Web
Top 20 Wordpress Plugins for Power Users
Mar. 30th, 2007
1. Advanced WYSIWYG Editor - adds more editing options to the WYSIWYG post editor. See it below
2. Akismet - default wordpress plugin which does an excellent job at filtering spam comments. To activate it you’ll need WordPress API key, which is freely available to every wordpress.com user. Once activated you can access it through ‘Options ->Discussion’.
3. BDP RSS Aggregator (update: original site seems to be offline, for now you can download this plugin from here) - lets you grab one or several RSS feeds, mix/style them and publish them on your blog. It’s an ideal solution, for any blogger looking for an easy and yet powerful solution to embed RSS feeds on your blog posts or pages. Access it through ‘Manage-> RSS feeds’.
4. Bookmark Me - adds links to popular social bookmarking sites. Once installed, it will add ‘Bookmark Me’ tab under the ‘Options’ menu, from where you can select which sites you want to be shown. Includes almost all popular sites.
5. Category Tagging - powerful plugin that lets you (1) create tag clouds based on your existing categories and (2) display related posts for each of your posts.
6. Comment Count - can be used to count total number of comments or comments for a specific post. You can see it in action on top of every article on makeuseof
7. Optimal Title - lets you move the position of the title ’separator’ to after the blog name rather than before. Even though some folks have been saying that such naming is good from the SEO(Search Engine Optimization) point of view, I think it’s just a better way to title your posts. It will also produce better looking pingbacks when you link to external blog posts.
- before: MakeUseOf.com >> Gmail Craze: 30+ Tools and Hacks for Gmail
- after: Gmail Craze: 30+ Tools and Hacks for Gmail >> MakeUseOf.com
8. Exec-PHP - lets you execute PHP queries within any of your posts or pages
9. Google Sitemaps - handy generator that will create a Google, Yahoo and MSN compliant, auto-updated sitemap of your blog and place it to the indicated location on your server. Access it through ‘Options -> Sitemap’.
10. WP-Cache - very fast cache module, that can come in handy for sudden traffic spikes, i.e. when featured on digg’s homepage. Once installed and enabled(’Options -> WP-Cache -> enable’) it will considerably reduce the load from your server, helping you survive the digg effect. (Note: Make sure to disable it once traffic level gets back to normal)
11. WSR Contact Form - lets you quickly create ‘contact’ page for your blog. See it in action on our contact page
12. Smart Archives - provides simple and clean way to present your archives. Check it out here
13. WordPress Database Backup - On demand backup of your WordPress database. You can either run backups manually or schedule them (daily, weekly, etc.)
(click to enlarge and open it in a new window)
14. WordPress Reports - gets stats from Google Analytics and Feedburner and adds them to the new ‘Reports’ tab
(click to enlarge and open it in a new window)
15. Custom Query String (CQS) - allows you to choose how many posts to be shown and specify how they should be ordered, for any of the ’search queries’ and blog categories.(’Options->CQS’)
16. Feedburner Feed Replacement - automatically detects all ways to access your blog feed (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/ or http://www.yourdomai.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every subscriber
17. Digg This - this one is a popular one, it detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically displays animated digg-count button(or text link) showing number of diggs a story got. Cool thing about it, is that as soon as your post is submitted to Digg, an email is sent to the site’s admin.
18. WP-Postviews - allows you to display the number of times a post has been viewed. In addition, you can use it to display your top 10 most popular posts.
19. HowTo: Separate Comments from Trackbacks - this isn’t a plugin but a quick and easy howto explaining how to separate blog comments from Pings/Trackbacks.
20. 1024px-10 - many people expressed interest to the theme used on makeuseof.com, hence I decided to post it here as well. It’s a simple theme which is extremely flexible for further buildup. Note that what you see on makeuseof right now is a slightly modified version. I shifted the sidebar menu to the left, this can be done by modifying style.css file in 2 places.
10 Best Wordpress Plugins for Google Adsense
Google Adsense has become the most popular online contextual advertising program. Wordpress allows bloggers to easily integrate Google Adsense inside wordpress using plugins. Listed below are 10 best Adsense plugins which help you work smarter with wordpress.
- Adsense Deluxe - offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Adsense Deluxe+ claims to have a an improved ad limiting algorithm.
- Adsense Injection - inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog.
- Adsense Inline - inserts Google adsense in blog posts
- Adsense Beautifier - makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings.
- AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar - Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
- MightyAdsense - allows you to host the code in wordpress without having to modify the templates. Ads are displayed in post item and you can specify how many blocks its going to show up in a page.
- AdRotator Wordpress Plugin - rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
- Adsense Earnings Wordpress Plugin - displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
- WP-AdsenseProfit - shows your profit from the adsense program to the public by adding a simple call to the function in your template.
- AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System - allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
- Author Adsense Wordpress Plugin - allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author’s ads to admin ads.
December 10th, 2007
50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging
Looking for the most popular and best wordpress plugins used by professional bloggers? After problogging on WordPress for over 2 years, and after developing some wordpress plugins myself, I present you my top favorite 50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging.
50 Best WordPress Plugins and Widgets
The wordpress plugins are arranged broadly by category of usage. As far as I know, all these plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress version. Please feel free to suggest great plugins in comments that I can add to this list.
Manage WordPress Comments
- Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
- WP AJAX Edit Comments - Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post inline using AJAX.
- Get Recent Comments - displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.
- Close Old Posts - Closes comments on old posts without any DB queries.
- WP Grins - allows you to put clickable smilies on your post and comments forms.
- WordPress Paged Comments - allows comment paging. Useful for those very popular blog entries receiving many comments.
- Live Comment Preview - the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.
- Show Top Commentators - Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
- WordPress Gravatar Plugin - outputs the gravatar based on the commenters email address.
- MyAvatars - shows MyBlogLog’s avatars in your comments
- Comment Relish - Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
- Favatars - displays the favicon associated with the commenter’s website.
- Brian’s Threaded Comments - adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. Makes it easy for people to reply to comments and discuss better.
- Dofollow - lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments.
- OpenID Comments for Wordpress - allows users to leave comments using their OpenID.
- Extended Comment Options - allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
Stop WordPress Spam
- Akismet - intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
- Spam Karma 2 (SK2) - is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.
- Bad Behavior - is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
- Math comment spam protection - Adds a math question to comments form to detect human input and block automated spambots.
- WP-Contact Form with Spam Protection - creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you easily.
Expert WordPress SEO
- Google XML Sitemaps Generator - creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.
- Permalink Redirect - replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
- All in One SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
- Head META Description - Insert HTML META description tags using post excerpts.
- SEO Title Tag - Optimize your wordpress title tags for search engines. Mass edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages etc.
- Enforce www. Preference - will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
- Optimal Title - allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first.
- Quick META Keywords - will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post based on categories under which the article is categorized.
Easy WordPress Navigation
- Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
- WP-PageNavi - Adds a more advanced page navigation to Wordpress, which is very useful for navigation on index and category pages.
- Evermore - Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. Helpful to create expandable posts summaries in Wordpress. Combine with Less that changes the (more…) link so it displays the entire post, not just the part after the “more”.
- Random Redirect - Allows you to create a link to a random post on your blog. Lets readers browse in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
- Lightbox JS Plugin - used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
- WordPress Mobile Edition - shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
- Popularity Contest - keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
- Extended Live Archive - implements a dynamic, AJAXified way of digging into the archives of a blog.
- Landing Sites - When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
- Clean Archives - designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion. It lists the Month / Year, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article, and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
- Custom Query String - set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.
- Feed List - very useful for adding other RSS feeds to your site.
- Sidebar Widgets because it allows you to move things (widgets) around, in and out of your sidebar. Not required for WordPress 2.2 and above.
- KB Advanced RSS Widget - a wordpress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.
- Category Cloud Widget - Adds a sidebar widget to display the categories as a tag cloud.
- Adhesive - lets you make the posts “sticky”, such that the posts will remain at the top of the page.
Interactive WordPress Posts
- Share This - lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
- Digg this - detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.
- Delicious Cached++ - uses the built-in MagpieRSS engine functions to create a list of the latest bookmarks on a del.icio.us account, from its RSS feed, keeping the feed cached in the database.
- WP-Notable - displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.
- WP-Email - Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
- WP-PostRatings - Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
- EasyTube - allows you to easily embed YouTube and Google Videos using one simple tag.
- Twitter Updater - automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. More best Twitter plugins.
WordPress Admin Management Tools
- WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today.
- WP-cache - Very fast cache module. Survive a Digg traffic spike easily.
- WP-Supercache - A modification of WP-Cache that produces static html files.
- Batch Categories - Easily manage the mass categorization of posts that match various criteria. Power edit your categories.
- podPress - adds lots of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
- TinyMCE Advanced - adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, the WordPress wysiwyg editor. Adds over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
- Exec-PHP - allows php tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files.
- Wordpress Reporter - allows you to easily view your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports in your WordPress administration area.
- WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
- WP Tiger Administration - Uses power of CSS2 to manipulate the functionality of the WordPress administration area
- Admin Drop Down Menu - eliminates the need for this double clicking on the Admin screens by allowing you to see the second level menu just by placing your mouse over a main menu.
- InstantUpgrade - provides is a easy and safe way to upgrade your WordPress automatically with a single click.
Advertising on WordPress
- Ad Rotator - Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
- AdSense-Deluxe - is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. More Google Adsense WP plugins.
- Buy Me a Beer - allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal on pretext of buying a beer.
- Wordpress BankRoll - offers to help you cut out the middleman by allowing advertisers to buy reviews directly on your blog.
Wordpress Blog Translation
- Global Translator - Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
- Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro - provides automatic machine translation of your blog in 13+1 languages. Costs $30.
Enhance Wordpress RSS Feeds
- Feedburner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.
- Simple Feed Copyright - adds a simple copyright notice to full text wordpress feeds.
- Full Text Feed - Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed. Ensures you get full text feeds.
- Add Related Posts to Your Feed - adds a list of Related Posts to your full text feed. Requires either UTW or Related Posts plugin installed and activated.
- RSS Signature - allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds.
Random WordPress Stuff
- Democracy - adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
- flickrRSS - allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog.
If you liked this, you might like our wordpress articles, some more tool collections. I know there are many great wordpress plugins out there I might have missed, please suggest them in comments, and I might add them here. This post is constantly updated.