WordPress Plugins

Some WordPress plugins I’ve used and what I think of them.

Writing, Editing and Admin

Classic Editor

★★★★★ One of my must-have plugins. I know the block editor is a major effort, but I still find it gets in my way more than it helps. For me, enabling the Classic Editor is a necessity.

WordPress Importer

★★★★☆ Good for the main use cases: restore from backup, and moving posts between blogs. Unfortunately the image import doesn’t seem to work (WordPress 6.3 with plugin 0.8.1), which makes it a pain to clean up image-heavy posts.

One thing I’d like to do with this that I can’t is to import another copy of a cross-post and merge the comment threads. As it is, the best I can do is import the duplicate copy and then use another plugin (or dig into the database) to move the comments around.

Behind the Scenes

ActivityPub ★★★★★

Smart Hashtags

★★★★★ Simple and useful: it just converts #hashtags to post tags. This works great on several of my sites.

(Discontinued but still available.)

WP Super Cache

★★★★★ Major speedup for the typical use case. I’ve been using this caching plugin since before Automattic took over management. Since I don’t get very much in the way of comments on my site, the vast majority of hits are anonymous and don’t change what should be on the page next time, so a static cache helps a lot.