The Jetpack Plugins for WordPress

The other day John spoke about how much he loved the WordPress.com Stats. This great plugin was developed together by WordPress owners Automattic and developers Andy Skelton and mdawaffe.

Earlier this year in March the original WordPress.com Stats plugin developers teamed up with Andy Peatling, Beau Lebens, Hugo Baeta and Joen to release it’s natural successor Jetpack. Jetpack is not a plugin that just tracks stats, it is a collection of 8 different plugins though has been setup so that more can be added in future updates.

Each plugin can be activated or deactivated from the main Jetpack page in your admin area.

My two favourite plugins are WordPress.com stats and ShareDaddy. The stats option works the same way as the dedicated plugin John spoke about the other day, though the graph is presented slightly differently.

ShareDaddy is another plugin that has been incorporated under the Jetpack umbrella. The plugin allows you to easily add social media voting services to the bottom of your blog posts and pages. I love the simplicity of it and it’s clean design. My only criticism is that they have not included Google +1 with the plugin yet, though I emailed them a few weeks ago and they are taking it on board for the next update.

The 6 remains plugins in Jetpack are:

  • Twitter Widget – A simple Twitter widget that displays your latest tweets.
  • Gravatar Hovercards – Shows a pop up of a commenters Gravatar information when you hover over their name (The person needs to have a hovercard setup for pop up to appear).
  • WP.me Shortlinks – Allows you to use WP.me shortlinks within your posts and pages.
  • LaTeX – A markup language for mathematical equations.
  • After the Deadline – Allows you to check your spelling and grammar within your post editor.
  • Shortcode Embeds – Embed media from websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Flikr using shortcodes.

Jetpack is one of the most useful free plugins available for WordPress. Even if you only plan on using WordPress.com Stats or ShareDaddy, I believe it’s worth installing as some of the other features such as shortcodes and Gravatar hovercards are incredibly useful.

More information can be found at the links below 🙂

Good luck,
Kevin

Links: Official Jetpack Website | Jetpack by WordPress.com (Download Link)

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.