ShanKrila

Update: WordPress 2.9 is out. Check out the top 10 WordPress 2.9 features here.

One of the things I love about WordPress as a blogging platform is how Plugins extend its functionality hundred fold. Just like how Firefox becomes more than a browser with its 1000’s of available extensions.

Searching for a good WordPress plugin in the WP Plugin directory can be like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. When I started out blogging, I just started finding the good plugins by asking the authors of blogs I frequented. Some talk about what they use and some bloggers would gladly tell you if you asked them nicely.

If you wonder what I use here in ShanKrila, you don’t have to anymore. Here is a list of WordPress plugins that I have found and started using them in the months of blogging. I have tried to categorize it based on its utility.

This will be a continuously updated page so that it’ll serve as a reference for myself as well as to anyone else running a self-hosted WordPress blog. I recommend bookmarking this page and checking back for updates.

Admin

• 404 Error Log – Allows the blog administrator to track 404 pages generated by the blog. You can save the report in HTML and download it or choose to email it.
• Advanced Admin Menu – Offers drop down menu for the admin functions. Saves a ton of clicks to get to different options.
• Executable PHP Widget – Makes it easy to add PHP code snippets to your sidebar with this widget.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – WPAU allows a user to automatically upgrade their WordPress installation.
  (not necessary for WP 2.7+)
• WordPress Database Backup – Every WordPress blog must be backed up with this plugin. You do not want to lose your hard work. Ever. Easy to configure and use. Schedule backups to run every night and email it to you. You could also backup anytime you need and download it.
• WP-ContactForm III – Adds a simple drop in form for users to contact you. Simple to use it in a post or a contact page. Great for starting blogs but if you start getting spam through this, there are other options with spam protection.
• WP-phpMyAdmin – Adds phpMyAdmin interface right in your WP Admin panel. No more logging into your host CPanel to get to it.

Ads

• AskApache Firefox Adsense – If you love Firefox, spread the love by showing a Firefox referral ad to your Windows readers who don’t use Firefox. For every download through your link, you make $1.00. Who said you can’t make money doing a good thing?
• Friends don’t let friends see ads – Your regular readers and folks who comment are your friends. Now, you can selectively not show them ads and just target the search traffic. Click over to find out all the other things it can do.
• Shylock Adsense – Helps you install Google Adsense codes without modifying your template code. Options to add different ad formats and specify where you want them to appear in your post. I love the option where you can choose to show a different format after a certain number of ads.
• Who Sees Ads -Another powerful ad management plugin like the previous one but with a control panel where you can set things like how old a post has to be to display ads, etc. I am still torn between the two but I have to use them both to find out which one I like better.

Comments

• AJAX Comments – Lets you post comments quickly without leaving or refreshing the page.
• Highlight Author Comments – Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by post’s author.
• LinkLove – Start removing ‘rel=nofollow’ for commentators after they have a certain number (configurable – recommended 2 comments) of comments to give them some link love. (this has been discontinued here)
• Live Comment Preview – Lets your commentators see what they type as they type. A huge help for avoiding and correcting typos.
• Show Top Commentators – Encourages feedback and comments by rewarding your top commentators with a link to their blog.
• Subscribe to Comments – Essential for any blog to allow your readers to easily follow comments they are interested in. Readers can opt in to get notification of new comments in the blog post by email. You can add a small opt in button at the bottom of the comment form.
• WP Grins – Add clickable smilies and emoticons on your post or comment forms. If you can’t remember the code, just click it to insert it.
• WP-Twtip-ID – Integrate Twitter into WordPress comments and discover your readers in Twitter.

Performance

• iFrameWidgets – Do you have MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BlogRush or Bumpzee widgets that load very slow sometimes making your blog appear really slow to load? Use this excellent plugin that uses iFrame to load these widgets. In layman’s term, if the widget loads slow the rest of the page doesn’t wait for it and completes loading making your whole blog seems it’s on steroids compared to the rest.
• TabStat – Helps to monitor the status of your database tables and allows you to optimize them.
• WP-Cache – Speeds up your blog by caching posts and pages to serve them faster. A lot of options to fine tune to your needs. Check out this modified version as well that claims huge speed increase.

Post

• In Series – Making a series of posts is very easy now. Have some common posts, create a new series by connecting them together. Check out our Firefox Extensions Series for a sample.
• Pagebar – Adds an advanced page navigation for your WP blog. Shows you the total number of pages and you can easily to jump to pages.
• Random Redirect – Seen the ‘Feelin Lucky’ menu at the top of the page here? It’s like a ‘Stumble’ button for your blog letting your readers read random posts.
• Simple Tags – Adds plenty of options to extending WordPress 2.3 tagging.
• SRG Clean Archives – Displays archive listings in a clean uniform way in a collapsible menu style. Either look at current month or look at all posts in your archive.
• What Would Seth Godin Do – This weirdly named plugin is simply awesome. It just detects new readers and displays a custom message. You can configure it and format it in HTML and choose to make it appear at the top or bottom of a post.
• WP-Post Views – Display how many times a post or page has been viewed. You can opt out of not tracking registered members.
• WP 2.3 Related Posts – I like this better than the other Related Posts plugin because this brings up posts based on tags of WordPress 2.3. If you consistently tag posts like I do, you might see better results with this one.
• WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows your readers to edit their comments inline for a preset time limit. Typos can make even a genuine comment look silly. Implement this and your readers will love you for this. Very slick.
• WP Social Bookmark Menu (aka Sexy Bookmarks) – Adds a CSS sprite based social bookmark buttons that pop out as you hover over them as seen here in this blog.

RSS Feeds

• Better Feeds – It gives you plenty of options to manage your feeds including adding footer notes and Related posts to every feed item.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith – Detects all your possible feeds in your blog and redirects to your FeedBurner feed address. No need to update your WordPress template code with your FeedBurner address every time you change your theme.

SEO

• All in One SEO Pack – Fastest way to get your blog optimized for SEO. Offers plenty of excellent options. A must have from the get go.
• AskApache Google 404 – Adds Intelligent SEO Ajax-powered Google Search to 404 pages. Try this link to see a 404 page here at ShanKri-la.
• Dean’s Permalink Migration – If you are changing your site wide Permalink structure, use this plugin to make it transparent. It’s transparent even to Google and doesn’t hurt your PageRank.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog. Supported by Ask.com, Yahoo, MSN Search & Google.
• Homepage Excerpts – If you display full posts in your Homepage, you could be getting bad karma from Google for having duplicate content in your home page as well as the single post pages. But, a lot of readers prefer not to click through an excerpt to read a full post. This plugin helps strike a balance by making a customizable number of posts as full and the rest of it as an excerpt in the home page without tweaking your template.

Stats

• Counterize II – A great stats plugin that saves IP, timestamp, visited URI, referring URI and browser information. It shows unique hits, page views for the month as well last 24 hours in a graph. A very nice utility for the stats addicted.
• FireStats – Excellent stats plugin that quickly shows important stats. Also automatically adds the Country, Browser and OS information right by the Commentator’s name as you see in this blog.
• Google Analyticator – Enable Google Analytics code from with in Admin panel by entering Google Analytics UID. No need to add the JavaScript to your theme code.
• Popularity Contest – Tracks popularity of posts by different metrics that you configure from a control panel. Makes it easy to add Most popular posts by month, all time, categories, etc.
• WordPress Stats – Tracks views, pageviews, referrers and clicks. It shows what people clicked on as well as search terms. You need a WordPress.com API key to activate this.

Styling

• ClassyBody – A very powerful plugin that hooks simple CSS classes to the body tag. You can modify the look and feel of every part of your site with these hooks very easily.
• MyCSS – Preserve and maintain your CSS changes easily through theme version updates.

Plugin Usage Tips

• Make sure you backup your WordPress files, if a plugin requires you to modify a template file.
• While upgrading a plugin, most times it is best to delete or atleast rename the current plugin folder/file and then upload the new plugin code.
• Take the time atleast once a month to update your plugins to the newest versions.
• Don’t let your WordPress blog get bloated and uninstall plugins that you don’t need or use anymore.

I have done my best to make sure the links are correct but it is the nature of the web that they do change at times. Please report any broken links through comments or by Contact Us form.

I would love to find new and better WordPress plugins. Also, I would love to hear if you’d like a listing of Top WordPress Themes like free wordpress themes, wordpress magazine theme or Adsense optimized WordPress Themes
Feel free to sound off in the comments if you know or have found a plugin that does a better job than the one listed here.

Help make this list a great reference for all the WordPress bloggers out there. If you really really found this list useful, you could also Stumble this post and help spread the word to other WordPress bloggers.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Related posts

• Download Free Microsoft Tinker For Windows 7 (0)
• Which DNS Service Should You Use? (2)
• Free Open Source Screencasting Software – CamStudio (0)
• Auto-Publish Your Feedburner RSS Feed To Twitter (0)
• Remember the Milk For Gmail Google Chrome Extension (0)