My top 10 essential Wordpress Plug-ins

Here are my top 10 essential Wordpress Plug-ins as I use Wordpress a lot. 
I manage over 100 blogs using this great software but pretty much use similar plugins on each. 
There are many plugins that do the same thing and some times it is a process of trial and error, installing, activating and deactivating until you find one that is right for you.
So I thought I'd share my list to make it easier for everyone:

1.  Wordpress Database Backup - Helps me sleep much easier at night.  Daily backups in my email what more can I say.

2. Platinum SEO Pack - Don't know what I'd do without this great plugin.  My blogs rank so much better with it running.  This plugin is highly customisable and a must have.


3. Google XML Sitemaps - Like #1, this is very handy for getting better results in Google and does all the work for you

4. Share This - Great way to generate some word-of-mouth action

5.  Feedburner Feedsmith - Feedburner helps keep an eye on who is reading your RSS feeds.

6.  Ultimate Google Analytics - Avoids your Analytics codes getting blasted away by updates and your stats stopping running

7.  Get Recent Comments - Indispensible little plugin helps other users to see which posts on your site people are talking about.

8.  Akismet - helps control that annoying comment spam.

9.  Geo Mashup Plugin - a fantastic little plugin that makes it very easy to generate Google Maps.  A little fiddly at first but once you get your head around it and get your API key it is very powerful.

10.  EasyTube or Smart Youtube - six one or half a dozen the other.  Basically easily embed YouTube into posts - only thing I hate about Wordpress is it makes it difficult to do this and Google Maps without plugins ...

Hope this helps !  Interested to hear if I've left some out that others find indispensable.

Cushy CMS vs Surreal CMS - which is the best Lightweight free CMS

I've used web content management systems for a while, but only began recently to use some lightweight web content management systems with some smaller websites - first Cushy CMS and now Surreal CMS.

A couple of free lightweight content management systems are out there that are application hosted and use FTP to hook into websites and CSS tags to define editable areas (in the case of Cushy it is class="cushycms" and in the case of Surreal it is class="editable"). They are offered free because their business model is aimed at web designers rather than end users.

One of the big limitations with these systems is that they are only really good for existing webpages, not for creating new ones. There is also the issue of FTP security when someone else is hosting your access logins.

But once you overlook these, the systems are neat, quick and (mostly) very easy for end users to pick up.

Cushy had some great design ideas, but a newcomer, Surreal gives it a real run for its money.

There are two reasons why I have switched from Cushy to Surreal:

1. A frustrating bug in Cushy resulting from when I moved my site from a staging server to a new server, I could no longer edit the pages, even if I re-added them. Resulting in me having to create a new account

2. Surreal CMS is now set up to accept Cushy's tag class="cushycms" making it easier to migrate from Cushy

3. Surreal editor is hosted off a separate purpose built domain - edit-content.com. I've found downtime on Cushy which makes Surreal more suitable for higher demand websites

While it is clear that Surreal capitalises on Cushy's mistakes to gain marketshare and I found Surreal as easy to setup as Cushy, there are However a couple of the setup things weren't quite as easy as they could be. The interface and tabs for editing different fields initially confused me and tripped me up and they quite aren't as easy as Cushy. The rich text area is also a little trickier to use, and a little difficult to find the View HTML Source option initially.

However despite these things I'm quite happy to now use Surreal.