All-In-One: WordPress Plugins & Modifications

[admin]

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All-In-One Threads:

All-In-One threads is something I'm starting here where we as a group try to list damn near everything known about the subject of the thread. When you see an All-In-One thread feel free to speak up. It can be a 'secret', just a technique you happen to use or even something you haven't used, just heard about - whatever. Feel free to join in.

Please do not use the term All-In-One anywhere on this board. It will be saved for these threads specifically so at some point all one will have to do is search for the term "All-In-One" and all these threads will be easily found. At some point these will become some of the most sought after threads on the forum so it might be a good idea to participate if you have something to say people are going to really like.

If you have a great idea for an All-In-One thread please send me a PM and let me know about it.

To Find All All-In-One Threads Just Click Here: http://www.warriorforum.com/tags/allinone.html

Thank you..
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If you know about a WordPress plugin or Modification please list it here in this thread..

Thank you!

Allen

[qkz283]

I use...

WordPress › All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugins
WordPress › All in One Adsense and YPN WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Official StatCounter Plugin WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Easy Privacy Policy WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Akismet WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Register Plus WordPress Plugins
WordPress › WP Security Scan WordPress Plugins
WordPress › WP Super Cache WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Wordpress Automatic upgrade WordPress Plugins
WordPress › WP-DB-Backup WordPress Plugins
WordPress › Simple Link Cloaker WordPress Plugins
Duplicate Content Cure Plugin for Wordpress - SEOlogs.com
cforms II delicious:days

I also modify my htaccess for permalinks:
The htaccess Rules for all WordPress Permalinks ? Perishable Press

And I disable trackbacks and nofollow the comments.

For membership functionality, both Memberwing and WishList Member work well.

For an integrated forum, there is SimplePress and bbPress. If you want to transform Wordpress into a social network, try BuddyPress.

[mmurtha]

Originally Posted by Palitra

Did you try to contact the wordpress with this question? I think they might know and can help.

lol I think you might have misunderstood the concept of Allen's thread and comment.

This is an *-in-one thread specifically posted to let people know about these types of threads and what they are for. This one in particular was posted so people can add any wordpress plugin they know about here in this one spot.

Here is the URL for WP Popular Posts: http://bloggingdiary.com/wordpress-popular-posts It's a sidebar widget.

StatPress Reload - Shows real time stats about your blog: http://blog.matrixagents.org/wp-plugins

WP Captcha-Free: http://wordpresssupplies.com/wordpre...s/captcha-free

[SusanneUK]

I must say Allen, flippin brilliant idea!

Anywho.. a few of my "must have" plugins for most of my Wordpress installs are (also some of the plugins mentioned by "qkz283" above:

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer - stops your wordpress site from over pinging. Wordpress Default is to ping on new post or page AND when you edit a new post or page, not good if you edit a lot of past posts or pages so this plugin will only Ping on a new post or page.

Reveal IDs for Wordpress Admin - If you are correctly using your permalinks, which you should, this plugin reveals the actual ID number of any post, page, image or category. Knowing this is often needed for other plugins, such as "Featured Content Gallery" where you need to state the IDs of whichever post or page you want displayed in the Gallery.

"Featured Content Gallery" This plugin creates an automated, fully customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your images and display categories, pages or posts with custom overlay text and a thumbnail carousel. This one makes any wordpress site look really yummy and professional!

"Pretty Links" - I love this one and especially useful for all you Affiliate Marketers out there, "Pretty Links" - input your Affiliate ID link, give it a better name, e.g. www.yourdomain.com/product-title - you can also track the results of all your links from the wordpress dashboard. There is a pro version of this plugin as well as the free.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - extremely easy to follow to automatically upgrade your wordpress site, this plugin does a back-up (which you should always do before upgrading) which you can download as you go through the process.

That's all I have time for right now, have to go do school run but I may be back later in the thread.

Cheers
Sue

[distinctly_digital]

This is a great idea, will save me so much searching time.

Quick question, I use the WP Backup plugin for my Wordpress site. Does this back up everything I need? i.e. If I lost everything but the back up file it sends to me, would I be able to republish the site easily?

Cheers

[John Taylor]

On a new Wordpress install and after upgrading to
the latest version of Wordpress you MUST check
your "Privacy" settings.

The latest version is set as no index/no follow by
default and that's not good!

John

[drmani]

For any "serious" content WordPress blog that I create, these are the plug ins I will ALWAYS use:

All in * SEO plug in:
WordPress › All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugins

Feedburner plug in:
WordPress › FD Feedburner Plugin WordPress Plugins

Google Analytics for Wordpress plug in:
WordPress › Google Analytics for WordPress WordPress Plugins

Google Sitemap Generator plug in:
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

Redirection plug in:
WordPress › Redirection WordPress Plugins

Subscribe to Comments plug in:
WordPress › Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugins

What Would Seth Godin Do plug in:
WordPress › What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress Plugins

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plug in:
WordPress › Wordpress Automatic upgrade WordPress Plugins

WP DB backup plug in:
WordPress › WP-DB-Backup WordPress Plugins

WP Security Scan plug in:
WordPress › WP Security Scan WordPress Plugins

WP Super Cache plug in:
WordPress › WP Super Cache WordPress Plugins

WP Short Stat plug in:
wp-shortstat ? WordPress Plugin Repository

Akismet plug in:
Stop Comment Spam and Trackback Spam Akismet

DiggThis plug in:
Digg This - Wordpress Plugin Aviran’s Place - The Technology Hangout

Odiogo Listen Button plug in: (to have your blog post in audio form)
http://www.odiogo.com/download/wordp...ton_latest.php

All success
Dr.Mani

[Amanda Russell]

Simple forum install for Wordpressfrom Simple Press:

Simple:Press Forum

[TiffanyDow]

Hi Allen!

Since so many newbies come here to learn, I thought I would add this:

What Is a WordPress Plugin?

A WordPress plugin is a type of widget that allows your blog to do something more than the basics. For example, you can add a Twitter Widget plugin that displays your tweets on the sidebar of your blog.

You can find and download tons of free plugins for your WordPress blog, or even have someone write the code for something you yourself have an idea for!

Some of the most popular WordPress plugins are these:

1.) Sitemap plugins create a Google sitemap for your blog.

2.) Contact form plugins allow your readers to communicate with you.

3.) SEO plugins help optimize your blog for search engines

4.) Akismet plugins prevents spam comments from posting to your blog

5.) Share This plugins help your readers automatically bookmark, email, or share your blog post with others on the ‘net

6.) AdSense plugins manage the AdSense blocks on your blog

7.) Poll plugins let you survey your readers about issues relevant to the blog’s topic

8.) Translation plugins help readers in other countries digest your blog posts in their language

9.) Security plugins help keep your blog safe from vulnerabilities

10.) Blog Post Popularity plugins tell you which blog posts were popular and which were duds.

Warning: Not all WordPress plugins are what they appear. Some people create a code and launch it on a free site, allowing millions of people to download and use it. Then, after awhile, it adds a link back to their site on your blogroll. So you might have a link to an unsavory domain being promoted on your blog without your permission! Always review a plugin before using it to see if others are having any bad reaction to it.

Tiff

[qkz283]

Originally Posted by distinctly_digital

This is a great idea, will save me so much searching time.

Quick question, I use the WP Backup plugin for my Wordpress site. Does this back up everything I need? i.e. If I lost everything but the back up file it sends to me, would I be able to republish the site easily?

Cheers

By default, it backs up all of the Wordpress core files. So this would include the posts, pages, users, etc.

You can manually select more tables to backup, like the plugins.

FAQ Page: WordPress › WP-DB-Backup WordPress Plugins

[GarrieWilson]

http://planetozh.com/blog/my-project...drop-down-css/ One of my favorite plugins.

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When the tinymce editor wont load/let you type...

I installed a blog and the editor wouldnt fully load and always displayed an error (in ie7) and it turns out that the error was because I set my blog URL in settings to not have a www (eg domain.com but I was visiting the site with the www. (eg www.domain.com).

Once I added the www in settings, it started working.

Garrie

[Mohsin Rasool]

Wordpress Used as CMS
When we use Wordpress CMS, we post most of the permanent content at PAGES
instead of POSTS.... but there is a problem... Wordpress by default does not create
RSS Feeds for the content on Pages...

Solution:
Install this plugin and you are done:
WordPress › RSS Includes Pages WordPress Plugins

Best Regards,
Mohsin Rasool

[Val.S.]

I like WP-Print by Lester Chan. It's great for giving pages and post a printer friendly option.

PHP Programming Portfolio | lesterchan.net (This link takes you to the WP-Print Plugin Page)

Lester also has some other neat plugins:

PHP Programming Portfolio | lesterchan.net (This link takes you to his main plugin page.)

Another plugin I just used today was the Exclude Pages by Simon Wheatley.

It's handy to be able to write a page and not have it automatically appear in the navigation menu.

WordPress › Exclude Pages WordPress Plugins

Another plugin that I really like for a simple and very easy-to-install contact form that configures nicely with other text and graphics is Clean-Contact, "a no hassle contact form plugin for Wordpress, with advanced Spam protection that doesn't require Captcha."

WordPress › Clean-Contact WordPress Plugins

[TrafficGuy Claude]

I vote for a sticky! This is awesome, great idea admin

Here's my contribution:

How To Turn Wordpress Into The Ultimate ListBuilding Machine!

These plugins while awesome on their own, will turn your Wordpress blog into an incredible list building machine if used all together!

And some of my tests have shown that this method brings in more subscribers than a normal squeeze page!

These plugins work best when used in synergy, and you'll see why later...

Plugin #1) What Would Seth Godin Do?

This plugin asks the simple question - What would the man who created Squidoo.com do if he had a Wordpress blog?

This plugin allows you to show a block of text to new users, and returning visitors for a predetermined length of time. Make sure to have this one show before the post. More on this later...

Download: http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-...-seth-godin-do

Plugin #2) Comment Approved Notifier

This plugin will send an email to your visitor once their comment has been approved by you, you can also edit the email copy to invite them back to the blog as well.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...oved-notifier/

Plugin #3) Comment Prompt

This plugin prompts the user to leave a comment on the blog with a text box displayed in the post. Make sure you display this one after the post. More on that later!

Download: http://www.timnash.co.uk/comment-prompt/

Plugin #4) Subscribe To Comments

This plugin allows your users to subscribe to the comments of a certain post. Your wordpress installation will automatically eMail them if someone comments on the post they are subscribed to.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...e-to-comments/

Plugin #5) Thank Me Later

This plugin will send an email thanking your users for leaving a comment on your blog.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/thank-me-later/

Plugin #6) WpAweber

This plugin will automatically subscribe anyone who registers to your blog or anyone who leaves a comment to your Aweber list. This also works with AWeber whitelabel companies like ProFollow.com.

Download: http://www.superpowermarketers.com/wpaweber.zip

Plugin #7) Intense Debate

This plug-in will transform your comments section into a mini-forum complete with avatars. It encourages active commenting from your users.

Download: http://intensedebate.com/wordpress

Plugin #8) Ultimate Footer Ad - NOT FREE!

You don't need this one, but it can increase your opt-in rate a lot. It places an editable opt-in form at your footer

Download: http://www.ultimatefooterad.com/

=================
How And Why This Works
=====================

When a new user visits your site they will see a block of text provided by your What Would Seth Godin plugin at the top of the post. It would welcome them to the website and ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, email list, etc.

Then they would read through your first post and then they would see a block of text provided by the Comment Prompt plugin at the bottom of the post, and it would ask them to comment. The beauty of this is that it will appear right above the comments hyperlink to your posts. If they then leave a comment on your post they will automatically be added to your list via the WPAweber plugin.

Then your blog would send them an email thanking them for the comment and telling them that it will be approved shortly due to the Thank Me Later plugin. I'd suggest delaying this email by about 5 hours from the comment so it looks like you sent it personally. This will keep your site fresh in their mind.

After their comment is approved, the Comment Approved Notifier plugin will send them an email inviting them back to view their comment.

If they click on that link from their email they will be taken to the comment area which is like a mini-forum because of Intense Debate plugin and they will be inclined to start participating in the conversation about your post, and the Subscribe To Comments plugin will look attractive to them because they'll want to stay on top of any new rebuttals or responses to their comments. Remember, people value their opinions really highly and you can use this to your advantage.

If they come to your blog and don't leave a comment or opt-in from your post, hopefully your Ultimate Footer Ad will catch them, and if not you can set your Seth Godin plugin to remind them to join subscribe to your list via a sidebar opt-in form or via your ultimate footer ad on subsequent visits.

I've installed this setup on several of my blogs and I've noticed a sharp increase in the number of opt-ins, and my list responsiveness has skyrocketed. On one of my sites, out of every 1,000 unique visitors I'm getting on average about 280 new opt-ins to my list which is a 28% conversion rate, and is higher converting to cold traffic than some of my purpose built squeeze pages, and this blog is VERY active with comments.

This system is a vicious cycle because the more comments you have on your posts the more people will be inclined to leave their own comments, and then they will leave their comments, and new people will be more inclined to leave their own comments, and so on and so forth. Your list will grow and grow and grow!

This suite of plugins keeps your prospects engaged with you and your blog, and we know that the more people know, like, and trust you, the more receptive they will be to your marketing messages.

This setup works best on blogs which you constantly update with fresh content, and it also helps if you respond to your users comments with your own comments, so they can see you as a person and not a faceless webmaster.

This suite of plugins will keep users coming back time and time and an increase their exposure length to your advertisements on your website which could equal a higher click through rate on some of your ads, and it will increase their trust in you as a person which can be quite good for you as a webmaster/internet marketer.

Finally your open rate on your email blasts will usually be sky high. I've seen open rates of up to 83% on one of my lists built using this method.

I hope this helps someone!

[Craig Desorcy]

Here's a few mods that should help your Wordpress blog...

1. Contrary to popular believe, you do not have to link to
Wordpress within your footer. So within your theme's footer.php
you can delete the "Powered By Wordpress" phrase and link.

If you'd like to payback Wordpress with a back link, do it in your sidebar.
Removing the "Powered By Wordpress" in the footer helps
keep the comment spam bots away.

2. In General Settings you'll notice your URL looks like this:
yourblog.com in Wordpress address (URL) and Blog (URL).
add www to them so it looks like this yourblog.com

3. Adding 200 ping addresses to your Wordpress ping list is not the
way to go. A few will do. On my blogs, I use one
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

4. Stop Self Pinging.
When you write and link to eternal posts, your blog will ping its self.
This is annoying. This plugin will stop it.
No self ping Wordpress plugin : Stop pinging your own Blog post

5. New installs of Wordpress should never use Fantasico. It's better to
do it manually which is more secure.
Installing WordPress WordPress Codex

6. Stop Search Engines from indexing your Wordpress folders.
See attachment. Upload that to your root folder "www". If you
can't see attachment, create a blank notepad doc and call it
robots.txt and add the following to it:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/

Save it and then upload to your root folder on your server.



Craig

[Abledragon]

Another set of recommended WordPress plugins:

http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/20...press-plugins/

Lots of WordPress theme sites (both free and paid) at the bottom of this article:

http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/20...dpress-themes/

Cheers,

Martin.

[Abledragon]

For beginners on self hosted WordPress, a free tutorial. Absolutely free, no opt in required, but it does contain some affiliate links:

FREE WordPress Tutorial | How to Install, Setup and Configure WordPress

Cheers,

Martin.

[Matt M]

Don't forget to look for and round up any article directories, Web 2.0, and news RSS widgets that you can add to your blog.

This is auto content.

Matt

[Aaron Moser]

Automated WordPress Link Building Plugins

These plugins will help turn WordPress into an SEO powerhouse by growing backlinks to your site on auto-pilot…

RSS Footer: This plugin will automatically insert a link to your site under every article in your RSS feed. Adding your link to your RSS feed can build links automatically from all the RSS aggregators and scraper sites republishing your feed on their sites. Just let all the aggregator bots on the web do their job and give you easy backlinks for doing nothing.

This is why full-text RSS feeds can be beneficial for link building because your feed will get syndicated and republished more often. The more your content gets republished with your keyword relevant URL or anchor text the more backlinks you’ll get.

WP Onlywire Multisubmit Plugin: This plugin automatically submits your posts to popular social bookmarking sites each time you create a post. The cool thing is it lets you stay anonymous on the web so you don’t leave any footprints that Google can trace.

The plugin supports multiple OnlyWire accounts and allows you to cycle through different user accounts so it doesn’t look like you’re spamming from one account. You’ll need to create multiple OnlyWire accounts to use this plugin anonymously.

Internal Link Building Plugin: Here’s an extremely powerful plugin to get automatic backlinks by interlinking internal pages. Interlinking internal pages is one of the reasons why Wikipedia ranks so high. This plugin will give you the same effect and there are a whole slew of options and ways to configure internal and external links. You can also use this plugin to leverage and distribute link authority to your other related sites.

WP_BlogNetworking: This is a great plugin for interlinking related sites to help boost their ranking power. I use this plugin dominate competitive keywords in my niches. You can build your own network work of sites and have this plugin setup to automatically build deep links to your pages between your related sites.

LinkingPress: This plugin acts like an automatic link building service for WordPress blogs. I haven’t personally tried this plugin yet but it might be worth checking out.



Enjoy...

Aaron Moser

[breakdance]

THANKS to *everybody* who posted in this thread! I will definitely use the above suggestions for my *future* WordPress sites/blogs!

[GuerrillaIM]

A great plugin that hasn't been mentioned is the global translator plugin.

It translates all of your WP pages and posts into 41 languages. This increases your amount of content by 41 times. Every site I install it on gets an instant boost of traffic.

WordPress › Global Translator WordPress Plugins

[Martin Luxton]

Some great plugins listed here. Just a word of caution.

DON'T ADD THEM ALL!

Add the basic ones (like Allinone seo, Askimet, Google sitemap generator, Database backup) and then add any others one by one.

1. Add a plugin

2. Make sure your site is still functioning OK.

3. Rinse and repeat.

You know how if you install too many antivirus programmes they fight each other and bugger up your computer?

Try adding 20 Wordpress plugins to your site in one go and see what happens.

Martin

[Josh Anderson]

Here is our own wordpress membership plugin for nanacast:

Member Lock Plugin Documentation

It allows you to create membership sites, secure blog post content, drip in content from nanacast based on when a subscriber joins, and even send private posts to individual subscribers.

It also allows to add and remove your membership blog subscribers to and from email lists at list management services such as iContact, Aweber, Mail Chimp, Getresponse, Analytic Approach, Send Pepper, or Constant Contact through the Nanacast api.

Best of all it ads all it hooks your blog up to all the front and back end ecommerce and affiliate management features of Nanacast.

[RyanCoisson]

I love feedwordpress which I hadn't seen anyone list yet.

Ryan

[johan]

Here's a neat little plugin to publish excerpts on your home page instead of the entire posts:

Homepage Excerpts Wordpress Plugin

John Taylor said it earlier in this thread but it's worth repeating: check your Privacy Settings and make sure the search engines are allowed to index your content!

[Leanne King]

I'm not going to add a plugin just a tip because others have already done a fantastic job.

So, first of all when adding plugins only add what you need. Don't add plugins when it is quite easy to do what you want without a plugin for example changing the page order. When you do add a plugin and activate it check all is working before moving on to the next plugin install.

Second, forums are generally full of WordPress questions but usually a lot of these questions have already been answered at the WordPress forum and a search will find the answer you are looking for pretty quickly in my experience.

[Paul M]

Most of the plugins I know about have already been listed, but here's a few I don't think have been mentioned yet that I use:

Re-Tweet Button Plugin.

Twitter Tweet/Retweet Button - TweetMeme

Adds a re-tweet button to every post/page on your site, allows users to re-tweet your content and keeps count of the re-tweets.


Sociable Plugin.

Sociable - Social Bookmarking for WordPress - Yoast - Tweaking Websites

Adds social bookmarking buttons of your choice to each of your posts/pages automatically.


Popularity Contest Plugin.

WordPress › Popularity Contest WordPress Plugins

This plugin determines and displays which of your posts/pages are most popular based on a range of values such as views, comments...ect.


GD Star Rating Plugin.

GD Star Rating|A WordPress Rating System

Allows users to leave ratings for posts/pages and comments on your site. Good for review style sites.


-Paul

[radhika]

WP plugins Home page: The list is on left side menubar.

WordPress › WordPress Plugins

Tips before downloading/using these plug-ins:

* DON'T use more that you need. So it will be easy to upgrade them and keep the code up-to-date.

* Upgrade the plugins regularly.

* Only download the plugins with recent updates.

* Save the plugins page (on WP site or authors website) in your Favs folder for checking future updates. (WP also has a feature to let you know about plugin updates.)

* Delete old plugins or the ones you don't use.

.

[JasonParker]

I really like this plugin called Psychic Search. It emails you a report every day with what search terms people are using to get to your site and what people are typing in on your search bar.

WordPress › Psychic Search WordPress Plugins

[dandimit]

My business partner Daniel Pereira has LOTS of great info on Wordpress and blogging.
Anyone here can grab an awesome ebook called "Reverse the Google Slap for Free Google Traffic" Just Google it and grab it for free.

And here's a cool blog post from him to help:
Free Traffic For Your Blog: Exactly Why Social Bookmarking And How To Get All Those Buttons On Your Blog!

If you have started to discover the power of blogging for your online businesses, then you are going to want to maximize your efforts and get as much blogging traffic that you can for free. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set up your blog so that it can be easily bookmarked from happy readers or subscribers. The only problem is that there are hundreds of different social bookmarking websites, so it would take you days in order to incorporate even a handful of these sites with your blog. Luckily, there is a trick to getting those social bookmarking buttons on your blog.

Will this trick work for all blogs? Nope. Unfortunately, there are a large number of blogging software programs out there, so this is definitely not going to work for all blogs. Also, if your blog is hosted on a different website like WordPress.com, or Blogger.com, then it is going to be a lot harder to put these social bookmarking buttons at the end of your posts. Also, depending on which website you are using, there may not be a way for you to automate the process. If you want these buttons automatically placed at the end of each of your posts, then the easiest way to do this will be to install a WordPress.org blog on your own website. There are tons of benefits to doing this, and if you are serious about blogging for free traffic, then you should take the time to learn how to incorporate the WordPress.org software on your own website.
So, if you want to add these social bookmarking buttons for a blog that you are promoting on blogging website, then the best advice I have for you will be to search for “Digg button” or “Social Network Button” on that websites FAQ. Generally, if you can add these buttons to your posts, then the answer will be revealed in the FAQ.
If you want automation, and you have already installed the latest version of the WordPress.org blogging software, then you’ll be pleased to know that there are a number of different WordPress plugins that you can incorporate on your blog for almost all social networking buttons. Many of them work well, and at the time that I am writing this, one of the plugins that many people use that gives you a lot of options is the “Share This” plugin. This plugin can be found at the following link: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
The funny thing about WordPress plugins is that some of them will work great for a while, but then after WordPress has made too many updates, the plugin may stop working all together. I share this with you in case one day you find that the “Share This” plugin no longer works. Then you will know to look for a different plugin that does the same thing. Also, you may want to install the “Share This” plugin along with other plugins that function similarly in order to see which plugin you like most for your blog.

Daniel Pereira

[Jason Johns]

Hello everyone,

Great thread - I love Wordpress. Here are some of my favourite plugins that haven't been mentioned. As mentioned above, only activate the ones you want and check your site is working. If you are editing the code then make sure you either have the original theme code at hand or you have a backup of the file.

404 SEO Plugin

This is a great one that puts a list of related pages on your 404 page. If you add some adsense / other adverts as well, it's a great way to use a page that isn't overly used.

Emo Vote

This is just a simple voting tool, which is good on more "social" sites. It allows people to vote by how they feel and you can edit the feelings to make it say anything you want. Very good to make the voting system fit in with the theme of the site.

Extended Category Widget

This widget adds more functionality to the category widget to make it a more useful menu. It helps to make the navigation much easier to use and more useful to your visitor.

WP-Sticky

This is a great one, it makes a post sticky so that you can have it appear at the front of your blog all the time. Means you can still have multiple posts on a page and have the page you want showing on the front.

Many of the others I use are mentioned above. There are some great plugins available.

All the best

Jason

[SickHippie]

I wrote quite a long blog post about this a while back - 12 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without!

WordPress is really an incredible tool. It really is wonderful for all of us that this amazing piece of software is available free of charge! On top of that, there is a rich, full, community of developers who freely give their time to develop additional plugins to extend the already robust functionality of WordPress. I have been working with WordPress for months now (mostly at work), and I have been working on this blog for 3 weeks now.

Well, on this wonderful journey I’ve come across a LOT of good plugins, and even more not-so-good plugins. Right now I’m running 31 plugins on this site, although some of them I don’t really get much use from. Things like Advanced RSS or Category Order are useful, but I haven’t explored their functionality much at all. Other plugins like Smart YouTube or Maintenance Mode are installed simply because I know they will be useful at some point in the future. If I need to take my site offline at any point, or when I’m ready to post videos, I don’t want to spend hours looking for those plugins again. I could probably make them inactive, but I also want to make sure that they work with the plugins that I need.

So, without further introduction, here are my 12 WordPress plugins I can’t live (or at least blog) without! These are not in any real order – all are equally valuable in my book.

1. OZh’ Admin Drop Down Menu is first in line. Simply put, this takes your admin menu from the side and puts in into a really nice dropdown at the top of the screen. It makes everything in your admin menu accessible, and has a lot of great little configuration options for making it exactly what you want. It even tells you when you have new comments and plugin updates, and how many of each! It really makes the backend a lot less confusing to navigate, and gives you your whole screen to work in to boot!

2. Google XML Sitemaps is up next. This little plugin is amazing! Whenever you change or update anything on your blog, it creates a new XML sitemap, gzips it, and notifies Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask that your site has been updated. Knowing that the biggest 4 search engines are instantly informed every time I make a post is comforting, to say the least!

3. Twitter Tools & Twitter Tools: bit.ly Links I’m counting as one, because they work so beautifully hand in hand. With this, you can bring your tweets in as blog posts, push your blog posts out as tweets, and will even pass your blog links through bit.ly before posting to Twitter! The only complaint I have about this one is the sidebar widget included is pretty clunky, doesn’t seem to update quickly, and just doesn’t look that good. Other than that, it’s easily the best integration between WordPress and Twitter that I’ve seen yet!

4. Lets talk about tags for a minute – Simple Tags specifically. I must admit, I don’t have much of a clue about tagging. I’ve seen the various tag clouds around, but never really used them – I always just searched for what I wanted. When I was setting up this blog, when trying to find a good Twitter integration, I clicked the ‘Twitter’ tag on the plugins page after searching didn’t get what I was looking for. Lo and behold, I found Twitter Tools. I started exploring tags a bit more, and found this plugin here. This thing will actually go through my post before I post it and suggest tags for me! It grabs from Yahoo and Tag the Net, plus looks through current tags on my site to offer suggestions. There are a lot of other great features on this plugin, but I’ve gone on too long already about it. If you like tags and tagging, this plugin is for you!

5. Comment Reply Notification is a nice plugin that offers a functionality that should have been in WordPress in the first place. Offering reply notifications is a must have for any community driven site. With this plugin, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, they have the option to receive an email when there is a reply. Really useful for keeping people informed, and for bringing people back to your blog. This is definitely a must have plugin!

6. Contact Form 7 is another great plugin. It’s simple, but extremely flexible. You can leave all the options alone and still have a nice slick contact form, or you can go all out and tweak options to your hearts content. Unlike most contact form generators, you can even tweak the individual error messages from the settings page, rather than being forced to edit the code (and re-edit after a plugin update). No website should be without a contact form, and this makes it simple.

7. Wordpress.com Stats is very straightforward. You put in your API key from WordPress.com, and it starts gathering stats for you. Adds a nice little piece to the dashboard, and lets you see all sorts of information – incoming traffic, outgoing traffic, traffic overall and per post, and so on. Best of all, all the tracking is done at WordPress.com, so it doesn’t add any real load to your server. Combined with Google Analytics, you will have all the stats you could possibly want.

8. That brings us to Google Analytics for WordPress! Put in your Account ID, it adds the tracking code for you! Tracks outbound links, download, and doesn’t track admin by default. A simple solution for a common headache – no template coding required!

9. WP Super Cache is basically a ‘just in case’ solution. It serves up static html pages to visitors who aren’t logged in or haven’t left a comment. This is great if your blog ever receives a huge spike in traffic – you’re on the front page of Digg or Slashdot, for example, or when the gates open up on that big product launch. A lot of nice technical options in the backend, but works beautifully out of the box as well. It will even rebuild a page whenever someone leaves a comment, so you know that visitors are seeing the latest content on your site (even the search engines).

10. Broken Link Checker is really handy. It goes through your site and looks for broken links – then displays a nice dashboard widget telling you how many unique links you have in your site, and how many of them don’t work. Since the web is everchanging, a site that is up today may be gone tomorrow – it’s handy to know so that you can easily remove broken links without having to test them all yourself.

11. All in One SEO Pack is a plugin you will see on almost every list of ‘must have’ plugins – and for good reason. If you want complete control over every aspect of your site’s SEO, this is all you need. Even if you don’t know anything about SEO, going through the settings page will give you a nice idea of what you might need to search for on Google to learn. Highly recommended by everyone I know who has used it, this is absolutely wonderful for giving your site those lovely back-end tweaks to boost up the ranking a bit.

12. TinyMCE Advanced is a wonderful plugin that adds about 16 new TinyMCE plugins plus a host of other new features. While I love coding in Dreamweaver, I won’t deny that there are times when WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is just plain quicker. This plugin brings WordPress’s TinyMCE editor one step closer to perfection – adding a number of things that I had wished were there before.

Well, that’s all of them – I really hope some of these were useful to you. Maybe I shed some light on an aspect of your blog you hadn’t considered, or maybe help you feel smug in knowing that you already have all of these installed!

I also keep a nice list of active plugins on my site, in case anyone wants to know what I'm using - Active Plugins

[Michael Taylor]

GetResponse and AWeber plugin for adding opt-in forms to your blog...

Wordpress Autoresponder Optin for GetResponse & Aweber

(Newsletter sign up is required to download...)

Update: Ok, I added this resource before I tried it because it looked good on paper. After trying it, meh. Not that great. I'm just going to dump the GetResponse form code into my templates where I need it. However, give this plugin a try if you're looking for something like it. It may work out for you.

[iw433]

One really great thread. Thanks Allen!

[Brian Cook]

This plugin adds a "page peel" in the corner of the site...
WordPress › Page Cornr WordPress Plugins

It's not fancy and requires some editing of the .png,
but it does appear to work with both IE and Firefox

Brian

[admiral]

thanks to all who posted on this thread for all your very useful tips and plugins

[James Pateman]

Oh...yeah...awesome lists...please keep them coming.

One more here:

http://www.noupe.com/wordpress/13-great-wordpress-speed-tips-tricks-for-max-performance.html

(Disclosure: I have no commercial interest through this link)

regards,
James Pateman

[MarkR]

WP-Polls is a great, simple, customizable polls plug-in that adds a lot of social / interactive features to your Blog and increases the "fun" factor.

It's great for surveying your readers too.

[sadasiva]

What about the Best rss-importer plug-in.. In the past I tried to pad my data with RSS import data.

[RobinSkeen]

A simple trick to improve SEO - change your permalink structure to:

/%category%/%postname%/

If you get your domain with your favorite keywords and add categories that also have keywords, you've doubled your SEO power with the custom permalink structure.

[mistyone]

Fantastic, Allen

I have been hoping that you would see that Wordpress is a huge topic and that it would benefit forum users to find questions and answers in one spot.

I have had many of my questions answered with this thread, about plugins and I have downloaded many I didn't have.

I have only one that I don't think anyone has listed and is important as far as Google is concerned and that is the Privacy Policy statement each website must show. It is one of my, must have, to load on every site I own:

Easy Privacy Policy

Thanks to all those who have contributed

Cheers
Viv

[dmitchb]

... my 2 cents worth

TS Custom Widgets – will allow you to display different widgets in your sidebar for each page, post, category etc. You can REALLY tailor your sidebar to the content they are viewing (very cool). By default, all widgets appear wherever the sidebar is loaded within your theme. With this plugin, you can configure where widgets are displayed on a per post or per WP Template(Using conditional Tags) basis.

Wordpress Download Monitor – helps you protect files within your membership from being shared to “non-members”.

Audit Trail – helps you see who logs into your site and what content they view (which can be very interesting).

... sorry about no links ... the forums don;t allow "newbies" to link anything