Graphically pleasing, Smart Archives Reloaded is especially useful for older blogs with lots of content.
Face it, your archives are a mess. No one wants to wade through pages of links. Smart Archives Reloaded is really quite smart and compact, arranging posts by year (top level) and month (lower level). To appreciate the plugin, one must see how it works (try my blog or see image below).
The plugin is flexible, providing different modes of display, and categories can be excluded. Overall, a better way to organize your archives.
A business card theme for WordPress. Free version has great features; premium version is a little better.
MiniCard is a business card theme for WordPress with a vCard/hCard link and connections to social sites. It’s also a complete WordPress theme with blogging capabilities. A portfolio feature is offered for displaying projects.
A premium version is offered with two additional features: an RSS feed and other theme designs. But at around $40, it’s expensive.
WordPress has an excellent reputation in the blogosphere. The script is current, well-maintained, and feature-packed. Plugin development is somewhat haphazard, though still resulting in some of the best script development anywhere. The idea behind so-called canonical plugins, developers say, is to improve the quality and implementation of popular functions:
Canonical plugins would be plugins that are community developed (multiple developers, not just one person) and address the most popular functionality requests with superlative execution. These plugins would be GPL and live in the WordPress.org repo, and would be developed in close connection with WordPress core. There would be a very strong relationship between core and these plugins that ensured that a) the plugin code would be secure and the best possible example of coding standards, and b) that new versions of WordPress would be tested against these plugins prior to release to ensure compatibility. — Canonical Plugins (Say What?)
One of the greatest difficulties in choosing plugins is knowing which will remain compatible with future versions of WordPress. Not upgrading is no longer a viable solution, so the implementation of “canonical plugins” would be a welcome change, and, as developers acknowledge, it has to be done “sooner rather than later.”
Allows administrators to ban users and bots, but bogs down on some networks
Lester Chan’s WP-Ban allows administrators to ban users by IP, IP range, host name or referrer url — it works. Some bloggers, however, report that sites slow to a crawl once this plugin is activated. Increased latency seems a problem on certain networks. This may be the fault of the network, not the plugin, but the end result is the same: users sometimes have difficultly accessing sites with WP-Ban enabled. Given the ample supply of plugins to protect against spam, WP-Ban may be superfluous.
Chan’s other plugins are generally recommended (see here).
A simple plugin that checks for viruses, and removes current “backdoor” permalink.
So you didn’t upgrade in time, how do you know your blog is not infected, save Google listing your site as “unsafe”? Try AntiVirus, which scans your active theme for viruses, i.e. malicious code, and removes the current “backdoor” permalink.
Click to view image:
Features:
Administrators can delete current “backdoor” permalink (I was unable to test this function)
Manual scans of theme
Whitelist for harmless code listed as “suspicious”
AntiVirus is not a security suite. It only checks the current template for suspicious code. Administrators will need to implement additional measures to secure their sites. For information, read Hardening WordPress, at WordPress.org.
