There’s a fantastic number of plugins available for Wordpress. It’s truly an amazing platform, and for the two years I’ve been using the self-hosted version, there’s been an incredible amount of support added, new (good) features that have been implemented, and a dizzying amount of customization plugins created. You can find the official directory for plugins here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.
I’ve covered some of the speed plugins that I like few posts ago, and I realize everyone already knows and uses All in One SEO Pack (SEO Optimization), Akismet (comment spam) and Google XML Sitemaps, so here are 10 great plugins that you may not know about:
(I’ve limited this to 10 so this post doesn’t get too out of hand, and in no particular order)
- WPtouch iPhone Theme: This plug-in makes your site optimized (readability) for the Apple iPhone, Apple iPod Touch, Google Android and Blackberry Storm. I don’t have any of those phones, so I can’t testify on how good it is, but I think it’s always nice to be able to reach an extended audience.
- MobilePress: Another useful plug-in to get your blog ready for mobile access.
- WP-PageNavi: Wordpress blogs by default show next and previous to go backwards and forwards in the blog. Change this so it’s paginated as you would see in a forum, like the below at the bottom of my blog home page.
- WP Security Scan: “Perform security scan of WordPress installation.” Yeah.
- Secure WordPress: Another good security-related plug-in to have. Remove common methods hackers use to analyze your Wordpress installation and find weaknesses that can be secured.
- Twitter Tools: Let’s you set up your Blog with Twitter. I use it to update Twitter every time I write a new blog post, but you can also use it to add a widget to show your newest updates, update Twitter from your blog, and post daily/weekly compilation posts of your Tweets during that time. (This plug-in is not being used for Twitter update in the upper right of my blog, however, that one is part of the Imagination theme.)
- Search Unleashed: You ever the search option (Ctrl-F) in Firefox 2 or 3, and you can highlight the search query on the page so you can find the text easier? Search Unleashed can do that for people who search directly on your blog automatically as well as for those who come to your blog after searching on Google.
- Photo Sidebar Widget: There are plenty of Flickr plugins for Wordpress, but not many Smugmug ones. This is the one I use to preview new content from my Smugmug account.
- Global Translator: As you can see below or in my right sidebar, you can translate my blog into different languages. Global Translator is a great plug-in in that it caches the translations so that when a user access them, they stay on your blog rather than be taken to a different website showing your site in a frame. This is also great for Search Engines because each new cached page in a different language is considered a real page and can be found by users searching in that language. To simplify what that means, imagine you write the blog post “More Wordpress Plugins to Live By” in English. That’s one page you’ve written now indexed. Now, you enable 10 (in the plug-in settings, you can pick exactly which/how many languages you want to support. I’ve picked the ten most common languages in the world in addition to SE Asian languages) translation languages in Global Translator. Through the plug-in, you will have effectively written 11 posts- the one in English, and the additional 10 in other languages. Users searching in their native language will find your post.
- Comment Relish: This emails users who leave a comment for you automatically. Think of it as a follow-up “thank you” to those who comment. You can create a custom message to let users know how to subscribe to your blog or whatever else you’d like.
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I’ve talked about this before, but I really recommend Windows Live Writer for composing your blogs.It’s like Microsoft Word for blogs- it’s easy to use, it’s free, and it has a lot of great features- spell check, drafts, image handling, blog preview within your theme, etc. I also recommend getting the Zemanta Plug-in for it- it will automatically find copyright-free photos for you to use in your new blog post, as well as suggest recent articles and links related to whatever you’re writing about in the post.
Download Links:
- Windows Live Writer: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/
- Zemanta for WLW: http://www.zemanta.com/download/livewriter/
Enjoy!
