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WordPress Plugins: My Favorites

Wordpress Plugins
Wordpress Plugins

I would like to list out some of top wordpress plugins that are my favorites: Plugins that are useful for Search Engine Optimization,  Photo Gallery, Forms, Maintenance, Rating, CMS, E-commerce, Security and Privacy, Cache, Backup, Others…

  1. For Search Engine Optimization
    • All in One SEO Pack: This plugins helps in Search Engine Optimization.
    • Google Analyticator: Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
    • SEO Friendly Images: It is an optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes and thus helps is SEO and validation.
    • Google XML Sitemap Generator: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
    • Random Pages Widget – For Visitors & SEO: This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar. The widget displays random posts and pages in sidebar. This increases the number of indexed pages and gives users an interesting way to browse your site.
  2. For Photo Gallery and Images
    • NextGEN Gallery: This is full integrated Image Gallery Plugin
    • Yet Another Photoblog: It helps to develop full featured photoblog
    • Featured Content Gallery: It 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. Custom options include gallery size, color, style and more.
    • Get the Image: It grabs images for you. It was designed to make the process of things such as adding thumbnails, feature images, and/or other images to your blog much easier, but it’s so much more than that. It is an image-based representation of your WordPress posts.
    • Flickr Photo Album: It allows you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided which you can customize to 100% match the look and feel of your own site.
  3. For Forms
    • Contact Form 7: It helps to create and manage multiple contact forms. It is very simple and flexible form. I highly recommend it. For Span protection you need to install additional Captach plugin named Really Simple CAPTCHA which was originally created for Contact Form 7, however, you can now use it with your own plugin.
    • TDO Mini Forms: This plugin allows you to add highly customisable forms that work with your WordPress Theme to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit and edit posts and pages. New posts are kept in “draft” until an admin can publish them (also configurable). Likewise edits can be kept be automatically kept as revisions until an admin approves them.
    • cforms II: It offers convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.
  4. For Maintenance
    • Maintenance Mode: It adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance
    • Theme Test Drive: It allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one.
  5. For Rating, Poll, Comment and Popular
    • GD Star Rating: It allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.
    • WP-PostRatings: It is old and mostly used Rating system in wordpress.
    • PollDaddy Polls plugin: It  allows you to create and manage polls from within your WordPress dashboard. You can create polls, choose from 20 different styles for your polls and view all results for your polls as they come in. All PollDaddy polls are fully customizable, you can set a close date for your poll, create multiple choice polls, choose whether to display the results or keep them private. You can even embed the polls you create on other websites. You can collect unlimited votes and create unlimited polls.
    • WP-Polls: It is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
    • WordPress Thread Plugins: Is is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested. It is very simple and easy to user for thread comment
    • IntenseDebate Comments: If you want the advance comment and like to configure then you can use this plugin. It enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you.
    • WordPress Popular Posts: It is a sidebar widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog with your own formatting.
  6. For CMS
    • Theme My Login: This plugin themes the WordPress login, register, forgot password and profile pages to look like the rest of your website. It replaces the wp-login.php and profile.php by using a page template from your theme.
    • Flutter: You can create custom write panel pages or posts + duplicatable fields and groups + import and export them. This is the great plugin if you are thinking on CMS solutions.
      There is an alternate to Flutter which is Custom Field Template: The Custom Field Template plugin adds the default custom fields on the Write Post/Page.
    • Multi-level Navigation Plugin: Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. Visit the Multi-level Navigation Plugin page for more information about the plugin, or the PixoPoint forum for help with adding the menu to your theme.
    • Top Level Categories: This plugin allows you to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page. For example, instead of http://www.sakinshrestha.com/category/photo, I use http://www.sakinshrestha.com/photo for the address my “photo” category.
    • WP No Category Base: I like the name of this plugin. It is same as the top level categories plugin but this got the good naming. We can understand the function of the plugin my just reading the name. This plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. myblog.com/category/my-category/ to myblog.com/my-category/ ).
    • Breadcrumb NavXT: The successor to the popular WordPress plugin Breadcrumb Navigation XT, was written from the ground up to be better than its ancestor. This plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog. These breadcrumb trails are highly customizable to suit the needs of just about any blog. The Administrative interface makes setting options easy, while a direct class access is available for theme developers and more adventurous users.
    • Breadcrumb Titles For Pages: This plugin modifies wp_title() (the function used to create the title of your website) to output all parent Pages when viewing a child Page (top level Pages obviously won’t be affected).Example: YourSite.com >> Top Level Page >> Child Page >> Grandchild Page
    • Simple Tags: It is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin This is THE perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8 tags
    • PageMash: It is page management plugin. Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.
    • WP-PageNavi: Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.
    • WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT: The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site’s navigation. The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers.
    • Page Links To: This plugin allows you to make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URL to the new one you’ve chosen (301 Moved Permanently redirects are standard, but you can choose a 302 Moved Temporarily redirect if you wish).
    • MaxRef Widget: It is a powerful way to add unlimited widgets on your sidebars to display posts only from a certain category, the links from a particular link category, comments and more. Choose how many items appear, to display an RSS feed for categories, and how to sort the links presented.
  7. For E-commerce:
    • WP e-Commerce: The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
    • eShop: It is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.
  8. For Security & Privacy:
    • Login LockDown: Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.
    • WordPress Exploit Scanner. This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.
    • WP Security Scan: It Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
    • Member Access: It allows a WordPress administrator to make individual posts and pages accessible only to logged-in members. Member Access allows global configuration so that all posts or pages can be viewable by everyone (the default) or only by members, and it also allows each post and page to override the global setting.
    • Members Only: It allows you to make your blog only viewable to visitors that are logged in. If a visitor is not logged in, they will be redirected either to the WordPress login page or a page of your choice. Once logged in they can be redirected back to the page that they originally requested. You can also protect your feeds whilst allowing registered user access to them by using Feed Keys.
    • Social Privacy: Social Privacy is a set of open-source plugins for WordPress that restrict the read access of posts or categories to only specified registered users. Install these plugins and you can start blogging for friends and family about topics that are too sensitive to publish publicly.
  9. For Cache:
    • W3 Total Cache : The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular sites like: mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, makeuseof.com, kiss925.com, lockergnome.com, tutsplus.com, johnchow.com, ilovetypography.com, webdesignerdepot.com, pearsonified.com, css-tricks.com, yoast.com and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
    • WP Super Cache: It generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
  10. For Backups:
    • WordPress Backup: This plugin backup the upload directory (images), current theme directory, and plugins directory to a zip file. Zip files optionally sent to email.
    • WP-DB-Backup: It allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
  11. For Share, Bookmarks & Subscribe:
    • Sociable: Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. I like this plugin as it is very easy to use and the most important thing is thatyou can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.
    • Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.
    • Subscribe2Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog.
    • Tell A Friend: Share/Bookmark/Email/Social Bookmarking Button: Adds a tell a friend, Share/Bookmark/Email/Social Bookmarking button in a widget position. The service which is used is freetellafriend.com which supports e-mail address book, social bookmarks and favorites.
  12. For Spam Protection:
    • SI CAPTCHA for WordPress: Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, or both. In order to post comments, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Works great with Akismet.
    • Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
  13. For Feeds:
    • FeedWordPress: FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog.
    • FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter: This is a filter for the FeedWordPress plugin.
    • Feed Control: This plugin will allow you to change how WordPress generates the main feeds that the update services use. From here you can add Pages to your feeds or remove posts from them. You also have the option to exclude specific posts or pages based on their ID and can also set the sort options to use modified date instead of post date.
  14. Some Other Useful Plugins:
    • bbPress Integration: This plugin helps to integrate the bbPress Forum developed by the creators of WordPress
    • Search Everything: Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, options included:
    • Easy AdSense: It provides a very easy way to generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. With its full set of features, Easy AdSenser is perhaps the first plugin to give you a complete solution for everything AdSense-related.
    • Events Calendar: It is a diverse replacement for the original calendar included with WordPress adding many useful functions to keep track of your events. You can also try Event Calender 3
    • Google Maps Anywhere: Add Google Maps to your posts and pages.(Only for WordPress 2.5+) This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Maps and Street View into your blog.
    • Twitter for WordPress: Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.
    • Smart YouTube: This plugin allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed.
    • WP-Cumulus: WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting.

I hope you all enjoy WordPress. It is simply the great.

Enjoy, Sakin Shrestha

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Author: sakinshrestha

Hello. My name is Sakin Shrestha, and I am a technology entrepreneur from Nepal. I am passionate about helping this sector grow, for many reasons. The technology sector creates jobs for many young Nepalis who would otherwise migrate to foreign countries. It lets Nepali professionals develop skills for a fast-changing global workplace, and compete at a high level with anyone, anywhere in the world. If it grows, it will provide a viable career option for many young Nepalis, and help us reap the benefits of a global economy.

17 thoughts on “WordPress Plugins: My Favorites

  1. Great post! How do you add a “Log In” link/button to the header? I use the iBlogPro template and need a way to let patients log in to a 3rd party Electronic Health Record.

    Can this be done through a plugin or do I need custom code? Thanks.

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