WordPress Plugins Meme, and Contest « planetOzh

There is an ongoing contest held by Weblog Tools Collection : rewarded with real prizes, it is about creating new WordPress Plugins. Sadly and surprisingly enough, although the WP community is very prolific and creates new plugins almost every day, this contest doesn't seem to be given a lot of interest. Free time permitting, I'll try to toss one or two plugins in this contest (I have dozens of plugin ideas or even plugins in pre-alpha states, and a proportionnal lack of spare time :)

In order to give this contest the exposure it deserves, Mark started a WordPress Plugin meme (meme : self-propagating unit of cultural evolution (read more at Wikipedia))

I think it is a good idea to share with others the appreciation you may have for plugins you like (even when some of the plugins I'm using were actually written by me), so here is my contribution to the meme : What plugins do you use on your blog and how do you rate them?

Plugins I'm using

BA Stats by Owen Winkler
What : This plugin enables a stats page in your dashboard, with complete information about referrers, pages hit, OS and client, IP, etc…
Rate : 8/10. The page itself is very well done, data are sortable, this is very neat. Too bad I never check the page as I don't really care about all these stats :)

Spaminator by Kitten
What : Spam prevention and blocking using tarpitting and strike counting. Comments are assigned strikes for spam content, and a comment that meets the criteria for spam is blocked from posting. Supposed to be deprecated and broken since WP 1.5, I'm still using it because… well, it still works damn fine. It killed about 6000 spam here in about 6 months, as far as I can tell there had been only a few false positive on my post about Online Poker Spam, which was more than predictable :)
I really have to investigate what is supposed not to work with 1.5 btw. Too bad this plugin is not maintained any more.
Rate : 10/10 !

Optimal Title by Aaron Schaefer
What : default behaviour of title in WordPress is "Your blog » this post title". I find it smarter, more readable, and more search engine friendly, to have a page title formatted the other way round : post title first, then name of your blog.
Rate : well, 10/10. Simple stuff, does little, but does it well.

Preserve Code Formatting by Scott Reilly
What : something I dislike with WordPress is the way it converts dots, dashes, quotes and other stuffs into curly quotes, hyphens and other "pretty" things. What I like is, when I type something, that the output is what I type. This is particularly true when I post code : curly quotes for example don't make it in real code.
What this plugin does is keeping code enclosed within <pre> or <code> tags exactly as how you typed it. HTML tags are not interpreted, quotes are quotes, straight and simple.
Rate : 10/10.

Auto Moderate Comments by me
What : when there have been no activity on a post for, say, 10 days (ie the post itself is 10 days old, or there have been no comment on it), this plugin enables moderation on this post.
Instead of having your whole blog moderated, my plugin allows moderation on a per-post basis. This is relevant since, till today at least, every single spam comment posted on any blog targets only old posts. You don't need to moderate every post, just old ones.
Rate : well, 10/10, blame my lack of modesty. Again, does what it's supposed to do, comes with more configurable option than needed.

Click Counter Plugin by me
What : Adds a, guess what, click counter to links (external links by default, but you can track any, so it can be used as a download counter for example).
Rate : I'd give it a 7, from a coder's perspective : now that I'm a bit more experimented in PHP, I'm sure I could clean the code, and I could get rid of about half of the options I've included, to make a simpler plugin.

IP to Nation by me
What : converts an IP into the country it originates from.
Rate : 8 or 9 out of 10, it could be a bit more flexible and I could have added a few options in it, but overall, a simple plugin that works pretty well :)

A few might do's and don't

Something I've been meaning to do for long is completely get rid of the old Categories, and go with the wild Tag concept, like on del.icio.us.
I've seen but not tested a few plugins on this matter. I know exactly what I want, and I want something that I could drop any time to revert back to a normal Category use, so I may end up writing my own. So far, this one seems to be promising.

To conclude, I'll add that so far, there is one plugin I wish I had never tried it : Subscribe to comments. The purpose sounds cool : send an email to subscribers of a comments page whenever someone replies. But the plugin was, at this time at least, poorly implemented in WP and modified the comment table structure. And, according to me, modifying WordPress database default structure should be punished :)