to be safe.

Make sure that the backups you’re receiving have actual content. I’d suggest using a trial installation of WinRAR to unzip them. This should produce ordinary .sql files, which will look funny if you open them in plain Notepad (though Notepad++ displays them great!), but you can at least see that there’s content.

If you’d like an extra backup, periodically use the built-in Wordpress export feature (now found in Tools, post 2.7). It doesn’t have nearly as much detail as a database backup, but this .xml file will have your posts, comments, and a number of other important pieces of information. If you have trouble restoring from the database, you’ll still be able to restore from the .xml file.

Backing Up Your Wordpress Files

In theory, you could restore your Wordpress installation without a file backup, but why would you want to? Having the files right there makes the entire process much easier.

There are two ways to back up your files.

1) Consider using the Blog Traffic Exchange Wordpress Backup plugin. It backs up your themes, plugins, and uploads directories.

You can opt to have the plugin e-mail you backups periodically or backup from your site’s back-end. If the backups are too large, you may have to do it on your site because the .zip files can’t be sent through e-mail.

2) You can download all your site files (which means that you can just upload them again and import your database if you need to restore). I suggest using an FTP client such as Filezilla. Your host should have given you FTP login information.

When accessing your site via FTP, you can just download your site’s entire “root” directory, if that’s an option. In the image below, the “” contains ALL the site’s Wordpress files, theme files, plugin files, and uploads (whether to the “uploads” folder, another img folder, or anywhere else). Click for a larger view:

Or you can download ALL the directories and files inside your site’s root folder. That includes wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes, as well as all the .php files and whatnot. If doing it this way, create a special folder on your computer to serve as a root directory of sorts.

Restoring from a Backup

That’s an article for another day. Until that day comes, there are other websites which have information about restoring Wordpress from backups. And if you have the files and database backup, any blog professional should be able to restore your Wordpress installation to your website or transfer it to another host’s website with little difficulty.

Easy Wordpress .htaccess 301 Redirect

Ms. Crafty — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:00:59 +0000

Recently, I moved a Wordpress blog from one domain to another. Most of the time, I work with blogging platform transfers or possibly moving the domain from one host to another.

In this case, I needed to direct traffic arriving at any page on the old domain to the same page on the new domain. I knew that I wanted to do a 301 redirect, but I hadn’t anticipated how simple the whole thing would be. I had anticipated a long list of redirects.

But it turns out that if you migrate a Wordpress blog from one domain to another domain, then all you need to do is make a small change to your .htaccess file at the old domain.

If there isn’t anything about the “RewriteEngine” in the .htaccess file, then add the following:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace www.newdomain.com with whatever your new domain is. Use “www” or not as you see fit.

However it’s quite likely that in the section following:

# BEGIN WordPress

you’ll find the first two lines:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

Directly after those, before any other rewrite commands, place:

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

again replacing www.newdomain.com with the blog’s new domain.

This works on Linux servers which have Apache Mod-Rewrite enabled. That sounds very technical, but it’s also what’s offered by a large number of hosting companies. If you don’t know whether or not you have that, give the redirect a shot. You can always contact your hosting company if it doesn’t work and ask for their suggestions.

It takes about 20 seconds to do. And this works whether or not you still have Wordpress installed on the old domain. I deleted the entire Wordpress installation and just left the redirect up. Every link goes through to the new site.

A 301 redirect isn’t as good as a direct link, but in terms of traffic and even SEO it’s a best choice. Gives you time to find out who’s linking to your old site and ask them to change while making people follow those old links to the right place anyway.

13 Admin Themes +3 : Improve Your User-Side Wordpress Experience

Ms. Crafty — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:00:27 +0000

If you’re like me, you’re not very keen on the default Wordpress admin look. Perhaps I’m just jaded from logging into too many other peoples’ blogs to do design work, I like to see something different in mine. (Also, am I the only one who thinks this new theme looks completely washed out?)

Well, there are a number of options out there, “admin themes,” as they’re called. Most come in plugin form and transform your admin area simply by being activated. Unlike blog themes, most admin themes only apply to the CSS of the admin presentation, they don’t change up the html elements. Everything is still there, it’s just moved around.

There aren’t nearly as many admin themes as there are blog themes, but there are a good number. Some are sleek, some are retro and try to imitate the 2.3.x look, some are user defined. I’ve included themes which are pre-2.5 as well, because I know some people are still using 2.3.x and may want to vary the look.

Wordpress 2.5+ Compatible Admin Themes

These themes are compatible with Wordpress 2.5+. They may not be compatible with pre-Wordpress 2.5, since the admin area underwent a complete makeover with the 2.5 release. However, some offer the old version for download on their site as well (depending on whether or not they had a pre-2.5 version).

Themes which have a completely different look from the original or current dashboard:

Leopard Admin is probably my favorite. The use of color does a nice job of drawing your eyes to the center and the graphics are lovely. Plus, I love the Mac-like look and pretending I have a sleek new Mac instead of an aging Windows machine.
Fluency Admin is my second favorite. It’s darker than Leopard, without the pretty graphics, but is still a clean look.
The Tiger Admin theme inspired both of the themes above. It’s also a clean look, Mac-inspired, but much too close to the current theme for my taste. Not enough contrast and darkness.

Themes which model themselves on the older look:

JP Admin Stylish Blue is a response to the washed out and wimpy classic blues of 2.5+ and creates a bold, almost-classic option. I’ve been enjoying the black vs. blue, but it’s a very nice look. Unlike some, which load as soon as you activate the plugin you have to go to the user section and select it in there.
Retro Dashboard makes the admin side look similar to the 2.3 theme, but not quite.

These themes allow the user to choose any of a number of color schemes or even come up with their own!

Easy Admin Color Schemes lets you come up with your own color scheme. You can have it match your blog or anything else you’d like. The layout is still WP 2.5+ framework, but the colors are whatever you want them to be.
Baltic Amber Themes – I couldn’t make any themes I liked out of this one. I tried, but it just didn’t turn out as I hoped. But if you want to make your own color choices or set up a random theme, it’s user-defined (like the Easy Admin, but a little easier to use with less impressive results).
WP Admin Themes has a number of simple color combinations which you can download, upload and activate in your user options section. You can even add your own.

Admin Themes for Pre-2.5 Wordpress

These themes are lovely, but aren’t compatible with Wordpress 2.5 or 2.6.

AFD Wordpress2 Admin Theme has a lovely silver look. A little too light and polished for me, but it appeals to my “clean” aesthetic.
Deconstructed is another theme that’s a little light for my taste. Still, I prefer it to either the 2.3.x theme or the current ones offered.
Deconstructed Remix–another version of Deconstructed, done by someone who enjoyed the first version. Nice look as well.
Planet X7 is a very very dark blue. Above, I commended Leopard and Fluency for using darkness to draw attention to the middle area. Planet X7 is just…dark. I like it, but I’m not sure I’d want to use it. Still, check out the screenshots.
JS Spot the Milk uses different shated of the classic blue and white colors. It also includes drop-down menus. (User comments note that the drop-down menus don’t work as well with sub-menus.)

Plus 3 Bonus Links

The Admin Drop-Down Menu plugin doesn’t really put up a new theme, but it allows you to save a lot of hassle in the current one. You know how if you want to, say, edit your theme, it takes several clicks to get there? This plugin solves that by creating drop-down menus. I’ve seen it at work on blogs I’ve consulted on and was very pleased with the easy navigation.

Wordpress 2.5+ doesn’t reveal post/category/whatnot IDs in the admin section. Well, it takes hovering over the editing link or checking the location bar when you’re editing. IDs can be very useful in coding, so I’ve found this annoying. This plugin restores them to where they should be. I’m not sure if it’s compatible with all the 2.5+ themes, but it’s worth a shot. Scroll down to English.

And if you want your blog to look like the 2.5 “Fresh” (default) Admin theme, you can find that here. I think it looks better on the front than inside.

New Related Posts Plugin Rocks My Socks

Ms. Crafty — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:30:40 +0000

A while back, I posted a list of the best plugins for a Wordpress site. I even created a plugin starter pack. Well, now it’s time to amend both to make way for a plugin I’ve recently discovered.

Previously, I’d included a recommendation for the old-school related posts plugin and put the plugin in the starter pack. But frankly, I was less-than-thrilled with it. I preferred it to the other related post plugins I’d seen, but it was a real pain to install (seriously, I had to go into MySQL!) and you had little control over what it thought was or wasn’t related.

It’s called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and the general instructions for download/use are on the plugin page. You can download the updated plugin pack here.

Things I like about YARPP:

1. You can “disallow” categories and tags. This means that on my personal blog, for example, I can disallow my “Roundup” category from related posts. In theory, this means that posts which are only in the “Roundup” category shouldn’t even show up.

2. You can emphasize, deemphasize, or require commonalities. You do this by setting an overall “match threshold” and then adjusting the match settings for each area. So I have titles considered with extra weight for the match, but tags not considered at all. I do require one category in common, which probably overrides the “Roundup” category issue I mentioned above . . . but only on roundup posts.

Because this blog is so new, I have a much lower match threshold, something like 1.5. The smaller or less inter-related your blog, the lower your match threshold should be.

If you click to view the full-size image below, you can get a good idea of how to do these settings.

3. You can style the way you want the items to appear. As you can see in the image below, I want an

before the list. I could also apply a class to the

surrounding the list. They could have stars instead of squares, or be bright pink, or do something sensible. I could even include a link at the end to the archives page.

Of course, it would be easy enough to write this styling in the code itself, but I like the simplicity of putting it once here and having it show up wherever you put the call. And if you want to change things, you simply go back to the plugin management area and change the code there. Neat and tidy.

4. You can limit relatedness to only posts or only pages. Or you can cross-relate if you want. There are codes for calling only posts, or only pages, or anything, as well as a place you can check off in the plugin management area. I don’t like having pages show up in related posts, especially since they’re often available elsewhere on the page.

Updating the Plugin Pack

So as you can imagine, I’ve updated the plugin starter pack to include the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. I’m very pleased to have run across it and grateful to its creator for giving us so much control over our Related Posts options.

Download the updated plugin pack here and the contact form plugin here.

Related posts:

Using Wordpress PHP Conditional Tags to Create Variable Design

Ms. Crafty — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:30:28 +0000

Looking for a way to create sidebars that look one way on the main blog page, another way on the individual posts, and perhaps a third way on the individual pages? Here’s how to use Wordpress’s conditional tags and the tiniest bit of PHP to do it. Don’t be intimidated, give it a try!

One beautiful thing about Wordpress is that you don’t have to be educated in more than the most basic use of PHP to use its PHP based tags. You just have to learn what they are and how to use them. You can use these anywhere. I’m talking about sidebars here, because they’re often on every page of a blog (home, post, page) but you might want them to look different on different types of pages.

Note: this is for hand-coded sidebars or those using a PHP widget. It won’t work in the Wordpress text widgets.

Conditional Statements in PHP

This is probably easier to learn than you think. PHP allows for conditional statements. They’re written the same way you might give a child a series of instructions. If there’s Cinnamon bread at the store, buy one loaf or else if there’s only raising bread, buy a loaf of that or else buy plain bread. You can include as many else if commands as you’d like and the program won’t get confused like a child might.

Or if it’s an either/or situation, you could write if Grandma is home, give her the cookies or else bring them back here. (No “else if”s if there’s only one “else” needed.)

Make sense?

Using Conditional PHP with Wordpress Tags

Wordpress has a number of conditional tags of varying detail.

For example, if you want something only to occur on Single Post pages, you can use is_single(). Or if you only want something to show up on a particular single post (let’s say the post slug is “awesome-post”) you can use is_single(‘awesome-post’). There are other options to use post number and post title; I prefer slug.

For all Single Pages (not any page, but the ones created as Pages in Wordpress), use is_page(). You can use the same methods as above to narrow it down.

The last one I’ll cover is is_home(). This tag is different from is_front_page(). On the domain blogcrafted.com I’ve set the front page to a static page. The “home” page, however, is the main blog page. On most blogs they’re the same thing, because the front page is also the main blog page.

So unless you’ve been messing in the ‘Settings->Reading->Front page displays’ part of your blog, you can probably use either. On this site, I have to be careful.

For the complete list of conditional tags, visit the Wordpress Codex.

Putting It Together

So how do you put this all together? Let’s take a really simply example. Suppose that you want to put one image at the top of your sidebar on the main blog page, one on single post pages, and one on any other pages (archives/404/pages/etc).

Here’s the code you would use:

Don’t forget the final php command which closes off the section. It essentially tells the browser “Ok, we’re done with that whole conditional section. The next bits go on every page.”

You can use the above code with simply if and then else. You can use it with as many else ifs as you’d like.

You could even have a different image in the sidebar for every post if you wanted to add all that code to the sidebar. Here’s the complete conditional tag list.

More Advanced Uses (“Not” Statements)

Suppose you want something to only show up on certain pages and don’t want anything there on others. Obviously, you can do this by setting up an if / else conditional statement as above and simply leave one option section blank (don’t put any code or text between it and the next else if/else). But if you would like to set it up to be on every page except one type (or even except one actual page!), you can do that by using a “not” statement.

I should begin by saying that in a lot of coding, “not” is actually done with what’s called a “bang.” And a bang is this: !

Yep, it’s an exclamation point.

So suppose that I want something to show up on every page that is not the home page (so I want it in the sidebars of singe post pages, single pages, 404 pages, the works). Here’s what I write:

See how the ! is right in-front of the is_home() ? That’s where you have to put it to get the “not” effect. This code tells the browser “if this page is NOT home, then display everything until the end piece of php code.”

You can also set it up so that the item has multiple NOTs. In the case below, this will show up on every page that is NOT “home” and NOT “single.” Just use: && between them and don’t forget the !

You can repeat this ad-infinitum.

Wrapping Up

If you go step-by-step, it’s not too tough. Some people reading this probably said “duh” and others (you?) might be more intimidated. But if nothing else you can start by copying what I have here and go from that.

This type of code can be used anywhere in Wordpress. It’s most useful for sidebars because if you want something only on individual post pages, you’ve already got a theme template file for that. Anything that is used on multiple pages is fair game. Maybe that’s a “navigation.php” file, or maybe it’s your sidebar/header/footer.

It’s also used to set up what will show up on a post/page based on whether or not the comments are open. So keep your eyes open for all the places it can be used. The a list of all the conditional tags helps you see what your newfound edjumication can do.

Later on, I plan to write about the other way to have varied sidebars. It simply involves making a number of sidebar files (or having several complete sidebars in one file) and calling different ones in different pages of your Wordpress theme. The advantage of the method I’ve outlined above is that you can do it entirely in one file and it’s good for minor changes.

Denying Access to Comment Spammers (and others) Using htaccess and 403 Pages

Ms. Crafty — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:30:50 +0000

One of the downsides of having an interactive website of any kind is dealing with spammers. Whether you have forums, blogs, wikis, or blog-hosting sites, you’ll run across spammers of one kind or another. In my blogging experience, I’ve run across two main types of spam.

Types of Comment / Trackback Spam

First there’s bot spam. This is done by impersonal programs which run around the web and post huge spam comments full of links to disgusting/spammy sites. They’ve been programmed ahead of time, but they’re really not after you. You just have the right keyword or something else that draws them to your page.

Fortunately, my spam blocker catches a lot of these. There are ways to deny these bots access to your site, but every one I’ve tried has thrown off at least one legitimate visitor or broken my site (Bad Behavior plugin). Since my filter works pretty well, I don’t worry about them.

But there’s a second, more insidious type of spam. It often disguises itself as real comments. This rather innocent comment was left on my site by someone calling himself “Tom.”

my biggest problem is forgetting as well. I am so busy during the day that it just happens to slip my mind later. It is frustrating and a little irresponsible, but I would like to make a system for remembering to pay my bills. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Nothing here to suggest he’s a spammer. But the site he included in the URL section was a commercial site that I didn’t approve of at all.

I had two options for dealing with this. I could simply remove the offending link and let the comment stay. It wasn’t doing any real harm, though I wouldn’t want my readers to put themselves to any trouble helping a spammer.

The problem with doing that is that my spam filter wouldn’t learn that Tom (and his IP address) are bad news. Akismet is supposed to learn who the spammers are. I’m not sure, but it may even use this data for more than just your site. But even if it didn’t, I knew that every comment of Tom’s would get through. So I marked it as spam.

Denying an IP Address Access

But I also decided that I wanted a solution so I didn’t have to wait for Akismet’s learning curve. Who knows how long that’ll take?

And live comment spammers are annoyingly persistent.

So I went to the Wordpress Codex and checked out their instructions for denying spammers access at all.

My comments section gave me Tom’s IP address. Let’s say it was 123.456.7.8. He’d commented several times from this same IP address.

I used the instructions for denying access and created this section in my .htaccess file.

order allow,deny allow from all deny from 123.456.7.8

In this case, the allow directive is evaluated first. It allows everyone, so the system moves on to evaluate the deny directive. Only one user, whose IP address matches the deny directive, will be denied. Since any requests who don’t match an allow or deny directive are denied by default, it was important that I included an “allow from all” section!!

One could also put in “deny from 123.45*” which would deny from any IP address beginning with those numbers. I just don’t want to limit it that much. We’ll see if Tom pops up again, if so I might put something like 123.456.7.* so that hopefully only he would still be blocked.

Creating a 403 Page

Next, I created a 403 error page and uploaded it to my server. Wikipedia describes this error as a signal which “indicates that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server doesn’t let the user access what was requested.”

You run across these all the time, whenever you don’t have the permission to do something. They’re often not very fancy, but I put a couple minutes into mine. Specifically, I created a page with a link to my site (in case you end up there through random clicking but weren’t actually blocked) and a note to legitimate users to e-mail me if they’re having a problem being blocked.

To get the page to show every time someone hit a 403 error, I added this line to my .htaccess file.

ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.html

So now, if Tom pops by my site again, he’ll run into a 403 page instead.

Adding more live spammers will be quite easy, I can just copy their IP addresses from the comments and paste them over into the .htaccess file.

Follow-up: “Tom” was apparently shocked that I didn’t appreciate him as a visitor and his comments. I’m not that desperate.

Must-Have Plugins for Your New Wordpress Blog

Ms. Crafty — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:30:52 +0000

Now you can download a free .zip file containing all the plugins listed! See here for more details and instructions.

Setting up a Wordpress blog? I’ve had plenty of people ask me which plugins I recommend for a new Wordpress blog. These are not all the plugins I use, but they’re the ones which are musts for almost any blog.

Akismet or Spam Karma 2

No blog is spam-resistant. If you allow comments or trackbacks, you simply must have something to control the spam. There are two main spam filtering plugins.

Akismet comes with your blog. To get the “key” which unlocks it, sign up at Wordpress.COM for a free account. You can use the same key with all your blogs. If Akismet isn’t working well, then try using Spam Karma 2. And vice-versa, if you have problems with SK2, try switching back to Akismet.

I have experience with both and each has worked well even if neither has been perfect.
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

The automatic upgrade plugin allows you to cleanly and simply upgrade your blog every time a new version comes out. You don’t have to worry about downloading/uploading anything, you can do it all from inside your wp-admin area. There’s a step by step version you can click through or one that just runs on its own (depending on how much control you want). All you have to do is either set it to go or just hit next.

A nice change they made on the most recent edition turns your plugins back on automatically…that broke in the previous editions, but they’ve fixed it.
All in One SEO or Headspace 2

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex business. If you want to optimize your post without changing its quality of writing, these two plugins can both help you out. They allow things like setting up extra keywords (tags) for a post which won’t be shown on the post’s page but will turn up for search engine results. You can also change your post’s Title tag to be something more keyword rich (but you don’t have to change the post title that’s visible on the page. So I might put “Best Plugins New Wordpress Blog” in the title box in the SEO plugin section for this post. But its title is still “Must-Have Plugins for Your New Wordpress Blog.” You can also put in different summaries.

Of the two plugins, All in One SEO is much less complicated. Once you’ve set it up, it’s easy to use. Doesn’t require a lot of time learning or entering the information. You can easily turn it off for any particular post.

On the other hand, if you already know you want to go all-out with SEO, then the Headspace 2 plugin might be the route to take. You can actually use both these plugins together, but some of their functions are redundant. For learning how to use Headspace 2, I recommend these three pages: from the original designer, and part 1 of the webhelper tutorial, part 2 of the webhelper tutorial
CForms Contact Form

Your readers need to be able to contact you. That’s why I recommend that every blogger set up a contact page immediately. You can include your e-mail address, but I also suggest including a form for people who don’t happen to have their e-mail open but are already on your contact page. It’s probably faster and more convenient for them. Having a contact form is also perfect if you don’t want to give out your e-mail (even as a picture) on your site for fear of spam.

I recommend the CForms contact form which I use here. It can be modified to fit your blog’s color or your page size using CSS. You can create a number of different forms and use them on different posts and pages.

As a note, this plugin is not in the pack as it would not properly fit. It can be downloaded here: CForms Contact Form.
Feedburner Feedsmith

The Feedburner Feedsmith plugin allows you to redirect your site’s natural feed to your feedburner address. That way, you can keep track of your readership all over at feedburner, even if people sign up by typing in your site’s feed or using the “automatic feed detector” in their RSS readers.

As an example, suppose that your feedburner shows you have 150 readers. You don’t know that 50 other people have somehow subscribed to the feed that comes directly from your site. When you add this plugin, you suddenly see all 200 when you check feedburner. Any stats you get about them also help you better understand your readership.
Google XML Sitemaps

Google isn’t the oldest search engine, but it’s certainly the dominant force on the market. This plugin creates a sitemap which makes your site more accessible to Google’s search. As a bonus, it also works for Ask.com, Yahoo, and MSN (the other big three).

Here’s some information on what XML sitemaps are and the FAQ for this plugin.
No-Follow Free

No-Follow Free is a little present for your regular commentors. Wordpress automatically labels the “site” field of comments as a “no-follow.” That means that commenting on your site won’t help the person’s pagerank or help them accumulate backlinks. It’s meant to discourage spammers. But using this plugin turns that off (frees your site from no-follow) and rewards your commentors.

Concerned that people will take advantage of it? Well, you can set up No-Follow Free so that only people with a certain minimum of comments for that site will be followed. And you can add keywords which will automatically turn no-follow back on.
Post Post

The PostPost plugin allows you to set up default text that will appear in various places on your blog. You can set something up to appear before or after every post, before or after every post that’s on its own page (vs. the site’s main page), before or after pages, and before or after your feed.

You may not use any of the former, but the last function is priceless. It allows you to hold subscriber competitions very easily, just put the “secret keyword” into the box for before or after your feed, depending on where you want it to appear. It won’t show up on your site, but it will show up in your feed. A number of people use it to put affiliate links in their feeds or even on their blog. Or if you want a “Click to subscribe” link in front of every post, this is the place to do it. You can use X/HTML to format it with links, etc.

The great thing about this is that unlike text in the post itself, this can be edited or deleted blog/feed-wide simply by changing or removing the text. You may not want it right away, but it’s good to put up there so you can activate and use it as soon as it become relevant
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Want to give your readers more relevant content when they’re done reading a post and keep them on your blog? YARPP does just that.

Unlike “recent posts,” this will allow them to see that you’ve posted something else on the subject even if it was months or years ago. Since it shows the title, there’s also more direct motivation than there is to click on tags or categories in hopes of finding something related. It’s right there. YARPP also has an excellent management area which allows you to control what types of posts show up.

I had previously recommended the old-school related posts plugin, but it’s a pain to set up and doesn’t have all the management options as YARPP. So I’ve changed it in the pack and this post.
SRG Clean Archives

Every blog should have an archives page. The Wordpress archives plugins for the sidebar are decent, but they’re not nearly as useful as this clean archives plugin. It allows you to create whole pages with collapsible lists by month.

Because it lists all the titles on one page and doesn’t require clicking again and again to older pages (though it has a more detailed option too) like the Wordpress version does, users can just look for interesting titles in your entire history. More motivation for them to stick around instead of getting bored.
Subscribe to Comments

Engaged readers are key for a healthy blog. One way to keep your readers involved in the discussion surrounding an article and coming back for more is to set up the subscribe to comments plugin. This way, people can opt to get an e-mail each time the post is updated.

Use caution, however. If you leave the “subscribe” box automatically checked (options will let you have it be checked or unchecked by default) people will be more likely to accidentally subscribe and may participate in the discussion. But many will feel that you took advantage of their comment and burdened them with the responsibility of unsubscribing. Not a good way to keep your readers happy.
Wordpress Database Backup

For the love of God and all that is holy, backup your blog. Between server failures, malicious attacks, and user stupidity error, your site is in grave danger of becoming FUBAR.

This plugin gives you the option of manually backing up your blog as well as setting daily/weekly/etc automatic backups which you can have e-mailed to you. If you opt for e-mails, you don’t have to keep more than the last few copies. Just backup. You’ll regret it if you don’t, and peace of mind can’t be bought.

So there you have it. The plugins that I install on every blog I set up and the reasons why. If you’d like to download them all in one pack, click below (safe and free!). For more details, see the pack’s page.

and download CForms Contact Form here because it didn’t fit.

Do you know other plugins that you think are critical to Wordpress blogs? I invite you to share which and why in the comments.