11 WordPress Plugins You Must Have is ProMovieBlogger’s introduction to all LAMBs. Many of you, WordPress users, Blogger, Tumblr, et cetera did not know there was a website on the Internet that exclusively serves movie webmasters and their collective interests. There is. That site is ProMovieBlogger.com. I have been asked to share my insights in the movie website game with you and I am more than happy to do so as I have been a member of LAMB in some capacity or another for years. I have also been writing about films and and the film industry for years as while on various movie websites and a movie website of my own.
To start things off on the right foot, below you will find eleven WordPress plugins that I have used/or currently use, plugins that you will find very useless if you are using a WordPress-based movie website.
Official Shpiel: The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
My Take: I was using the WP Super Cache plugin but when I started using this plugin, my sites noticeably sped up and loaded faster. Be sure to use Google’s Page Speed add-on for Mozilla Firefox to find out what CSS and JavaScripts to add into the plugin to condense them into one file so that your site loading is even faster.
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Official Shpiel: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines.
My Take: You see at the top of the home page of ProMovieBlogger where it says “How to Create and Start a Movie Website, How to Write a Movie Review – ProMovieBlogger”. This plugin allows you to create and manipulate that message with ease. That message is important because you can load it with keywords. Search for ProMovieBlogger on Google. What tagline do you see for it in the results?
Final words on both: All in One SEO is plugin and play, W3 Total Cache Plugin is better (in my experience with it. I have used both) and basically plug and play, but it comes with many more options and if you configure it, tweak it, it will work that much better. It also comes with many more headaches.
Official Shpiel: Add meta robots tags to WordPress pages.
My Take: By using this plugin, you can tell search engines what to spider on your website and what not to. The best part is that it allows you to setup your own Robot.txt file with whatever Allows and Disallows you want. A good tutorial on the program can be found here.
Official Shpiel: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
My Take: Less spam on your website. Nuff said.
Official Shpiel: Automatically redirect your feed into FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
My Take: It collects all your feeds and automatically redirects so that you do not even have to think about it afterword. Every RSS access point you have is redirected to the same place.
Official Shpiel: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
My Take: This plugin helps your movie website get indexed by search engines.
Official Shpiel: This plugin disables intra-blog pinging.
My Take: When you are linking in your posts to another post on your site, this plugin stops WordPress from pinging and displaying the linking post in your comments.
Official Shpiel: Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first.
My Take: It makes your post titles look more professional, e.g. How to Start a Movie Website | ProMovieBlogger.
Official Shpiel: Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page.
My Take: I use this more than Google Analytics to track website traffic and what search engine terms are bringing people to my websites. Actionable info on one page.
Official Shpiel: The WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate related posts via your WordPress tags and add the related posts to the bottom of your posts.
My Take: A must for showing other posts at the bottom of an article you have written. Another option is the LinkWithin script for your single post php file.
Official Shpiel: All-in-One social vote buttons – Digg, Reddit, dDone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme(twitter), facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Post comments, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, WebBlend and BlogEngage.
My Take: A very good plugin for adding social buttons anywhere in your post or having them float along side it as you scroll down. Adjustable button sizes as well. It is not compatible with the mobile version of your website though.
For example, type in a search term like “SEO” and you will find helpful articles on search engine optimization. If you do not find the answer you seek there, you can always email us here: promovieblogger {AT} promovieblogger [{DOT}] com.
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Great iniative! If anyone have own favorite plugins please plug (haahahah) them in the comments.
Rob: Maybe thats a sign that you should change your theme. Sounds like its quite limited.
I’m curious as to the origin of (and a little creeped out by) this post. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about seeing this here, with no introduction, bothers me. It seems to me to be a great deal more commercial than useful. I visited this site, and while there is no link to the Lamb anywhere to be found on the homepage, in the “Movie-Centric Sites” list on the right sidebar there are three links: one for one of those illegal watch free movies online sites, one for the guy’s own film blog, and a third for an online casino.
Mark – I can assure you there’s nothing shady going on here. The “guy’s own film blog” (Film-Book.com) is a long, long time LAMB (#50) and he started ProMovieBlogger some years back as well. There’s a link to the LAMB on the “Networks” page.
I can kind of see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think the lack of a “Hey, Reginald from ProMovieBlogger here…” makes the information any less useful.
Annoyingly none of those are available options with my current theme. They are all so useful too.
Thanks Dylan.
Dylan, no need to step in for me (thank you for coming to my defense though. It is appreciated.).
@ Professor Mark
I do not wish for this to turn into a confrontation. As Dylan said, I have been a member of LAMB for a long time (#50, #467). I’ve promoted LAMB on my site: (http://promovieblogger.com/promovieblogger-is-now-a-lamb/) The fact that you did not know any of this is on you.
Regarding my LAMB badges, they can be found here: http://film-book.com/networks/ and here: http://promovieblogger.com/networks/. I have no reason to justify myself to you or dignify your badge query with an answer but there it is. Is it your second occupation to comment on the placement of LAMB badges on sites you do not own?
Is it your third occupation to comment on the links on a site you do not own? What does my sidebar or its contents have to do with you, WhereDangerLives or Cin-Eater?
Why are you “creeped out” by this post? I introduced myself at the beginning of it. In addition, I was already introduced to LAMB through my two sites when they became LAMBs.
If I were you, I would spend my time doing what any good webmaster should be doing: generating content for your site(s).
@Rob You can not use any of them with your current WordPress theme? Even the cache plugins?
To me it sounds like Rob is using wordpress.com my short stint with that platform gave me the notion that that it really cant handle very many plugins.
Hmmmm. I guess I forgot I don’t live in a free country anymore. I was under the impression that it didn’t need to be a person’s “occupation” in order for them to question something at a website they happen to be a long time and active member of.
If you aren’t interested in turning this into a confrontation, and you don’t feel the need to justify yourself (I certainly agree that you don’t), I’m nonetheless surprised at the length and especially the defensiveness of your response, particularly when my comment wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. If you took it that way, so be it, but I was satisfied with Dylan’s comment — that’s why I responded with a thanks to him.
Yet, since you’ve chosen to respond by asking me why I would concern myself with the links posted on your site, here’s why: As a Lamb member yourself, instead of promoting the organization on your home page, you promote an illegal film download site. With that in mind, I’m actually glad not to see a Lamb badge underneath your “watch movies online” link. Many of us have friends and colleagues in the motion picture business, and I don’t think it reflects well on any of us when a Lamb uses their site to promote such activity. If it were up to me, and it certainly isn’t, I’d make it a condition of membership around here that member sites don’t link to or promote piracy sites. But that’s just me.
So does it bother me that I may have pushed a button or offended you by bringing this up? Not one bit.