I run and manage a handful of WordPress blogs that use a ton of different plugins. Of all those plugins, the one that is consistently used on all of the blogs is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold.

This plugin automatically generates a valid XML sitemap of your blog every time you add or edit a post or page. The advantage to having a current sitemap is that search engines like Google and Yahoo have a much easier time crawling and then indexing your site. The faster and easier it is for search engine to do their jobs the faster and easier it will be for your blog to start appearing on search engine results.

This plugin is a no-brainer for me and is usually the first one I install and configure when I’m starting a new blog. There are other Sitemap plugins available out there but in my experience this one is the best.

Hat tip to Daniel Jalkut and his Red Sweater Software blog post about the decision to disable the Atom Publishing and XML-RPC Protocols by default in the upcoming 2.6 release of WordPress.

This is a pretty interesting decision by the core development team that’s done under the premise of greater security. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would argue that WordPress could do with less security but there’s also an interesting twist to this development. For software creators like Daniel, and customers of his remote blogging client MarsEdit, one more hurdle has been put in their way to using WordPress the way they want to. I’m sure it will be trivial to turn off the setting and use remote clients as normal but this is still a bump in the road for users.

Another take on this is that WordPress, now featuring a fresh new admin design with the 2.5 release, is trying to shut the door on third-party posting interfaces to draw more attention and use to the new look. I don’t wear a tinfoil hat or anything but you have to admit it’s interesting to think about.

I recently decided to use WordPress for a client’s site. The intention was to have a content management system running from day one to allow the client to enter in site content while I fleshed out the site’s look and converted it into a workable WordPress theme.

My biggest concern with this project was that as sleek as the new 2.5 admin is there are still some slight hiccups for less computer savvy individuals. I really wanted to find a way to trim down the options available to my client when they were logged into their WordPress account.

Luckily I found the Role Manager plugin which did exactly what I was looking for. With Role Manager I can define exactly what different levels of accounts can and can not do when they are logged in to the WordPress admin.

So I took my client’s account and made him an “Editor” with the capability to only manage the individual Pages of the site. This stops him from accidentally changing any of the other parts of the site like the theme or any of the other plugins we’ll be using. It’s the perfect solution to my problem because it hides the other parts of the admin that he can’t access as an Editor.

With all of the downtime issues the popular service Twitter has been suffering from in recent months it might be time to look again at Prologue.

For those of you who may not remember, Prologue is a free theme the folks over at Automattic released back in January of this year. It is, essentially, a simple self hosted Twitter clone using WordPress as the back-end and a highly customized theme for the front-end.

Any companies using Twitter as a means of social instant messaging might want to look into using Prologue instead. Twitter has been experiencing such awful server issues that it is no longer a reliable service at all.

I had asked about a month ago where the ecommerce solutions for WordPress were.

Tonight while I was browsing around I came across Ecommerce Themes by the fine folks at iThemes. There’s a cool video explaining the features of the theme.

This theme falls under the category of “premium” which means it costs a nominal fee to use (in this case, that means $49). For someone looking to launch an online store selling their own products or other people’s products through affiliate links this theme might be the solution for you.

I’d like to see someone release something similar for free to help broaden this market a bit. Or, maybe, have iThemes lower the developer license cost to get more web developers out there using their theme.