My New Favorite WordPress Plugin

At NothernVoice last month, Mark Lise and I led an unconference session on “PowerBlogging“, which was intended to be an open discussion of everyone’s favorite tips and tricks. While I think we fell a little short on actionable content, everyone in the room got a great feeling about the level of expertise available to them (surprisingly HIGH) in the Canadian Blogging community. Here were some of the big surprises:

• In a room of around 50 people, more than 3 had written their own plugins
• More than 5 were pro-bloggers
• Over half had customized their themes
• More than 10 wrote their OWN themes from scratch
• NO one agreed on the most important WordPress Plugin

This last one surprised me – I had expected a quick concensus on, perhaps the Ultimate SEO plugin, or maybe one of the social bookmarking ones. In fact, people didn’t even agree on the best stats tracking service. Obviously included:

• Google Analytics
• WordPress Stats
• Performancing
• Feedburner
• MyBlogLog (not exactly pure stats)

After the conference, I started working on distilling my many, varied experiences into a few coherent blog posts. Following my (long-ago) background in journalism, I looked around for a quick outside edit before I posted anything – and discovered, to my dismay, that you can’t share draft posts. What?

What followed was a quick IM exchange with Lloyd Budd, the rockstar “Community Guy” at Automattic, and an old friend of mine from the Netscape 8 days. He quickly confirmed that draft posts can’t be shared, and suggested I simply email the content of the post to a few friends. Arg.

All of which serves as preamble for yesterday’s message from Lloyd:

10:04:27 PM Lloyd Budd: I remember you looking for a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shareadraft/ recently
10:06:07 PM JustJosh: AWESOME
10:06:11 PM JustJosh: perfect, thank you very much
10:06:22 PM Lloyd Budd: my pleasure

This is now my new favorite plugin. It simply lets you share (for a defined period of time, like 2 hours) the draft view of a new post with, well, anyone.

In the spirit of our NorthernVoice talk, what’s YOUR favorite WordPress plugin – and why?