A good friend of mine, Coen Jacobs, just released a new plugin called Comic Sans FTW. YES! Comic Sans FTW. When I first saw his tweet I thought I would get Rick Roll’d. But sadly he actually build the damn plugin and released it.

What it does is it simply turns your WP admin in to “Instant Comic Sans awesomeness”. It changes all the fonts in the back-end to Comic Sans. Of course I installed it on my WordPress installation and I love the Hello Dolly lyrics in Comic Sans. I was just kidding.

According to Coen, Comic Sans is going to take over the world, one WordPress installation at a time and the next big feature will be Comic Sans on the front-end. Total Comic Sans Awesomeness!

I would like to share with you a plugin I just started to use this weekend. It’s called After the Deadline and it is built by the guys of Automattic. You know, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org and many more great things.

After the Deadline is a plugin that really nifty checks your spelling, style and grammar. It’s only for English so not really useful for my Dutch blogs but for this blog it’s really handy. My English writing is not yet on a level that I would like to be. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog in English. This plugin really helps me find mistakes and corrects them. So if you have an English WordPress blog, you should really try this plugin and let it check your writings.

Installation

Go to Plugins -> Add New and search for ‘After the Deadline’. Click on Install Now and wait a few seconds. Then you can activate the plugin and you’re ready to go!

Update – 26 may

I just read on WPMU.org that there is now also a After the Deadline for BuddyPress. It will add all the functions of the WordPress version to the BuddyPress Groups, Forums, Activity Stream, Profiles, Messages and Blog Comments.

WordPress 3.1 is about to release and one of the biggest changes is the Admin bar. WordPress.com already has a admin bar. If you would like to disable it, you can use a plugin, or add some code to the functions.php. If you would like to disalbe the Admin bar for yourself. Go to Users -> Your Profile. There you can click on the checkbox if you would like to disable the Admin bar in the dashboard and on your website.

Joost de Valk wrote some more about how to disable the WordPress Admin bar by add some code to the functions.php of your theme.

Of course there are already a lot of plugins that can also disable the Admin bar. I really like the plugin called: Admin Bar Minimiser. It doesn’t disable the Admin bar. It just adds a little option to minimise the Admin bar. It’s a simple solution, and I like it.

To check out the WordPress Admin bar, you must run the latest beta version. It not recommend to do if you are not an advanced WordPress user.

I want to share with you some of my favorite WordPress plugins that I use regularly on WordPress blogs. There are more plugins that I use often but these 8 plugins are the standard ones. I use them on all my WordPress blogs or websites.

• Akismet – The best plugin to keep out all that nasty spam on your blog. Its standard in the WordPress installation so you don’t have to download it. You only have to sign up at Akismet.com to get de API key.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – I’m a bit of an analytics geek. I just love all the stats. This plugin, by Joost de Valk, is I think the best plugin to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site. You should see the video to check out all the features in this plugin.
• Gravity Forms – The only premium plugin in this list. But is worth the money. It’s a great plugin to make contact forms. But it’s also very easy to make big advanced forms.
• Redirection – A great plugin to track 404′s and to make 301 redirections. You don’t want your visitors to get a 404 on a page, do you? This plugin will find those 404′s and then you can redirect the visitors to the correct page. There is just one thing that I don’t like about this plugin and that is the User Interface. I always have to search. I hope that will improve soon.
• WP-DBManager – A nice plugin to maintain the database with all the data on it of your blog. You can schedule back-up’s or do it manual. There is an option to optimize the database. So it stays clean.
• WordPress SEO – If you’re already a bit in to WordPress and SEO then you already know All in one SEO. This plugin is really All in one. The feature list is just to long to post it here. One thing I really like is the Google search result snippet previews. It really helps you make a meta description and a good SEO title. Just delete All in one SEO and al the other SEO plugins you’re using right now and start using this one.
• W3 Total Cache – Nobody likes to visit a slow site. W3 Total Cache will help you with speeding up your site. A great plugin with too much options. Just start with the standard options and measure the difference with Pingdom.

Last but not least. My number one favorite plugin is Hello Dolly. It’s the plugin that makes WordPress so awesome! Did you know that Louis Armstrong made a song about the plugin?