WordPress Launches New Plugin Directory

WordPress Plugin Directory

Last week WordPress launched a new Plugin Directory. Plugins are one of the best features of WordPress, allowing you to extend the functionality of your blog in countless ways. Previously these plugins, created by a worldwide community of open source developers, were scattered all over the place without a unifying interface, but now they can all be located in one central location.

Here are the top 5 plugins used on Laughing Squid:

1) Akismet – Absolutely essential. It kills comment spam dead.

2) Flickr Photo Album – Allows you to create a local photo gallery of your Flickr photos using the Flickr API and also it’s a great way to add photos from Flickr to your blog posts. Here’s my previous writeup on Flickr Photo Gallery plugin.

3) flickrRSS – Lets you to add your last batch of Flickr photos to your blog via RSS.

4) Google Sitemaps – A really simple way to create and submit your sitemap to Google.

5) wp-cache – Sets up caching for your blog using static files, which is a great way to improve the speed and performance of your blog, especially under high loads, like when one of your blog posts makes the front page of digg.

Scott Beale
Scott Beale

Scott Beale is the founder of Laughing Squid and is based in New York City. When not running the blog, Scott can be found posting on Threads and sharing photos on Instagram.