Core Wordpress Plugins in Use by allQoo.com

Posted on October 18, 2008

allQoo.com is built on Wordpress. In the past we have used seriously on other CMS (content-management-system) like PostNuke, Xoops and Drupals; as well as some ecommence oriented systems like osCommerce and Shopex. We have even spent over US$50k on custom-made content sites. Wordpress is by far the best on its simplicity in core and high expandibility with its thousands of plugins. No script is perfect but Wordpress gives least troubles from installation to customization. The best part of it, is it being an open source free script which anyone can use and modify at zero fee. You can download Wordpress latest vesion from here:

Wordpress the lastest version (70 hits)
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One of the troubles in using Wordpress (and other CMS as well) is to decide on which plugins to adopt for a particular site. To-date there are over 3,852 plugins. One will need to spend a week or two to only “read” though them learning what they are. Then another week or more to “test” on their functionality on a dozen or two of your picks.

This post lists our “core” plugins allQoo.com is using on our host of Wordpress sites we built and are maintaining for our customers. Hopefully it will save our readers time in selecting wp-plugin for their own site.

Contact Form 7 -We used to use cform by default for a contact us form on every site. But cform is a very sophisticated product and heavy when upgrading. It is a good plugin for sites needing mulitple complex form (like this request-for-quotation one for example). But for most other sites there need only one contact form. So this CF7 comes in handy.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Platinum SEO Pack – This is free and absolutely vital to your blogs life. As the name suggests, this plugin optimizes your blog for the highest possible search engine placement. Way better than the All-In-One-SEO!

PingCrawl – Every time you make a post on your blog it grabs similar posts from other blogs that allow pingbacks using the post tags. It then links to them at the bottom of the post as similar posts. It then executes the pingback on all the posts.

Wordpress Plugin - PingCrawl (64 hits)
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The plugin required a call of php function file_get_contents to work with remote URIs. Some web hosting companies (mostly shared hosts) won’t allow such call for security reason. Whether you understand that php stuff or not, in case of error using PingCrawl, try switching to LinkCurl, it is a fork of PingCrawl using cURL to avoid the shared host limitation.

Wordpress Plugin - LinkCurl (456 hits)
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Don’t know why both authors are not listing their plugins on to the offiical Wordpress Plugin Directory.

Privacy Policy – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. This free plugin keeps you in good standing with Adsense, so they wont look for a reason to boot you. 99% of blogs/autoblogs, fail to add this simple yet vital plugin to their blogs, thereby disobeying Adsenses Terms of Service.

Ultimate Google Analytics - There are a few Google Analytics plugins. We tried another one and stopped at UGA because it is simple to configure and does the work as it should.

StatPress - A statcounter on steroids. We use it on every one of our Wordpress site. You have to know what is going on with your traffic in order to make it better. What pages are being viewed more, what pages never get views, etc..

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. It creates a google friendly sitemap for your blog in seconds. Huge time saver and Google will love you in return. This plugin can also make a robots file, if needed.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – Since version 2.7 Wordpress has a built-in automatic update function already.But this built-in feature does not work in every of our WP sites. It is signified by error of base directory not found or cannot write to directory. These errors are related to web host server setting and could be complicated to go into details.

So we are keeping this plugin in our core team because:

It works well on all our sites in different web hosting companies.
It makes by routine backup copies of your site files as well as the database. While the 2.7 built-in upgrade does not have this service and you will need to do the backup manually.

Non-Core Plugins

No two web sites have the same purpose and appearance. Read about our non-core WP plugin list we adopt on individual sites.

1 Response

92An Warez Forum
February 25th, 2009

Wordpress Plugins -PingCrawl & LinkCurl- Get backlinking relevantly and automatically…

Every time you make a post on your blog it grabs similar posts from other blogs that allow pingbacks using the post tags. It then links to them at the bottom of the post as similar posts. It then exec……