Choose The Plugins

At this point, it was time to move on to installing the features that were not native to my theme. I won’t bore you with the details of everything I looked at, but here’s what made my short list:

Akismet is a spam prevention plugin that’s installed by default when you install WordPress. I didn’t want to require people to register in order to comment — nor did I want to have to moderate what I hope will be lots of comments — so I configured my Akismet keys and left it enabled.

Twitter Blackbird Pie is a plugin that lets you embed nicely formatted interactive tweets like this.

I installed Category Icons because I thought it would allow me to selectively display a Twitter icon next to the titles of my imported tweets. It may be possible, but I was unable to get it to work the way I wanted it to. Since displaying titles for tweets is redundant, I decided that Blackbird Pie was a nicer solution and disabled Category Icons.

Among other things, Excerpt Editor is a plugin that lets you have a page that displays excerpts for each of its sub-pages. This plugin made it trivial to implement a menu item that would take my readers to a nicely formatted page of the articles I’ve written such as the one you’re reading now.