For those people who have been using WordPress for years, the first plugin that they would recommend anyone starting out with the WordPress format would be the All in One SEO Pack. All in One SEO Pack was one of the first comprehensive WordPress plugins and since it was launched has been downloaded over 8 million times. It is without doubt the daddy of all WordPress plugins and the one most people download first when they set up their WordPress blog.

All in One SEO Pack allows you to quickly and simply configure the meta tags, meta description and Title for each and every post that you write for your WordPress site. This is particularly useful because WordPress will use your blog tag as a keyword. Thus the plugin is brilliant for customizing every post or webpage to get the maximum benefits of optimization. This automation of the SEO process is brilliant for beginners, because it not only generates the correct tags but it also avoids duplicate content.

However, the problem with being the top dog is that someone always comes along and tries to steal your crown. And lately another SEO package has been getting a lot of attention. The WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most recent, and certainly most discussed, SEO plugin around. Boasting a whole raft of new features it promised to be less high maintenance than All in One SEO Pack. And it comes with a good pedigree with Yoast and his team being a reliable source and having been downloaded a great deal as well.

Indeed it is well designed and very easy to use with a bunch of great options for tweaking your search engine optimisation settings. The page that takes the place of the old All in One SEO Pack page works extremely well and allows you to simply customize the titles for differing page views, with numerous options for flexibility. However, there are also some problems with Yoast at this stage, that still need ironing out. Some category tags and templates didn’t work once the plugin was enabled, and after the installation of the plugin the category permalinks also stopped working. In addition there were problems with sitemap functionality and a few other minor teething problems that still need to be sorted out.

To be fair Yoast’s SEO plugin has not been around anywhere near the same length of time as All in One SEO Pack so it needs some time to bed in. But for a plugin that does one basic job – generating and organizing meta description, title and keyword tags – and does it well, All in One SEO Pack is still the only plugin worth installing.

About the Author

Alex Simmonds is a copywriter and journalist based in the UK.

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For that purpose, we have gathered a list of some useful WordPress plugins which a blogger or website owner can use. You are welcome if you want to share more useful wordpress plugins that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.

Google XML-Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generate special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Sitemaps make it easy for crawlers to check the structure of your site and retrieve relevant data efficiently. It notifies all the search engine every time a new post is made on the blog.

Wp Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. It helps to reduce the load on the website as well this way so that your website does not face any down time.

Digg Digg

Digg Digg is an excellent wordpress plugin which helps users integrate different social networking buttons on your wordpress blog. It supports almost all the popular social networking websites including Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Reddit, dDone, Twitter, TweetMeme, Topsy, Yahoo Buzz, facebook share, facebook like, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Google Buzz, Designbump, WebBlend, BlogEngage and Serpd.

WP-DbManager

Wp- DBManager allows users to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. With DBManager, users can easily schedule backup and optimizing/repairing of WordPress blog.

Insights

I started using Insights few months back and I must say its an excellent plugin which every blogger should try. With Insights, users can easily find and interlink posts on their blogs, insert YouTube videos, insert Flickr images and much more.

SEO Smart Links

With SEO Smart Links, users can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Akismet

Akismet is one of the most important plugin for every wordpress users. What this plugin does is that it checks the 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.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is another useful plugin which helps users create contact forms for their wordpress blogs. With Contact Form 7, users can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

FD Feedburner Plugin

With FD Feedburner plugin, webmasters can redirect the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com. It can easily setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed, without modifying the template of your website.

Yoast WordPress SEO

Just like All in on SEO, yoast is another good WordPress SEO plugin that helps users optimize their page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) for WordPress gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

Google Analytics plugin helps u track your blog easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.

WP Page Navi

Page Navi adds better pave navigation interface to your wordpress blog and replaces older and newer posts with page numbers.

LinkWithin

LinkWithin is an excellent related post widget which adds related posts with thumbnails to your blog posts.

SEO Friendly Images

EO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set.

If we missed any plugin, please share with us using the comments section below.

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What I did find though, is that there are lots of developers out there who don’t know how to use all the powerful API’s that WordPress provides them with to develop plugins. This is why I also immediately started a WordPress development best practices section in which I’ll highlight the most important things. The issue is that there are quite a few development best practices that you should know about if you’re intending to be a real good plugin developer.

Professional WordPress Plugin Development: the book!

This is where a new book, by Ozh Richard, Justin Tadlock and Brad Williams comes in, it’s aptly titled Professional WordPress Plugin Development (aff link). It’s a big fat book that covers each and every bit you need to know to become a super developer of WordPress plugins. All you need after that is creativity and good ideas.

I have to admit, I am a bit biased, as I wrote the foreword for the book, but I’ll also admit to having been incredibly honored when these guys asked me to write that. You see, these guys have been my source for interesting articles about WordPress for years and they were the perfect team to write this book. Having now gone through it completely, I’m 100% sure: if you’re interested in WordPress plugin development, whether or not you want to do it professionally, you should buy and read this book.

So what are you waiting for? Go order that book!

Professional WordPress Plugin Development is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

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All you have to do to enter this competition is leave a comment on this post telling us what your favorite theme is from one of the bundle.

About the MOJO Theme Anniversary Bundle

The MOJO Themes First Anniversary Bundle will take place for 7 days only between the dates of April 18th (Monday) to April 24th (Sunday). The Bundle includes some of their most popular items from the marketplace. Basically, you can get your hands on $442 worth of items for only $25.

The bundle includes the 14 items below, including 10 WordPress themes, 2 WordPress plugins and 2 Tumblr themes.

WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins

TumblrThemes

How to Enter

For a chance of winning one of these amazing MOJO-Theme bundles, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling us what your favorite theme is from the list above. The five winners will be chosen completely at random, with each winner receiving their bundle via email.

Best of luck to everyone

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Here’s a few that we use frequently to supercharge our sites:

SEO

WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk – The ultimate SEO plugin for WordPress. We’ve tried them all, and this stands out above the rest. We’ve reviewed this plugin before, so I won’t go into detail, but you need Yoast SEO in your life!

Yoast Breadcrumbs by Joost de Valk – Used to be a separate plugin, but now it’s an option within the WordPress SEO plugin. Switch it on if you want breadcrumbs on your site. Simple!

Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk – Another one from the mighty Yoast, and again, the best Analytics plugin we have used. Setup is automatic, so you don’t need to add any code yourself, and there are tons of advanced settings for the experienced Analytics user.

Spectacu.la Advanced Search by Interconnect IT, James R Whitehead – If you have any experience of the default search function that comes with WordPress, you’ll know that it sucks hard. Results are returned in date order! What’s that about? Spectacu.la Advanced Search improves the search results by listing them in order of relevance. Yay!

Q and A by Dalton Rooney – FAQs can be great for SEO and conversion, but the key is not to have a single FAQs page, but to put relevant FAQs on your landing pages. Q and A lets you do just that. The questions and answers are entered as custom posts, and you can slot them into any page or post with a simple shortcode. Lovely!

Images

NextGEN Gallery by Alex Rabe – The WordPress media library is fine for occasional imagery, but if you want to have image galleries on your site, you’re much better off with NextGEN. Your images can be sorted into galleries, and galleries can be sorted into albums, all of which can be displayed in your pages with shortcodes.

wp-jQuery-Lightbox by Ulf Benjaminsson – I use this alongside NextGEN, as I think the lightbox style looks nicer, and it uses lightweight jQuery instead of Prototype and Scriptaculous, so everyone’s a winner.

AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild by junkcoder – Ok, not essential, but let’s say you redesign your site, and find you want to change the size of all your thumbnail images. You can make the change in the admin panel or the functions file, and all future images will be the new size, but all your existing thumbnails will still be the old size. This plugin will resize all of your old thumbnails for you. Nice!

Video

ProPlayer by Isa Goksu – If you want to host your own videos, this is the best plugin we’ve found for the job. Just give it your video URL and a few other optional settings, and it takes care of the rest, with a nice Flash video player. We use this plugin to play our website review videos on WebsiteWorks.tv.

Smart YouTube by Vladimir Prelovac – A very simple way to stick YouTube videos into your posts. All you do is paste in the URL of your YouTube video, and change http:// to httpv://. There are other options in the settings page so you can set default sizes etc. Simple but effective.

WP-prettyPhoto by Pier-Luc Petitclerc – It’s a general lightbox plugin, but it supports more than just images, and I find it especially useful for showing youtube videos in a lightbox when you don’t have space to embed them directly onto the page.

Lead Generation

Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi – Building your own contact form can be pretty complex, but Contact Form 7 makes it really easy. You build your form in the back end by selecting various options, and then you stick it on a page using a shortcode. You can have multiple contact forms too.

Optincrusher by Daniel Watrous – A great way to boost your newsletter subscription. You can see it at the bottom of this site (unless you’ve already subscribed to our newsletter). The design can be customised, and it works perfectly with popular mailing list services such as AWeber.

I hope you find those useful. Leave a comment if there are any other great plugins that we need to know about.

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You are welcome if you want to share more wordpress plugins for admin area that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at  SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

Developer Tools

The Developer Tools plugin creates an admin user interface for many of the code-enabled features in WordPress and commonly used JavaScript libraries. It also generate template code for theme development.

Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. With this plugin, You can assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

The lazy and the productive will love it : all admin links available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages. And plenty more space on your screen.

WP Login reCAPTCHA

This plugin simply adds reCAPTCHA to your login form. By adding reCAPTCHA to your login form, you can prevent bot / script from trying to login to your WordPress website.

WPMU Prefill Post

You can add the ability to create post template. You can manage templates and use them to prefill a post. Also prefill the post title.

Scissors Continued

This plugin adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images. Additionally, images that are resized in the post editor are automatically resampled to the requested size using bilinear filtering when a post is saved, which improves the perceived image quality while reducing the amount of data transferred at the same time.

Auto Post Thumbnail

Auto post thumbnail is a plugin to generate post thumbnail from first image in post or any custom post type. If the first image doesn’t work it will automatically search for the next one and so on until the post thumbnail is inserted.

Global Hide/Remove Admin Bar Plugin

This plugin adds an option to the Settings Menu to globally turn off the Admin Bar and/or turn off the user option in the profile to show admin bar.

Custom Login

You can use this plugin to customize your login screen. It will really help you to design personalized login screen for your every clients.

Hellos Bar

This plugin adds a javascript file that will position a fixed bar at the top of your browser screen to show announcements (controlled by a custom post type [CPT]) on each page load. Built with simple HTML and javascript.

Faster Image Insert

This plugin moves built-in Media Manager down in a meta-box, right next to main editing panel, so you have full control of the manager: opens it, makes it collapse or hidden from the interface completely. Best of all, is now you can insert image(s) much faster, and precisely where you want them to be.

WP Hotlink Protection

The WordPress Automatic Image Hotlink Protection plugin is a single step script designed to stop others from stealing your images. Simply add an .htaccess file to your root folder thereby stopping external web servers from linking directly to your files.

Cimy Header Image Rotator

With this plugin, you can displays an image that automatically rotates depending on setting. You can setup from one second up to one day and more. Intermediate settings are also possible.

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Many people have asked me for my list of top WordPress plugins. Of course I’ve written quite a few WordPress plugins myself, but I’d thought I’d share with you what I use and recommond as the top WordPress plugins for just about any site I build, analyze & optimize.

1. W3 Total Cache
   I seriously cannot live without this plugin, as it makes the sites I build perform to my expectations, instead of slowly crawling. And yes, I think every site should be cached to get the maximum performance for each and every user, not just when you start hitting social sites.
2. Google Analytics for WordPress
   While it’s my own plugin I seriously recommend everybody use this for tracking their blogs visitors, it does “standard tracking”, but it helps as well with analyzing 404 errors, seeing how authors perform, and much much more.
3. pageMash
   My site uses a lot of pages to get the site structure I want, and sometimes you want to move around some pages. The default WordPress way of doing that is hard (you have to give each page a menu order by hand) but pageMash is excellent for that, with a nice Ajaxy interface in which you can just drag and drop pages. Have a look (click for larger image):
   
   I’ve been using PageMash for years, in fact it was in my original Top WordPress Plugins post back in October 2008. On some sites though, I’ve replaced it with CMS Tree Page View, which also has a great interface and was a bit easier to work with on sites with even more pages.
4. Redirection
   Adding in redirects in WordPress is, well, impossible. Redirection makes it possible and for that sole reason is with me on most of my sites. After having some issues with it at first with 3.0 it seems to be working flawlessly again, and I couldn’t imagine running a blog without it yet.
5. WP-DBManager
   Not only is this plugin perfect for doing automated backups, it can also do things like database optimization and the admin pages for it allow you to do the occasional query from within WordPress!
6. VaultPress
   I used to rely on all sorts of plugins to do my security, now I just rely on VaultPress. It makes backups of your blog, checks your site for weird anomalies and fixes them as you go along happily blogging. If you make money from your site and / or it’s worth a lot to you, don’t miss this one.
7. Clean Notifications
   There are a couple of things in WordPress that have annoyed me from the start and one of them are the emails it sends out for comments, pingbacks etc. Clean Notifications, another one of those top WordPress plugins that has been with me for what seems like ages, cleans those up nicely and turns the emails into nice readable emails without clutter.
8. Comment e-mail verification
   I don’t like adding hoops for people to jump through when they’re leaving a comment on my site, but I have recently started requiring people to verify their email address once they leave their first comment. It’s helped me heaps in controlling spam on my blog, and the comment e-mail verification plugin is the plugin that allows me to do that. Read more on my comment flow here: preventing anonymous comments in WordPress.
9. MediaRSS
   One of those plugins that you never “see” but should always be quietly there, doing it’s work, is MediaRSS. It adds MediaRSS tags to your RSS feed, making the first image in the post the thumbnail for services that support it and other things. A simple one without any configuration needs: install, and go!
10. Blackbird Pie
    So many conversations get started on Twitter these days that you often want to refer back to them in your blogposts. Just linking to a tweet is such a bland method of doing that though, when Blackbird Pie makes it really easy to do it so much smoother. Check out this tweet about my WordPress SEO plugin, for instance: 

    That looks pretty darn cool, don’t you think?

11. WordPress SEO plugin
    Last but not least is my own WordPress SEO plugin. While it’s still in beta and will do far more when it’s completely done, it’s already the best SEO plugin out there, in my own humble opinion of course. I use it literally everywhere.

Note: if you think: there are a LOT of comments on this post, that’s true. The original version of this post was published in 2008, I just decided to update and re-post!

11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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You are welcome if you want to share more blog loading time speed up wordpress plugins that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at  SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

W3 Total Cache

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. With this plugin, you can save up to 80% Bandwidth via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds. We personally use W3 Total Cache and recommends this plugin to our all the visitors.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

HeadJS Loader

This plugin reformats your page to utilize Head JS in your WordPress site. It strips out all your old javascript declarations and puts them into head.js calls so that they are loaded in parallel.

Plugin Organizer

This plugin allows you to change the order that your plugins are loaded. It also adds grouping to the plugin admin age.

JS & CSS Script Optimizer

This plugin will help you make your website more quick. It can grouping and packing Java Scripts and CSS. Also it makes fewer HTTP requests.

WP Minify

This plugin integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

Scripts Gzip

A WordPress plugin to merge and compress the CSS and JS links on the page. It does not cache, minify, have a “PRO” support forum that costs money, keep any logs or have any fancy graphics. It only does one thing, merge+compress,
and it does it relatively well.

html-compress

This plugin clears html of web page. It reduces space, tab, etc. on all source content, including in line css and javascript.

Performance Optimization: Order Styles and Javascript

What if you are using plugins and that are adding calls to JavaScript and CSS files dynamically. This is case of WordPress blog, where we use many plugins and those plugins add various Styles and Script files dynamically from wp_head() call. This plugin helps you assign the order to stylesheet and JavaScript (external and inline) for performance optimization.

External Files Optimizer

It automatically combines and compress css/js files generate with wp_head() and wp_footer().

WordPress Gzip Compression

It enables gzip-compression if the visitor’s browser can handle it. This will speed up your WordPress website drastically and reduces bandwidth usage as well. Uses the PHP ob_gzhandler() callback.

WP Parallel Loading System

The WP Parallel Loading System is a wordPress plugin that will enhance the loading efficiency of your Blog.

CloudFlare

The CloudFlare WordPress Plugin ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform.

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Until recently, the standard embed format used the object tag, like so:

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wsZ8h9_X-A4?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wsZ8h9_X-A4?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

But now, when a user depresses the embed button, they are greeted with this:

<iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UcnEIgmq8iw" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen></iframe>

As indicated, the ability to use iFrame embeds has been around since July of 2010, but the change in default embed format reveals YouTube’s preference for an HTML 5 world.  Users can still use the orginal <object>-based embeds by selecting the “Use old embed code” selection if desired.

In terms of compatibility, at least one WordPress blogger — the author of this post — indicates their blog’s backend stripped the iFrame tag out, making the new style unusable.  Granted, the iFrame removal could be because of any number of WordPress plugins — the SEO plugin is one suspect — nevertheless, there are some compatibility issues with YouTube’s new format.

Considering iFrames aren’t necessarily SEO-friendly to begin with, something the ReelSEO blog discusses here, perhaps the WordPress bloggers of the world should continue using the old embed style, or perhaps disable their SEO plugins.

More from ReelSEO:

And with that, YouTube is firmly in the HTML 5 corner, although, they are kind enough to throw a bone to those who prefer the old embed format. 

I’m looking at you, WordPress bloggers.

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Most WordPress users can easily find and install plugins from the official directory via Plugins -> Add New in their Dashboard, but some may need to complete a manual installation. To install a plugin manually, download it and then use an FTP or SFTP client to upload the decompressed archive to your blog’s /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Once the plugin has been uploaded, you should be able to activate it from the Plugins section of your Dashboard. If it isn’t appearing, the plugin may have additional installation instructions.

Plugins are not free from the dangers of malware, and can sometimes be far more dangerous than themes. Unfortunately, the plugin directory does not have a volunteer review staff like the theme directory does, so users need to be extra careful. Always check a new plugin’s tagged support topics before installing it and run the Exploit Scanner plugin before activating it. If it finds any results for the plugin files in the “Level Severe” category, just delete the plugin and find another. If you are ever uncomfortable with any of the results from the Exploit Scanner plugin, delete the plugin and find another.

Plugin malware is a serious issue. By simply installing and activating a plugin, you could instantly lose all of your data, subjecting your visitors to invasive scripts, or leaving your blog open to malicious attack.

To be safe, always run the Exploit Scanner plugin before activating a new plugin.

This is the third entry in our hopefully long-running WordPress FAQ series. What did you think, and what questions would you like us to answer next?

Continue reading to find out what is this WordPress plugin (actually it works on all sites) about, what it does and why do you need it.

So What Exactly Is It?

Popup Domination is a powerful WordPress plugin for attracting email subscribers. It creates a lightbox based pop-up window which helps to increase opt-in email list conversion on your blog. Popup Domination installation comes together with 4 beautiful high converting themes, 15 different colour combinations and 8 button variations.

The good thing is that you don’t need any knowledge coding at all. Just like most of the WordPress plugins this one ain’t no exception and does all the work for you. Simply customize the settings and with a click of a button, your interactive plugin is ready.

Why Do I Need It?

If you want your online business to be successful, having a large audience is crucial. And as you may know, reaching and building trust to your audience isn’t an easy job. One of the best ways to do build it is to have a mailing list. This is where Popup Dominations comes handy. The principle is that you have to be able to give something to your readers, so they would be interested in sharing their email with you.

Here are some of the features you’ll find on Popup Domination 2.0:

• It will work on any website

Unlike 1.0 version, in this one there are included both a WordPress plugin and a brand new standalone version which means you can enable PopUp Domination on any website.

• 7 themes and 15 different color options

The standard Popup Domination installation comes with 7, yes 7 themes and 15 different color schemes. All of which are unique and fully customizable.

• Works with any mailing list provider

All you need to do is input the HTML generated and you are good to go.

• Works with any caching software

Developers had listened to feedback and worked hard with this feature.. Theres more themes, more options and more functionality. You can check out the video on their homepage for a complete run down of the new features.

• Page Selection

Within the WordPress plugin you can choose exactly which pages and posts you want PopUp Domination.

• Impression Counter

Only show PopUp Domination once you have receive a certain number of impressions from a particular user.

It’s really easy to set-up and customize. You can fully customize this plugin without leaving your WordPress admin panel. Templates, colors schemes and text fields are easily editable. If you’re more experienced user, you can access to CSS files and edit the plugin beyond recognition.

Summary

Briefly, I want to say that Popup Domination is a great and worthy plugin which will be appreciated by marketing veterans and rookies as well. Easy customization and user-friendly design makes it one of the best this kind of plugins in the game. It can be priceless investment to your online business. So whether you are an online marketing expert with years of experience or just a newcomer, Popup Domination is the must have a thing for your toolkit.

I have bought and tested Popup Domination myself, not using for 1stwebdesigner yet because still I think it’s a bit too proactive way for getting subscribers, but very effective one, I think it would be good to not receive this pop up once you’ve subscribed, but I don’t know if there is any chance to recognize already subscribed person. But for short time effective marketing definitely must have plugin in your toolbox.

If you want to get Popup Domination and learn more about it, you can do it by clicking here. It’s not a cheap plugin though, now it costs 77$, but true marketers will evaluate its functions and will do anything to increase their mailing list to eventually increase their own earnings.

If you have a bigger subscriber count, usually it also means better chance to actually sell something to them. The same is with website –  if you have a great website but no one knows about it, you don’t earn anything and don’t have any exposure. Do something about it and convert your loyal readers to even more loyal followers in your mailing list.

I hope this informative promotional article helped you to evaluate good plugin and email marketing at all! Take care!

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Below are some of the most useful and popular WordPress plugins that will let you and your readers promote your articles easily.

Digg Digg WordPress Plugin

As the name suggests Digg Digg plugin allows you to post articles on various social media networks. Currently it integrates with Digg, Reddit,  Dzone, Yahoo Buzz, Twitter, TweetMeme, Topsy, Facebook Share / Like, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Google Buzz buttons, Designbump,The web blend and BogEngage. Other than that you can place your buttons according to your theme’s display.

Social Media Page

Social Media Page is another WordPress plugin that serves the same task. Once installed you can easily add a list of links to your social media profiles on a page or post of your choice through the use of a simple tag. In addition to that a widget is also added so that you can display this list of links in the side menu of the site.

ShareThis

ShareThis is a very popular WordPress plugin currently used by over 850,000 sites. This plugin allows users to share content through email and moer than 50 social networkings including Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Buzz and Facebook.

Gregarious

Offering great interface Gregarious WordPress Plugin allows seamless integration between your WordPress Blog and social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Reddit and more.  It is the ultimate social bookmarking plugin for WordPress users.

AddToAny

AddToANy is dedicated to helping people around the world share, bookmark, and email articles using mutilple social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and many more. It comes with a customizable Smart Meny, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.

If you have more suggestion do not hesitate to use the comment box below and mention them.

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If you have tried any of them, how did you get on? Any recommendations?

Visit Link: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/11/03/awesome-wordpress-plugins-to-empower-your-visitors/

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Now that question actually puzzles me. Because SEO is already a very big part of WordPress without spending a dime on any premium theme and certainly high-cost SEO experts – I thought everyone knew that.

Apparently not.

Well, all is not lost because here’s the truth: All you need are the right WordPress plugins, the correct permalink settings, a targeted keyword-rich post or page title, and the same keyword repeated 2 or 3 times in the content depending on the length of it. The content should be original (not spun or scraped content!) and chances are you can rank very well and very quickly in your targeted niche. And it cost you nothing but your domain name, your hosting, and a little bit of time to set it all up.

So let’s take a look at those easy SEO optimization steps to improve your blog’s visibility:

1. 1. The plugins: Install Platinum SEO (or similar), Google XML Sitemaps,FD Feedburner Plugin , and a social bookmarking plugin – (any one is good – I’ve tried most of them).
2. 2. Permalink Settings: Go into your WordPress Dashboard and under Settings–>Permalinks, select the custom structure and type in either of these two settings: /%category%/%postname% if you want the category and post/page name in your permalink or just /%postname%, the post/page name.
3. 3. A keyword-rich title and keywords in your content: what is your post or page about? Research the different keywords you can use to describe your content. There are free keyword research tools, such as Google’s own that won’t cost you a penny. Repeat your keywords a couple of times in the content.

The last thing you need to do is create a Google Webmaster account and a Feedburner account. When you do spend some time in there getting to know what is inside. There are great tools that you can use to increase your visibility with Google even more.

Oh, and did I mention that all these steps are all free? Well, perhaps not completely free, because it will cost you some time to do them. But if you’re willing to spend a little bit of time setting things up right, then keeping your WordPress blog SEO-optimized, updated and maintained will be a snap.

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If you are a WordPress user, then you definitely know the importance of keeping backup copies of our files and database because there is always a risk of losing your data. How? your site might get hack (WordPress security level or server security level). What’s worst? You could lose all the files and databases. There are a lot of ways to strengthen your WordPress blog’s security but we still think one of the best way is to backup regularly so that you can re-install your files or content and roll backed to your post in no time if the site is compromised.

Here, we have chosen some of the plugins and services which can be helpful in terms of backing up your WordPress files and databases. Full list after jump.

WordPress Plugins

These plugins are used to take a back up of your critical data, files, tables and save them to your archives or any of the online storages for free or for a nominal price. Schedule the storage automatically and manage your entire database with these.

WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup plugin creates a backup of your core database tables and also other tables in the database and gives you an option of saving your back up data either to your server or download to your computer or save get you backup file e-mailed to you.

Bei Fen – Backup plugin

Bei Fen backup plugin gives you the choice of taking a backup of either your complete WordPress installation or only the files or only your database and the backups can be restored with a single click.

WP Time Machine

This plugin creates an archive of your files and uploads and data and provides a connection to any of the free online storages like Dropbox, or Amazons AWS S3 and also to an FTP. You could exclude your cache directories or some of your MySQL tables which don’t start with your table prefix.

WordPress Backup

WordPress Backup plugin is used to zip your back up your images, current theme directory and your plugin directory.

WP S3 Backup

With WP S3 Backups take a backup of the parts automatically and install them to Amazon S3, a service to safeguard your important files at a comparatively lesser price.

WordPress DB Manager

A complete plugin to optimize, repair, backup, restore, and delete the backup database and also to run your queries is offered by WP-DB Manager. Also manages the automatic scheduling of the back-up and manages your whole database.

WordPress EZ Backup

An administrator plugin WordPress EZ Backup create backup archives of your entire site, archives of any MySQL database chosen by you. You can view the Live log file of your backup procedure. Has an interactive Help & Auto Settings of your web server configuration.

DBC Backup plugin

DBC Backup plugin schedules daily database backups with the wp cron system where your backup file is protected by a small hash key and are transferred to an export directory, .ht access and an imdex.html file. You can compress your backup as Gzip or Bzip2.

BackWPup

Other than taking a backup of your WordPress Blog database and files, BackWPup plugin optimizes checks & repairs the database, stores the backup either to Folder, FTP Server, Amazon S3, RackSpaceClous and sends a log or backup via e-mail.

Online Storages

Taking a backup of your data means storing it in a secure place which should also retrieves your data at a much faster rate. These online storage options helps you keep a check on your data where you can share, upload and edit your files.

Dropbox

Sync your files or your WordPress data of any size online automatically and also when new changes and files are detected and store them on Dropbox’s secure servers. Share and control the access of your files with other people. Get a storage space of 2GB for free and up to 100 GB for premium usage.

IDrive

IDrive offers you the facilities of Automatic and Continuous Backup, True Archiving, Versioning, Mapped Drive Backup and more with an online backup space of 2GB for free in IDrive Basic Package and a space of 150 – 500 GB for premium users and a 50GB pack for multiple users for Business under the IDrive Pro package.

Humyo

Humyo offers a free online storage space of 5GB for media files and 5GB for non-media files where you can access these via web only, but once you upgrade your account to Premium one, you get 100 GB storage along with automatic backup, sharing, uploading & downloading files, access via web, phone, PC, extra secure SSL encryption at a price of $69.99 per year.

Binfire

Binfire offers File hosting, Collaboration and Project Management site in its free version with 10GB storage space, file uploads of 200 MB, Private & Project web folder, File locking, Member permissions, Whiteboards, Status reports, Intuitive tasks & Milestones for projects and more.

Backup Services

The Backup services take a backup of your blog, and store them securely and restore them in case of a crash and provide you with many other services like upgrading your versions, giving you the authority of controlling your data, migrating to a new server and more.

blogVault

blogVault creates a backup of your blog which includes the full posts, comments, images, plugins, themes and style sheets by copying them into its secure and robust servers which lets you restore the contents any time easily.

Backupify

Backupify is a service to backup your archives, cloud accounts, SaaS data, WordPress data and social media files on a daily basis to the Amazon S3 cloud with great security and a data duplication policy. You could not only backup your data but also control your data independently.

Backup Buddy

Backup Buddy schedules and backs up your data to Amazon S3 server or an e-mail or an FTP / FTPS account, Restore your WordPress site with your themes, widgets, plugins etc., on the same server or migrate it to a new server with a new name and domain like Sandbox or Playground site.  Upgrade your newer versions of the plugin in WP Dashboard

Online backup for WordPress

Backup Technology specializes in online backup and disaster recovery and provides on-demand backup through an enterprise level backup service where the data is highly encrypted and compressed and stored in a secure data centre. Provides you an online backup of 50 MB for free with the facilities of locked and email backups.

VaultPress

VaultPress safeguards everything from our plugins, themes, comments, post-revisions with WordPress multi-cloud backups. Updates your blog with hot – fixes and protects them with zero-day vulnerabilities.

myEASYBackup

myEASYbackup plugin performs a backup by creating a single file called dataset which compresses the data in a .zip file format and saves them outside WordPress installation directory. You could download, upload and delete your data sets.

(bellefoong)

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The 2010 WordPress Honors launched earlier this week and is currently seeking submissions and votes for your favorite WordPress plugins, themes, sites, and personalities.

Final voting will begin once the nominees have been announced in mid November, and the winners will be announced in early January.

What’s your take on award ceremonies like this? Will WPHonors show the best that the WordPress community has to offer, or will this be just another popularity content?

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For bigger list however you could check older list with 130 plugins for all needs split in two parts – part 1, part 2.

Over my time of working with WordPress and using it to create websites for clients, I have found that some of the most unique requests I have recieved from clients have been settled by a simple WordPress plugin. We all know the major things needed for every website – From SEO to Analytics, which I will also be including in this article.

Getting Started

For those of you that are new to using WordPress and installing plugins – There are a couple of different ways to do it. The easiest being to use your admin panel under “Plugins” and clicking on “Add New” where you can search for each plugin and install directly from your admin panel. The other way is to use an FTP client such as FileZilla and browse to your WordPress Plugin directory “WP-Content” – Then “Plugins” to manually upload the plugin files.

Remember that after manually uploading your plugin files you will still need to activate them by visiting your admin panel and going to the plugin tab and choosing activate.

The Plugins

Here is my own personal list of my top 10 WordPress Plugins that go along with each personal and client installation of WordPress. Remember also that there are many different variations of some of the plugins, which some people like more or less than the ones I have listed. Through my own personal experience using these plugins and doing my own research the following ones are the ones that have suited me the best and worked for me.

1. Akismet

Akismet Home Page

This one should be a given. This is actually included with every WordPress install by default. You will need to obtain a Akismet API key to use it, but it is on my top list of plugins that are worth using. Make sure to use it on all of your WordPress powered websites to cut back on the spam comments. Although it doesn’t cut out 100% of all spam comments, I myself cannot imagine not having it installed and activated. There are also other plugins that take it a step further and more protect from spam comments, but Akismet is well worth using.

2. All in One SEO Pack

By: SemperFiWebDesign.com – All in One SEO Pack

I have tried and tested many of the other SEO plugins available for WordPress and found this one to work the best for everything I have ever needed. The list of options is almost endless, and the ease of use adds to the list of great features offered by this wonderful plugin. Most of us that currently use WordPress have used this plugin, or probably currently use it now. I would recommend this with each and every WordPress install. If you are looking to really make your website Search Engine Friendly then I would always use this, and take advantage of all the options it has to offer.

3. Contact Form 7

By: Takayuki Miyoshi – Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is another one that has always been high on my list of must have WordPress plugins. Everyone that has created a website knows the importance of having a secure contact form. I have choosen this one as my favorite due to all of the options available for it, along with how easy it is to create and implement forms on any page of my WordPress powered website. I have used this to create large surveys for clients websites, and custom contact forms for times when very special things were needed on the form itself. I want to also mention that using the included .CSS file it is VERY easy to modify the appearance of this plugin on your website to make it fit in with your website.

4. Google XML Sitemaps

By: Arne Brachhold – Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin has been a top performer from the start. We all know the importance of XML sitemaps for SEO purposes, and especially using Googles Webmaster Tools. This sitemap creater runs by itself to always keep your sitemap current, and also submits it to the major search engines. It can also create HTML sitemaps, and .gzip sitemaps as well. Another top one on my list that I think should be added to every WordPress powered website.

5. Secure WordPress

By: SiteSecurityMonitor – Secure WordPress

This has proven to be a great security plugin for WordPress. It use to be individually owned and was recently purchased by SiteSecurityMonitor (SSM) and made a lot better. Below is a brief overview of features directly from SSM.

Secure WordPress:

1. Removes error-information on login-page
2. Adds index.php plugin-directory (virtual)
3. Removes the wp-version, except in admin-area
4. Removes Really Simple Discovery
5. Removes Windows Live Writer
6. Removes core update information for non-admins
7. Removes plugin-update information for non-admins
8. Removes theme-update informationfor non-admins (only WP 2.8 and higher)
9. Hides WP-version in backend-dashboard for non-admins
10. Adds string for use WP Scanner
11. Blocks bad queries
12. Validates your site with a free malware and vulnerabilities scan

6. Secure Admin

By: Ryan Boren and Robert Accettura – Secure Admin

Like Secure WordPress, the Secure Admin plugin adds more security to your WordPress admin panel. I have always used this alongside of Secure WordPress to try and protect each of my WordPress installs. I have done research on both and always used them. I put alot of thought into how much work and effort I had in each of my WordPress powered sites, and thought it only made sense to activate a simple plugin to offer more protection. There are many other security plugins available but some offer the same things. With this one and the above mentioned, they together cover most everything.

7. WordPress Database Backup

By: Austin Matzko – WordPress Database Backup

The WordPress Database Backup plugin is exactly what it says. I have not personally found a more straight forward way of backing up my WordPress site and having so many options to automate the process as well. I always run this on every WordPress site I have, and it has never let me down. I have always set mine up to email me a weekly copy of my website, for those just in case situations. If you are looking for a way to backup your WP database, as well as your published articles and information that you have on your site, then you need this plugin.

8. WP Google Analytics

By: Xavisys.com – WP Google Analytics

Exactly what it says, and if you don’t know about Google Analytics then you don’t know what you are missing. This is the best way to use a plugin to add Analytics to your site. There are other ways (Manually adding it, and you can also do it using your functions.php file) But for the easiest most straight forward way…. The plugin is the answer. This will ensure that your stats can always be seen by you to know what is going on with your site. Great way to monitor the details of your visitors.

9. WP No Category Base

By: WordPressSupplies – WP No Category Base

I found this plugin when I realized that WordPress was making a “Category” directory trailing my domain name, that was being placed before my pretty URL’s I had created. This was throwing me off, and I searched high and low for a way to remove the category base. Using this plugin is as easy as it gets, just install – then activate it, and your done! Works the first time every time, and makes those URL’s look much much better. Great for SEO purposes.

10. White Label CMS

By: VideoUserManuals.com – White Label CMS

One of the best CMS plugins I have found that has so many options. White Lael gives you the option of customizing your WordPress install along with making it more aimed at a CMS instead of just blogging. I have used this numerous times for many purposes and it is worth taking a look at. Great way to make a CMS site, or use it just to customize your WordPress login and Admin panel with a custom logo and branding. Great Plugin!

Other Useful and Unknown Plugins

I have added some of these extra plugins that I have found over time at the request of different clients. As things are asked of me when I am creating a website I start searching and so far (Fingers Crossed) I have always found a plugin to fit my needs. These are all more reasons that I love and recommend WordPress. Here are the extras, along with a description of each. Many of you may already know about these, but the point of this article is partially a reminder, and to show new users to WordPress the power of certain plugins, and also as a reminder to those of you that may be using WordPress and just simply forgotten about some of these lovely plugins.

Web Invoicing and Billing

By: TwinCitiesTech

Great plugin for keeping track of clients and being able to create and send invoices directly from your admin panel. Nice way to keep track of your business needs, and also be able to monitor your income from the invoices. I really like this over other invoice plugins simply because it’s the best. It also will handle recurring payments you setup, and also recurring payments from PayPal. Great if you have a reason to send out invoices to get paid.

TubePress

By: TubePress Plugin

Great plugin to allow you to easily add some content to your website. Set it with keywords and it will add videos directly from YouTube directly to a post or page of your choice. Has options for you to change where the videos come from (also supports other video services like Vimeo) and will let you pull videos directly from a user, keywords, and many other options. Great for tutorial videos on a website of any kind. Awesome way to create more dynamic content to your site. I highly recommend this one and I currently use this on one of my sites as well.

Elastic Theme Engine and Editor

By: Elastic Theme Engine and Editor Plugin

I have played with this a number of times. I am still a little in between on really liking it and not being too sure about it. I do think that if you do not know anything about programming and want to make a custom site, then it is worth playing with. Like anything, it had it’s downside, but overall was really worth playing with. If you are looking to make your own custom WordPress site and don’t know any PHP or CSS then get this plugin, and make your own site easily.

WP125

By: WebMasterSource

This is one of my favorites. If you have a blog that you offer out advertising on, then you need this plugin. There are other plugins aimed specifically at BuySellAds.com, but this plugin is for the individual managing their own ads. It shows details on your admin panel, and can be set to run ads for a set number of days.

WP-Polls

By: Lester Chan

I love this simple plugin. As the name implies, it is for adding a poll to your website. Now I know that there are hundreds of other plugins that do this, but this one is the most simple straight forward that also offered the most options and never let me down. Just for that I will recommend it and keep using it myself. Customize the look and feel of it, while generating different polls over and over. Great plugin for doing exactly what it is suppose to do.

In Closing…

Plugins are a great way to add more functionality to your WordPress powered website - and no matter what you are looking for someone else has thought of it and probably made a plugin for it. I personally think that WordPress is still growing in popularity and being used more and more each day. This helps with the growing community of users supporting more WordPress themes(massive theme collection here) and plugins. If you don’t find what you are looking for then you can always create your own. I hope everyone has enjoyed the article!

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This plugin allows you to transfer your inputs SEO data from one theme/plugin to another. We all know how difficult it can be to switch themes or dump plugins. The fact that themes and plugins store their inputs SEO data differently makes it even harder. This plugin remedies that.

Usage

Just choose what platform your moving away from, and what platform you want to move to. Click “analyze” to see what records and elements are compatible, and click “convert” to make the conversion.

Download

The SEO Data Transporters plugin is hosted at the WordPress Plugins directory. You can download it there.

Installation

1) Upload the entire seo-data-transporter folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2) DO NOT change the name of the seo-data-transporter folder
3) Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4) Navigate to the Tools > SEO Data Transport menu

Supported Themes

1) Builder
2) Frugal
3) Genesis
4) Headway
5) Hybrid
6) Thesis
7) Woo Framework

Supported Plugins

1) All in One SEO Pack
2) Headspace2
3) Platinum SEO

Screenshot

Go to Source

Much has been written over the years about the subject of the use of the nofollow attribute by webmasters. What is “nofollow,” when should it be used, does it benefit the site using “nofollow,” are just some of the questions people ask.

Nofollow meta tags simply means that all outgoing links on a page are not followed by the search engines, in particular Google. These nofollowed links are literally given no link juice value by the search engines. The same thing can be had by nofollows on individual links on any given page.

Google advocate webmasters to use “nofollow” if they have paid links on their sites. If it is discovered a webmaster sells link space then Google can penalize that site because it is viewed as a form of cheating by sending the search engines, and visitors, to sites which may not otherwise deserve to get link juice. Unfortunately of course most people who pay for backlinks require that those links are followed to help their own Page Rank.

Dofollow links are viewed as a sign that the sites being linked to are trusted. In other words if you as a webmaster place a link on your site that isn’t nofollow you are giving it a ‘certain seal of approval’ and you trust that site’s content. This is one of the reasons why probably the vast majority of blog owners use nofollow on their blogs’ comments section. Spammers will be less likely to post a link to their poor-quality sites if they know that they won’t get any link juice, though of course that doesn’t prevent a visitor clicking the link and the second site getting a hit. The more certain way is for the blog owner to remove any comments which appear to be spam.

Incidentally, one of the WordPress plugins is called “Nofollow Case by Case.” Since by default WordPress blogs are nofollow on comments what this plugin does is override the default to make some, or if desired, all, comments dofollow. I do know of a few blogs where this plugin has been installed, though it must be said it does tend to get a lot of few-word “thanks for the post” kind of comments. Having said that, it is currently PR3, and ranked high up in the search engines, so Google must be reasonably happy with it.

As a form of reward, Google themselves suggest either automatically, or manually removing the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who a blog or forum owner believes makes consistently high-quality posts. Again though, if a forum uses dofollow for all of its comments, even though some posts may be of very poor value, that doesn’t necessarily mean Google penalizes the forum. One forum I know of is a PR3, and very popular with the search engines.

What I do find strange is when I read advice that you should make all your outgoing links on a conventional site, or blog, nofollow. If you are linking to an “authority” site which you believe is of value to your readers and worth directing them to, are you really saying that you don’t trust that site?

And finally, the nofollow attribute can be used even with internal links. If you link to a page on your site which has little importance as far as the search engines are concerned, but is one that you want your visitors to see, don’t give it any link juice by making it nofollow.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

NoFollow Importance

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Every once in a while I like to scan the plugins directory on WordPress.org and see what beautiful & useful pieces of code the community comes up with. Here’s a selection of 6 of the latest WordPress plugin releases that caught my attention during the last “scan”.

1. Simple Fields

Plugin description: Simple Fields for WordPress lets you add groups of fields to your edit post page. Simple Fields turns WordPress into an even more powerful Content Management System (CMS).

Required WP version: 3.0+
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

Downlod & more info: Simple Fields

2. Simple Mail Address Encoder

Plugin description: Automatically encodes every e-mail address on posts, pages and sidebar widgets to prevent spam. Simply decodes any previously encoded e-mail address by just clicking the mail link.

Required WP version: 2.7+
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

Downlod & more info: Simple Mail Address Encoder

3. SEO-Tool – Keyword Density Checker

Plugin description: This SEO plugin automatically generate a keyword density report of used keywords and 2-/3-word keyphrases in the pages’ or posts’ content. The statistics will be updated at a specific interval while the author is typing in edit-post and edit-page dialog.

Required WP version: 1.5+
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

Downlod & more info: SEO-Tool – Keyword Density Checker

4. Anthologize

Plugin description: Anthologize is a free, open-source, WordPress-based platform for publishing. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, pull in feeds from external sites, or create new content directly in Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a coherent volume for export in several ebook formats, including PDF, EPUB, and TEI.

Required WP version: 3.0+
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

Downlod & more info: Anthologize

5. FeedBurner Stats by DevMD.com

Plugin description: The plugin enables you to get a great insight into your FeedBurner feed, along with information and statistics about the subscribers, views, clicks, feed item information and chronological statistics right from your WordPres administration panel.

Required WP version: 3.0+
Compatible up to: 3.0.1
Also requires: PHP 5.1 or higher

Downlod & more info: FeedBurner Stats by DevMD.com

6. Members Only Menu Plugin

Plugin description: This plugin allows you to mark a page as “Members Only”. Once this is done, the user must login to view the page. However, you can still add the page to the menu, and it will then ONLY show up if the user is authenticated. That way you can have more items for logged in members on your website.

Required WP version: 3.0+
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

Downlod & more info: Members Only Menu Plugin

Important note

All the above descriptions are provided by the plugins’ authors. At the time this post was published, the latest stable WordPress release was 3.0.1, thus, all plugins are “Compatible up to 3.0.1″. Check out each plugin’s info page to see an updated compatibility as new WordPress versions come out. And remember, always try (if possible) new plugins in a testing environment, on a test installation of your WordPress blog, for safety measures. If anything breaks or you need instructions, please ask the authors for support, I’m simply the messenger.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

As a subscribe reader of Blogsessive, this is my gift to you: a guide to corporate blogging (but not only) that will help you in your blogging adventures! Download now, for FREE!

©2008-2010 Copyright by Blogsessive – Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us, so that we can take legal action immediately.

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There are a lot of sites out there, particularly digital education sites, such as Net Tuts and Blender Cookie, that push out a lot of “premium” content that is only accessible to registered users.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you some of the basics of writing a WordPress plugin from scratch that will allow you to restrict content on your site to registered users. You will be able to restrict complete pages / posts by clicking a check box or just sections of content using WordPress shortcodes.

Note: I will not be showing how to create a paid membership system, or how to integrate this plugin into a paid membership system, such as aMember. This plugin will deal with choosing which content is restricted, but not how users register. It will use the default WordPress user roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Subscriber, and None.

1 – Getting Started – The Plugin Basics

WordPress plugin development is very similar to theme development and can employ many of the same tricks to achieve the end goal.

If you are not at all familiar with WordPress plugin development, I recommend you read Writing a WordPress Plugin from the WordPress codex.

2 – The Plugin Header

The first thing to do, once we’re ready to start writing our plugin, is to create a new file called restrict_content.php and to enter all of the plugin’s necessary meta data, such as name, author, description, url, etc.

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<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Restrict Content
Plugin URI: http://pippinspages.com/freebies/restricted-content-plugin-free/
Description: Restrict Content to registered users only.
Version: 1.0
Author: Pippin Williamson
Author URL: http://pippinspages.com
*/
 
?>

If you upload this file to your wp-content/plugins directory and click Activate from the WordPress plugins menu, the plugin will activate fine, though it won’t actually do anything at this time.

3 – Create the Shortcode

Now it’s time to begin really writing the plugin.

First we are going to create a function that will allow us to use WordPress shortcodes to restrict sections of content like this:

[restrict] . . . this is restricted to logged in users . . . [/restrict]

Paste this below the plugin meta info we entered earlier:

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function restrict_shortcode( $atts, $content = null ) {
   extract( shortcode_atts( array(
      'userlevel' => 'none',
      ), $atts ) );
      if ($userlevel == 'admin' && current_user_can('switch_themes'))
      {
      	return do_shortcode($content);
      }
      if ($userlevel == 'editor' && current_user_can('moderate_comments'))
      {
      	return do_shortcode($content);
      }
      if ($userlevel == 'author' && current_user_can('upload_files'))
      {
      	return do_shortcode($content);
      }
      if ($userlevel == 'subscriber' && current_user_can('read'))
      {
	      	return do_shortcode($content);
	  }
	  if ($userlevel == 'none' && is_user_logged_in)
      {
	      	return do_shortcode($content);
	  }
      else return '<span style="color: red;">Some content is only viewable by ' . $userlevel . 's</span>';
}
add_shortcode('restrict', 'restrict_shortcode');

What does this code do?

It first creates a place for us to store options (in the variable $atts), and a place to store the content contained within the shortcode (in the variable $content).

Next, an option is created called userlevel and it is given a default value of none. This option allows us to define which users will be able to see the content inside of the shortcode.

When loading the content, every visitor’s user status must be checked, and only to those whom have sufficient privileges will the content be displayed. This check is done like this:

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if ($userlevel == 'admin' && current_user_can('switch_themes'))
{
  return do_shortcode($content);
}

This will check whether the user level is set to admin and if the current user has the ability to switch themes. If both of these are true, the content contained in the shortcode will be displayed. If one of the above checks is not true, then this happens:

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else return '<span style="color: red;">Some content is only viewable by ' . $userlevel . 's</span>';

Which will display the message: Some content is only viewable by admins

These two checks are done for every user level.

Lastly, we need to make the shortcode available for use by doing this:

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add_shortcode('restrict', 'restrict_shortcode');

Now we are able to use something like this in our posts / pages:

[restrict userlevel="editor"] . . . this is restricted to logged in users . . . [/restrict]

The available options are:

• admin
• editor
• author
• subscriber
• none (this is the same as using just [restrict] . . . [/restrict] )

4 – Creating the Meta Box

The next step is to add an option to all posts / pages that will allow us to restrict the entire post / page. This is much better than simply wrapping shortcodes around our entire post / page, even though it would accomplish the same thing.

We will do this by adding a custom meta box to our editor screen. This will be done with multiple functions, all pasted just below the code we already have in our restrict_content.php plugin file.

The first function defines all of the options for our meta box:

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//custom meta boxes
$prefix = 'rc';
 
$meta_box = array(
    'id' => 'rcMetaBox',
    'title' => 'Restrict this content',
    'context' => 'normal',
    'priority' => 'high',
    'fields' => array(
        array(
            'name' => 'User Level',
            'id' => $prefix . 'UserLevel',
            'type' => 'select',
            'desc' => 'Choose the user level that can see this page / post',
            'options' => array('None', 'Administrator', 'Editor', 'Author', 'Subscriber'),
            'std' => 'None'
        ),
        array(
        	'name' => 'Hide from Feed?',
        	'id' => $prefix . 'FeedHide',
        	'type' => 'checkbox',
        	'desc' => 'HIde the excerpt of this post / page from the Feed?',
        	'std' => ''
     	)
    )
);

We have now created an option for choosing the user level to which we’d like to restrict the content, and an option to hide the content from being displayed (even as an excerpt) in the feed.

Now let’s actually make the meta box display on the editor screen:

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// Add meta box
function rcAddMetaBoxes() {
    global $meta_box;
	foreach (array('post','page') as $type)
    add_meta_box($meta_box['id'], $meta_box['title'], 'rcShowMetaBox', $type, $meta_box['context'], $meta_box['priority']);
}
add_action('admin_menu', 'rcAddMetaBoxes');

Inside of the add_meta_box command, we are calling all of the options we defined above.

The next step is to make a function that controls how the meta options are displayed. This next function is called by the third variable (rcShowMetaBox) in the above function.

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// Callback function to show fields in meta box
function rcShowMetaBox() {
    global $meta_box, $post;
 
    // Use nonce for verification
    echo '<input type="hidden" name="rcMetaNonce" value="', wp_create_nonce(basename(__FILE__)), '" />';
 
    echo '<table class="form-table">';
 
    foreach ($meta_box['fields'] as $field) {
        // get current post meta data
        $meta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $field['id'], true);
 
        echo '<tr>',
                '<th style="width:20%"><label for="', $field['id'], '">', $field['name'], '</label></th>',
                '<td>';
        switch ($field['type']) {
            case 'select':
                echo '<select name="', $field['id'], '" id="', $field['id'], '">';
                foreach ($field['options'] as $option) {
                    echo '<option', $meta == $option ? ' selected="selected"' : '', '>', $option, '</option>';
                }
                echo '</select>';
                break;
            case 'checkbox':
                echo '<input type="checkbox" name="', $field['id'], '" id="', $field['id'], '"', $meta ? ' checked="checked"' : '', ' />';
                break;
        }
        echo     '<td>', $field['desc'], '</td><td>',
            '</tr>';
    }
 
    echo '</table>';
}

This will now provide us with a nice layout for our “restrict content” options. At the top of this function we have included a hidden input for the nonce verification. This makes sure that no one edits these options who does not have permission.

Finally, we need to have a function to save our data we have inputed. Once again, copy this into restrict_content.php beneath all of the code you have already entered.

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 // Save data from meta box
function rcSaveData($post_id) {
    global $meta_box;
 
    // verify nonce
    if (!wp_verify_nonce($_POST['rcMetaNonce'], basename(__FILE__))) {
        return $post_id;
    }
 
    // check autosave
    if (defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE) {
        return $post_id;
    }
 
    // check permissions
    if ('page' == $_POST['post_type']) {
        if (!current_user_can('edit_page', $post_id)) {
            return $post_id;
        }
    } elseif (!current_user_can('edit_post', $post_id)) {
        return $post_id;
    }
 
    foreach ($meta_box['fields'] as $field) {
        $old = get_post_meta($post_id, $field['id'], true);
        $new = $_POST[$field['id']];
 
        if ($new && $new != $old) {
            update_post_meta($post_id, $field['id'], $new);
        } elseif ('' == $new && $old) {
            delete_post_meta($post_id, $field['id'], $old);
        }
    }
}
add_action('save_post', 'rcSaveData');

I’m not going to go into detail about what exactly this code does as it is rather detailed, but essentially it first checks to make sure the updates were made by a person with permission to do so, then checks to make sure that we’ve made changes. If both of these checks come out okay, the data is saved to the database.

That’s it for the meta box.

5 – User Check #1

It is now time to create a series of functions that will each check for whether or not there is a restriction level set and then display the appropriate content (or lack thereof).

These functions are the first of two user checks we will perform.

Let’s first take a look at what one of these functions look like, then we will put them all together.

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function rcMetaDisplaySubscriber($error = ' ')
{
	$custom_meta = get_post_custom($post->ID);
	$rcUserLevel = $custom_meta['rcUserLevel'][0];
 
	if ($rcUserLevel == 'Administrator' || $rcUserLevel == 'Editor' || $rcUserLevel == 'Author')
	{
		echo 'This content is restricted to ' . $rcUserLevel;
	}
	else
	{
		$error .= "";
		return $error;
	}
}

This function first gets the user level info from the custom meta box we created above and then displays an error message if the user level is set to a value that is above the current user.

Note: the user level of the current user will be determined later.

We need a function like this for each user level, so all together it looks like this:

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function rcMetaDisplayEditor($error = ' ')
{
	$custom_meta = get_post_custom($post->ID);
	$rcUserLevel = $custom_meta['rcUserLevel'][0];
 
	if ($rcUserLevel == 'Administrator')
	{
		echo 'This content is restricted to ' . $rcUserLevel;
	}
	else
	{
		$error .= "";
		return $error;
	}
}
function rcMetaDisplayAuthor($error = ' ')
{
 
	$custom_meta = get_post_custom($post->ID);
	$rcUserLevel = $custom_meta['rcUserLevel'][0];
 
	if ($rcUserLevel == 'Administrator' || $rcUserLevel == 'Editor')
	{
		echo 'This content is restricted to ' . $rcUserLevel;
	}
	else
	{
		$error .= "";
		return $error;
	}
}
function rcMetaDisplaySubscriber($error = ' ')
{
	$custom_meta = get_post_custom($post->ID);
	$rcUserLevel = $custom_meta['rcUserLevel'][0];
 
	if ($rcUserLevel == 'Administrator' || $rcUserLevel == 'Editor' || $rcUserLevel == 'Author')
	{
		echo 'This content is restricted to ' . $rcUserLevel;
	}
	else
	{
		$error .= "";
		return $error;
	}
}
function rcMetaDisplayNone($error = ' ')
{
	$custom_meta = get_post_custom($post->ID);
	$rcUserLevel = $custom_meta['rcUserLevel'][0];
 
	if (!current_user_can('read') && $rcUserLevel == 'Administrator' || $rcUserLevel == 'Editor' || $rcUserLevel == 'Author' || $rcUserLevel == 'Subscriber')
	{
		echo 'This content is restricted to ' . $rcUserLevel;
	}
	else
	{
		$error .= "";
		return $error;
	}
}

6 – User Check #2

The second user check is the one that is going to run inside of the WordPress loop. Even though I’ve label it User Check #2, it’s actually the first check that is performed. It is run from within the WordPress loop.

Let’s take a look at it, then we will dissect it. Copy the code below into the bottom of your plugin file.

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function checkUser()
{
 
	if (current_user_can('read'))
	{
		if (current_user_can('upload_files'))
		{
			if (current_user_can('moderate_comments'))
			{
				if (current_user_can('switch_themes'))
				{
					//do nothing here for admin
				}
				else
				{
					add_filter('the_content', 'rcMetaDisplayEditor');
				}
			}
			else
			{
				add_filter('the_content', 'rcMetaDisplayAuthor');
			}
		}
		else
		{
			add_filter('the_content', 'rcMetaDisplaySubscriber');
		}
 
	}
	else
	{
		add_filter('the_content', 'rcMetaDisplayNone');
	}
 
}
add_action('loop_start', 'checkUser');

This is a linear capability check that first tests to see if the logged-in user has the minimum permission level, and if they do, it proceeds onto the second permission level check. At each stage the user either passes or fails.

One of the important things to notice with this user check is that all users, except for administrators, end up having a filter applied to the the_content() function. These filters tie directly into the functions we wrote in the above step with User Check #1.

User Check #2 allows us to determine the permission level of the current user and pass them to the correct function in User Check #1, which will filter the content accordingly.

Now that we have performed both of the user checks, we only have two more functions.

7 – Add Filter to Feed Header

This next function will add a small content filter to the top of all the WordPress feeds that will allow us to hide content from the feed if a post/page is restricted.

At the bottom of your file, put:

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function rcCheckFeed()
{
	add_filter('the_content', 'rcIsFeed');
}
add_action('rss_head', 'rcCheckFeed');

8 – Check for “Hide from Feed”

The last thing we need to do to finish up our plugin is to add a small function that will check whether the “Hide from Feed” option is turned on. If it is turned on, we then need to display a message like “This content is restricted to Editors“. If it is not turned on, we do nothing but display the regular content.

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function rcIsFeed($error = ' ')
{
	$custom_meta = get_post_custom($post->ID);
	$rcUserLevel = $custom_meta['rcUserLevel'][0];
	$rcFeedHide = $custom_meta['rcFeedHide'][0];
	if (is_feed && $rcFeedHide == 'on')
	{
		echo 'This content is restricted to ' . $rcUserLevel . 's';
	}
	else
	{
		$error .= "";
		return $error;
	}
 
}

That’s it! Your Restricted Content plugin is complete!

9 – Going Further

The first thing to do, of course, is to give your new plugin a thorough test run. Next is to extend it to have further capabilities, such as restricted categories.

The complete version of this plugin is available as a free download from my site.

Enjoy!

WordPress plugins are hot. CodeCanyon – Envato’s marketplace for code monkeys – has recently started selling them, and WordPress fans are coming out of the woodwork to buy them up. So, since we know you’re hungry, here’s a list of the top 15 premium WordPress plugins from CodeCanyon and around the Web. If we haven’t included your favorite, please let us know about it in the comments.

1. WPST – Advanced WordPress Ticket System Plugin

WPST is a support ticket system for your WordPress site. You can add admin, staff and users to the ticket system without adding them to WordPress. The system includes automatic emails, departments, avatars, advanced password reset, banned users, and multiple attachments.

Price: $27

2. Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a full-featured premium form management plugin for WordPress. It includes conditional forms, email notification, custom fields, validation, predefined choices and scheduling. Try this full-featured demo.

Price: $39, $99, $199

3. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy makes it easy to backup your site to Amazon S3, FTP or email, and just as easy to restore or migrate your site when necessary – even to a server with a different domain and database. And yes, it backs up everything: the SQL database, plugins, files, themes, scripts, and everything else in the WordPress database and directories.

Price: from $45

4. Lowrider Triple Slider

Lowrider Triple Slider is an attractive and non-traditional slider for WordPress. Check out a preview here. Besides looking great and having a title that rhymes, Lowrider also lets you drag and drop images, and hook a blog post to each slide.

Price: $22

5. Events Calendar Pro

The Events Calendar Premium plugin for WordPress enables you to rapidly create and manage events using the post editor. Features include Google Maps integration as well as default templates such as a calendar grid and event list for streamlined one click installation. Check out the full screencast here.

Price: $32

6. WP e-Commerce

An easy to install e-commerce solution for WordPress, WP e-Commerce is worth looking at. It includes one page checkout, multiple payment options, integration with social networking, and a range or storefront styles. You can extend the functionality of the plugin with premium upgrades.

Price: Free download, pay for premium upgrades

Premium upgrades cost between $10 and $100, and can be found here.

7. WPTickets – An Advanced Tickets System

WPTickets is another ticket plugin worth checking out. Set it up with the categories you you’d like your users to choose from, and they can select the priority and status of their ticket. Users are notified once their question has been answered.

Price: $22

8. WPReviewEngine

WPReviewEngine makes it easy to build powerful review sites quickly. You can review anything from restaurants, hotels, and ski resorts to web hosts and computer software. Features include star ratings, thumbnails and external URLs.

Price: $99.95

9. DDSliderWP – 11 Transitions – Slide Manager Panel

DDSlider lets you manage your slides the way you want, without depending on pages and posts. Check out this screencast to see it in action.

Price: $22

10. Post Validator

Are you busy running multiple sites, and don’t have time to moderate every detail about a post before you publish it? Post Validator is what you need. It allows you to require specific conditions before a post is approved, including required fields and post length.

Price: $17

11. PluginBuddy Mobile

PluginBuddy Mobile is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to easily build an iPhone version of your site in minutes using the built-in style manager, mobile-ready themes and custom header uploader.

Price: From $45

12. Twitter Widget Pro

This Twitter plugin has a ton of options, including multiple Twitter accounts, display of avatars, names and times, automatic linking of hash tags, Twitter users and links, and caching support. Check out this screencast to see it in action.

Price: $14

13. SocialPress

Use social power on your blog with SocialPress, a plugin that lets visitors share your posts and pages on their favorite social network. You can define which networks and icons to use, and see which links your users clicked in Google Analytics.

Price: $17

14. WordPress Newsletters Plugin

The WordPress Newsletter Plugin is an email marketing plugin for WordPress which allows you to gather unlimited email subscribers, organized into multiple mailing lists. History emails and email tracking statistics show you how many of which emails you have sent out and how many of those were read. Email notifications to the administrator keep you up to date on all events like when someone unsubscribes.

Price: $49.99

15. WP Envato

And finally, the perfect plugin for Envato marketplace authors. WP Envato displays your most recent Envato items on your own WordPress blog, helping you gain maximum exposure. Just install the plugin, drag and drop the widget to the sidebar, enter your username, and you’re up and running. Check out a live preview here.

Price: $17

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16 Found Fridays, and there’s no sign of slowing down – thanks in large part to the openness and talent of the online design community. Side note: 16 was the number of Joe Montana, greatest quarterback ever. Anyway, this week’s finds include a great list of design books to read (it’s summer; go read in the sun!), a cool USB keychain drive made from recycled bicycle tubes, brilliantly designed coffee packaging, a great list of time-saving apps for web designers, and the first of what I’m sure will be many WordPress plugins for the new custom post type feature in WP 3.0. Read on, readers!

50 Must-Read Design Books to Inspire

I am an unabashed design nerd. After a hard day’s work designing, it’s not uncommon to see me drinking tea out of my Pantone mug while reading a book related to – you guessed it – design. This post has a whole bunch of worthwhile design books; check ‘em out and get reading!

Tube: USB Drive Keychain

(via swiss-miss)

I know, I know, there are myriad ways to transport your files these days. There’s apps for iPhone like Airsharing; there’s Dropbox and many others. But the good ol’ USB key is holding fast: check out Tube, a USB keychain drive that is made from recycled bicycle tubes. Green, well-designed and good for us combo bike/design nerds.

One Village Coffee Packaging Design

I love coffee. In fact, as I type this I’m realizing I’ve incorporated my favorite things into this week’s Found Friday (that being design, obviously, but also bikes and coffee). This packaging design by Able is definitely one worth checking out. So good.

50 Powerful Time Savers for Web Designers

Smashing Magazine always have good posts & round-ups, but this one is worthwhile if only for the free online app Bounce. Check out the list if you’re a web designer – there’s sure to be many others in there you’ll find useful. I also am going to start using LaunchList on the regular.

WordPress Custom Post Types UI Plugin

This is for the developers and bloggers out there: custom post types is a new feature in WordPress 3.0. This plugin wraps a simple UI around it; probably one of the easier ways to begin working with the feature. Try it out and let me know what you think!

That’s it! See you on Monday.

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No web design trend has become as wide-spread and as popular recently as the content slider, they are everywhere! And rightly so, not only do they offer a marvelous method for displaying a lot of content in such a minimal space, they are also a great way to highlight your best and most popular articles and content. And on top off all that, with the correct image selection and well chosen content they look great as well.

When you take the most popular current web trend (the sliders) and mix it with the most popular CMS (WordPress), you just know there is going to be a bunch of free plugins you could easily use. And that is what we focus on in this post, 10 of the best free Content Slider WordPress Plugins.

Front Slider WordPress Plugin

Front Slider, with its smooth sliding effect, will allow you to display an unlimited number of posts including images and thumbnails. You can set the speed, duration and whether or not to allow it to auto-rotate. Overall its very easy to customise and can be integrated into most WP themes with ease.
Front Slider WordPress Plugin »
View the Demo »

vSlider – WordPress Image Slider Plugin

vSlider is a jQuery based image slide show script that can display specific images on your WordPress based website with fading or sliding transitions. It makes use of the core WordPress jQuery library, making it very tiny, about 20 kb, and you don’t have to have any knowledge of coding for using it!
It can use images from your posts using custom fields or scanning for images in the post to feature your latest posts from a specific category (for example a featured category), this way with every new post the slider will automatically update it self.
vSlider – WordPress Image Slider Plugin »
View the Demo »

SlideDeck WordPress Slideshow Plugin WP

SlideDeck is a new way to display rich content on websites and blogs. It delivers a better user experience by removing the information overload and providing a fun, quick and beautiful slider for users to interact with your blog posts and other content.
The SlideDeck WordPress plugin allows you to easily create a content slider widget or slideshow on your WordPress blog without having to write any code. Just create a new slider with the SlideDeck control panel tool and insert the widget into your post via the WYSIWYG editor with the TinyMCE plugin SlideDeck picker.
You can also create a dynamic slider by using the Smart Slider function. Just choose your blog post criteria (recent, popular, featured), select a theme, set your options and viola, you have a dynamically updated slider in seconds! Users can now visually experience your blog posts.
SlideDeck WordPress Slideshow Plugin WP »
View the Demo »

WP Slideshow Gallery

WP Slideshow Gallery is a flexible and easy to configure JavaScript powered slideshow gallery showcase for WordPress.
WP Slideshow Gallery »
View the Demo »

Featured Content Gallery Plugin

Completely customizable, the Featured Content Gallery is very easy to integrate. Choose to automate the plugin and simply add a custom field to each post or page you want to display and the gallery will show the image, an auto-generated thumbnail in the upper carousel, and the title and first few lines of page/post text. Advanced options allow inclusion of custom thumbnail images, text, gallery styles and transitions.
Featured Content Gallery Plugin »
View the Demo »

Frontpage-Slideshow for WordPress

There are no limits to how many slides Frontpage-Slideshow will allow, it will automatically start when images are preloaded and will retrieve automaticaly all information to show depending on global parameters. All aspects can be easily customized: sizes, colors, background-images, transitions, durations, parts to show and preload animations.
Frontpage-Slideshow for WordPress »
View the Demo »

Featurific, The Terrific Featured Item Slideshow!

Featurific, The Terrific Featured Item Slideshow! »
View the Demo »

Smooth Slider – Slideshow Of Featured Posts

Smooth Slider is a free, feature rich and easy to customise and style WordPress Plugin that assigns a post as featured posts on a blog and then create a slideshow with them to show at any location on a blog.
Smooth Slider – Slideshow Of Featured Posts »
View the Demo »

WordPress Content Slide Plugin

Content Slide a WP plugin to create fully customizable jQuery fading image slideshows/sliders anywhere within your WordPress site. Custom options include slideshow size, color, style and more, much more.
WordPress Content Slide Plugin »
View the Demo »

Coin Slider 4 WordPress

Coin Slider 4 WP will show your featured posts as an image slider and rotate them using unique effects provided by jQuery’s Coin Slider. Implementation is very easy, after you download and activate this plugin, just paste one line of code in your template and Coin Slider 4 WP is ready to use.
Coin Slider 4 WordPress »
View the Demo »

Featured Posts Slideshow WordPress Plugin

This basic, yet smooth, slider plugin can be easily incorporate into your WP theme. In the admin overview you can set the category, the number of posts, and easily customise it.
To view the images in the slideshow, you must create a custom field with the key "thumbnail" and with the direct link to the picture as value.
Featured Posts Slideshow WordPress Plugin »
View the Demo »

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Go to Source

WordPress plugins give you an amazing ability to extend the power of WordPress. You can easily install and start using any of the thousands of plugins to bring a wide assortment of functionality to your website. There are plugins for e-commerce, SEO, banner ads, Analytics, managing your users, integrating with email lists, showing galleries of images, embedding audio or video, and on and on and on.

Check out the repository of free WordPress Plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. There are also a number of premium (paid-for) plugins that you can by searching Google for “WordPress plugin” plus a keyword describing what you are looking for.

But they don’t do you any good if you aren’t using them! The good news is that finding and installing WordPress Plugins couldn’t be easier. In this How-To article, we’re going to take a step-by-step look at how you can find and automatically install plugins directly from within WordPress. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Log Into WordPress

Go to your WordPress Admin Center just like you would if you were going to add a new page or post and login as an administrator.

Step 2: Go To the Plugins Tab

This will bring up a list of all the plugins that are already installed. You may find a couple in there called ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘Askimet’ even if you never downloaded a plugin before, those come pre-installed with WordPress. At the top of this page you will find a “Add New” button that you can click to start searching for the plugin you want to include.

Step 3: Find Your Plugin

If you are looking for a specific plugin, then you can just search for the name of the plugin. You can also search more general terms to try to find a plugin for a particular need you have on your site. For example, let’s look at the Exclude Pages plugin. This simple, but endless useful, plugin lets you create pages that do not appear in your typical navigation. This is great for creating pages such as a Thank You page (for after someone submits a contact form for instance) where it doesn’t make sense to have visitors navigating directly to. To find this plugin, just search for “Exlude Pages” and you it should be at the top of the list.

Step 4: Install the Plugin – Automatically!

Under the “Actions” column you will find a link called “Install”. Click that link to see more information about that plugin and to install it. You’ll want to make sure that the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress, though plugins will generally work fine for later versions as well. You’ll also want to check that the Average Rating is pretty decent, that the plugin has been downloaded a significant amount of times, and that they plugin author updates the plugin somewhat regularly. These are all good signs that the plugin is still actively maintained and should work without any problems.

When you are ready to install the plugin simply click the Install Update Now button. This will automatically start the process of downloading and installing the plugin into your WordPress. You just need to click the “Activate Plugin” link to start using the plugin.

Step 5: Use the Plugin

Different plugins are controlled in different ways. Most of them will create a new option under Tools or Settings to control the plugin options, others will create their own tab in the Admin Center, and some just add a new option somewhere within the Admin Center. In our example using the Exclude Pages plugin, we can navigate to a page via Posts > Edit (or Add New) and see the new Panel called ‘Exclude Pages’ where you can click the checkbox to either include or exclude that page from the general navigation. Simple!

It’s that easy. You can now search through the thousands of available plugins to add all kinds of functionality to your WordPress site. Did in and have fun!

Philip Light is the founder of the WordPress WebKit. We’re here when you need help with WordPress. Learn from our WordPress Video Tutorials, Guides and Resources or use our Professional Services when you need a helping hand from a WordPress Professional.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How To Automatically Install WordPress Plugins

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Here are a few plugins that I think deserve more attention. These will probably be more useful to power-users who really want to tweak their WordPress site, but I encourage everyone to get their hands dirty every once and a while and get creative with their installs. Unless otherwise noted, these should work with with both WordPress 2.92 and WordPress 3.0.

Widget Logic

This gives every widget an extra field in which you can specify WP’s conditional tags. What this means is that you can have certain widgets appear on certain pages but not others. For example, I have my blogroll set to only appear on my front page.

SEO Friendly Images

This plugin can automatically add alt text to any image that doesn’t have one already. You can use the post title or the name of the image. This is great if you have a blog with lots of images that were never properly tagged and you don’t have time to go through and change them all by hand. It can also override WordPress’s default alt text – this would be useful if you have a group blog where one or more contributors frequently neglects to put any sort of alt text into their images.

AStickyPostOrderER

I’ve only recently discovered this plugin, and I’m totally in love with it. It lets you sticky or order posts within a tag or category. I’m experimenting with using this plugin to sticky “portal” or “best of” posts to the top of certain tag archives.

Domain Mirror

This is an amazing plugin that lets you have different domains, titles, and taglines for the same WordPress install. If for some reason you don’t want to use redirects, you can use this plugin to host mirror sites from the same install. You can see it in action on the plugin authors pages lightpainting.org and mcaleavy.org.

Headspace2

Platinum SEO Pack and All-in-One SEO Pack usually get all the attention, but Headspace2 is worth some special attention. It gives you far more (possibly too much) control over your WordPress site’s title and meta-description tags. Some users will find it overkill. I like it because it lets me set descriptions for category and tag pages. Note: This doesn’t seem to work with WordPress 3.0 yet.

All security plugins

I also think pretty much all WordPress security plugins are underrated, which is why I’ve been covering that subject.

What plugins do YOU think are underrated?

As before, I’ll emphasize a few things:

1. Your WordPress security is only as good as the security on your local computer. If you’re not running good antivirus and anti-malware software or are using an insecure wireless connection, none of this will matter.
2. Likewise, if you’re not keeping your WordPress install updated, none of this will matter.
3. I should have at least mentioned this in my previous security article but didn’t: your WordPress security is also only as good as your web server’s security. Since the audience for these tutorials is beginners, I’m going to assume that you don’t have a lot of control over your host’s security settings. So I’m not going to say anything else about this other than to look for a reputable host with experience hosting WordPress.
4. Make sure you’re using a strong password. See step 2 of my previous tutorial.
5. I’m going to assume you already know how to install WordPress plugins.

NOTE: I’m writing this guide for WordPress 2.92, the current stable release. All of these plugins seem to work with WordPress 3.0, but I haven’t thoroughly tested them.

WP Security Scan

Let’s start by checking for the biggest security holes first, using the plugin WP Security Scan.

After you install you should see a new “Security” section on the left column of your dashboard:

Let’s click “Scanner” and check our file permissions, the most crucial of security settings in WordPress. Chances are everything will be shaded green, and everything’s ok. However, if anything’s not set correctly it will be highlighted in red. Changing file permissions is beyond the scope of this tutorial – contact your web host if you need to change anything.

Next, let’s change our database prefix. This is a “security through obscurity” technique. What we want to do is make your WordPress database harder to exploit by using a database prefix other than the default one – this way any sort of generic, automated attack on the database will likely fail because the hacker will be using the wrong database prefix.

BEFORE ATTEMPTING THIS MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP. I can’t stress this enough. I wrote a tutorial on backing up your WordPress tutorial. Even if you don’t use the plugin I describe there, make sure you’ve got a good backup before proceeding.

If you followed my last security tutorial and changed your database prefix during install, you can skip this step.

Otherwise, click “Database” on the Security section. You’ll see something like this:

If you see something other than “wp_” in the field labeled “Change the current” field, then you can skip the next step.

Change “wp_” to something else. It’s highly recommended that you still keep the _ for database readability in the future, however.

Click “Start Renaming”

If this fails, you’ll either have to change the database prefix manually or not at all. Manual changes of the prefix table are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Secure WordPress

Next, let’s install Secure WordPress. After you install it click “Secure WP” in the settings column of the left column of the dashboard. Most of the defaults should be fine, except one: if you’re not planning on using Windows Live Writer, check the box next to that option and click “Save Changes.”

WordPress Firewall

The steps above will help prevent attacks by hiding information about your WordPress install from attackers, making sure the correct file permissions are set, and plugging a few potential security holes. Next we’ll install some plugins that actually stop attacks on your blog.

WordPress Firewall is a handy plugin for preventing a variety of attacks. This one is especially important if you weren’t able to change your database prefix. It’s quite simple – just install it. There should be no need to change the default settings. Important: WordPress Firewall has only been tested up to WordPress 2.8. It has not been tested with WordPress 2.92 or WordPress 3.0 beta 2.

Bad queries

Block Bad Queries, like Firewall, prevents hackers from performing certain common dangerous actions on your site. This one you just install and activate – there are no settings to change.

Chap Secure Login

If you’re not using SSL to login (once again, beyond the scope of this tutorial), you can use Chap Secure Login to encrypt your password. This is especially recommended if you use a lot of different computers to access WordPress, or frequently use public wireless Internet connections. Chap is another remarkably simple plugin – just install it and activate it and you’re ready to go. Note: you’ll get a warning the first time you login after installing. According the plugin developers, this is to be expected.

Login Lockdown

Finally, we’ll want to protect against brute force or dictionary attacks. In an out of the box WordPress installation, users can attempt and fail to login an infinite number of times. This means someone could try thousands of password combinations until they got the right one. Login Lockdown will ban users from IP addresses that have tried and failed to login too many times.

Install the plugin and click “Login Lockdown” in the “Settings” section. You should get an options menu that looks like this:

If you have a hard time typing your password correctly, you might want to set the “Max Login Retriess” a little higher.

I also recommend using the “Mask Login Errors” option. Normally, if a user types an incorrect username WordPress will return an invalid user name error. But if the user types a correct username but an incorrect password, WordPress will return an invalid password error. This gives someone trying to crack your password an extra hint as to whether they at least have the right username. If you use the “Mask Login Errors” option, WordPress will return a generic “username or password is incorrect” error instead.

Ask Apache

Many people swear by AskApache Password Protect. However, I have not been able to get it to work with my host. Your mileage may vary. If I understand it correctly, this plugin adds an additional password to the /wp-admin directory. If you allow open registrations and have lot of users logging in, you might not want to use this plugin.

Conclusion

There’s still much more you can do, such as using .htaccess to protect directories, moving core WordPress files, and monitoring for exploits. Those are things we’ll have to cover in the future. If you have need to harden things further now, please see the Hardening WordPress Codex entry. Remember no (usable) site will ever be completely secure, but if you’ve installed the plugins above your chances of getting hacked will be greatly reduced.

1. All in one SEO Pack

One among the most popular and widely discussed plugins for WordPress. This plugin is easy to use and is compatible with most WordPress plugins. It works as an overall SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizes your titles for search engines and helps you in avoiding duplicate content. This plugin also enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post in your web site.

2. HeadSpace2

A powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. It allows you to tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions, thereby improves your page ranking and relevance on search engines. You can also change the theme or load plugins on specific pages and much more. This plugin is available in multiple languages.

3. Platinum SEO plugin

An all-in-one SEO plugin with a host of features like automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto generation of META tags, avoid duplicate content, SEO optimized post and page titles and a whole lot of other features.

4. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin

This plugin is a fairly modified version of the all-in-one SEO Pack. The unique feature of this plugin is that, it’s directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS. It can auto generate titles, descriptions and keywords when overrides are not present and also avoids duplicate content.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Generates an XML sitemap supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Sitemaps make it much easier for crawlers to see the complete structure of your web site and retrieve more efficiently. It also notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post. You can either choose to write a normal XML file or a zipped file. In case of any errors, you can rebuild the sitemap manually. As a remark, Pingomatic can be used to ping your blog to multiple search engines and other specialized services.

6. Sitemap Generator

Creates a highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered web site. It enables you to choose what to show and what not to including – what order to list the items in. It supports multi-level categories, pages and permalinks.

7. SEO Slugs

Slugs are long filenames assigned to your posts. Ex: http://yourblog.com/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings. This plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’,’in’,’what’,’you’ etc. from the automatically assigned post slug to make it more Search Engine friendly.

8. SEO Post Links

This plugin works similar to SEO slugs. It shortens the post slug and retains only the necessary keywords making it Search Engine friendly. It allows you to choose the longest number of characters in your post slug and also remove unnecessary words.

9. Automatic SEO links

Just choose a word or a phrase for automatic linking and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your weblog. It allows you to set the title, target and rel. for each link. You can also set the anchor text and choose if it should be no-follow or not. If there are repeated words, only the first matched word in the post will be replaced.

10. SEO Smart links

Automatically links keywords and phrases on your blog with corresponding posts, pages, categories or tags on your blog. It allows you to set up your own keywords and a list of matching URLs and also set the no-follow attribute. You can customize it according to your needs through the Administration Settings Panel.

11. WP Backlinks

This plugin helps in making the task of link exchange very simple. Once installed, it puts a small form on the sidebar of your blog that allows webmasters and other bloggers to quickly submit a link for link exchange. The plugin will spider the webmasters site for a reciprocal link and if everything is successful you will have made a successful link exchange. It also has the option of displaying different links on different pages.

12. SEO Title Tag

SEO Title Tag makes it easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress powered blog. It allows you to override a page’s title tag with a custom one, mass editing of title tags, title tags for 404 error pages and much more.

13. 404 SEO plugin

Gives you a smart, customized ‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message and automatically displays links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.

14. Redirection

This plugin helps you to manage 301 redirections, to keep track of 404 errors and also correct them. It also allows you to monitor your redirects by giving you full logs of all redirected URLs and also RSS feed for 404 errors. Automatically adds a redirection when a posts URL changes.

15. Simple Submit SEO/Social Bookmarking Plugin

This plugin adds submission links for Digg, Delicious, Buzz, and Stumble to pages and posts. It allows you to choose whether to display it on home page, post page, all pages etc.

16. AntiSocial

Adding this plugin on your blog allows readers to submit your posts to Digg, Reddit, Del.Icio.Us, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites. It adds a row of buttons with links to the sites and also adds a nofollow to the links. It is actually a hacked version of the famous plugin Socialable.

17. AddToAny

Helps your readers share,save,email and also bookmark your posts and pages. It supports over hundred social bookmarking and sharing sites. It comes with a smart menu that places the services that visitors use a lot at the top of the menu based on their browsing and usage history.

18. SEO Friendly Images

This plugin helps in making your images SEO friendly. It automatically updates all images with a proper ALT and TITLE. ALT acts as a description for your image and TITLE is the tooltip text displayed when the mouse is over the image. These attributes are one of the important part of SEO.

19. Robots Meta

A very easy solution to add robot tags to your WordPress pages. It allows you to add meta tags to individual posts and pages, prevent indexing of your comments, login and admin pages.

20. Nofollow Case by Case

Allows you to selectively apply or remove nofollow attributes to comment links, comment author links, pingbacks and trackbacks and also open the comment links in a new window. If not configured it automatically strips nofollow attributes from all your comment links and comment author links.

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Search engines are the best way to promote, publicize and help people discover your content. Thus, it is very important to optimize your blog or web site so that search engines can discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

WordPress, in addition to providing you with the state-of-the-art publishing platform, also provides plethora of plugins for Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Some plugins are really effective whereas some are not. To help you find the right plugin for your web site, we have composed some of the best SEO plugins.

1. All in one SEO Pack

One among the most popular and widely discussed plugins for WordPress. This plugin is easy to use and is compatible with most WordPress plugins. It works as an overall SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizes your titles for search engines and helps you in avoiding duplicate content. This plugin also enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post in your web site.

2. HeadSpace2

A powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. It allows you to tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions, thereby improves your page ranking and relevance on search engines. You can also change the theme or load plugins on specific pages and much more. This plugin is available in multiple languages.

3. Platinum SEO plugin

An all-in-one SEO plugin with a host of features like automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto generation of META tags, avoid duplicate content, SEO optimized post and page titles and a whole lot of other features.

4. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin

This plugin is a fairly modified version of the all-in-one SEO Pack. The unique feature of this plugin is that, it’s directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS. It can auto generate titles, descriptions and keywords when overrides are not present and also avoids duplicate content.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Generates an XML sitemap supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Sitemaps make it much easier for crawlers to see the complete structure of your web site and retrieve more efficiently. It also notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post. You can either choose to write a normal XML file or a zipped file. In case of any errors, you can rebuild the sitemap manually. As a remark, Pingomatic can be used to ping your blog to multiple search engines and other specialized services.

6. Sitemap Generator

Creates a highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered web site. It enables you to choose what to show and what not to including – what order to list the items in. It supports multi-level categories, pages and permalinks.

7. SEO Slugs

Slugs are long filenames assigned to your posts. Ex: http://yourblog.com/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings. This plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’,’in’,’what’,’you’ etc. from the automatically assigned post slug to make it more Search Engine friendly.

8. SEO Post Links

This plugin works similar to SEO slugs. It shortens the post slug and retains only the necessary keywords making it Search Engine friendly. It allows you to choose the longest number of characters in your post slug and also remove unnecessary words.

9. Automatic SEO links

Just choose a word or a phrase for automatic linking and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your weblog. It allows you to set the title, target and rel. for each link. You can also set the anchor text and choose if it should be no-follow or not. If there are repeated words, only the first matched word in the post will be replaced.

10. SEO Smart links

Automatically links keywords and phrases on your blog with corresponding posts, pages, categories or tags on your blog. It allows you to set up your own keywords and a list of matching URLs and also set the no-follow attribute. You can customize it according to your needs through the Administration Settings Panel.

11. WP Backlinks

This plugin helps in making the task of link exchange very simple. Once installed, it puts a small form on the sidebar of your blog that allows webmasters and other bloggers to quickly submit a link for link exchange. The plugin will spider the webmasters site for a reciprocal link and if everything is successful you will have made a successful link exchange. It also has the option of displaying different links on different pages.

12. SEO Title Tag

SEO Title Tag makes it easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress powered blog. It allows you to override a page’s title tag with a custom one, mass editing of title tags, title tags for 404 error pages and much more.

13. 404 SEO plugin

Gives you a smart, customized ‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message and automatically displays links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.

14. Redirection

This plugin helps you to manage 301 redirections, to keep track of 404 errors and also correct them. It also allows you to monitor your redirects by giving you full logs of all redirected URLs and also RSS feed for 404 errors. Automatically adds a redirection when a posts URL changes.

15. Simple Submit SEO/Social Bookmarking Plugin

This plugin adds submission links for Digg, Delicious, Buzz, and Stumble to pages and posts. It allows you to choose whether to display it on home page, post page, all pages etc.

16. AntiSocial

Adding this plugin on your blog allows readers to submit your posts to Digg, Reddit, Del.Icio.Us, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites. It adds a row of buttons with links to the sites and also adds a nofollow to the links. It is actually a hacked version of the famous plugin Socialable.

17. AddToAny

Helps your readers share,save,email and also bookmark your posts and pages. It supports over hundred social bookmarking and sharing sites. It comes with a smart menu that places the services that visitors use a lot at the top of the menu based on their browsing and usage history.

18. SEO Friendly Images

This plugin helps in making your images SEO friendly. It automatically updates all images with a proper ALT and TITLE. ALT acts as a description for your image and TITLE is the tooltip text displayed when the mouse is over the image. These attributes are one of the important part of SEO.

19. Robots Meta

A very easy solution to add robot tags to your WordPress pages. It allows you to add meta tags to individual posts and pages, prevent indexing of your comments, login and admin pages.

20. Nofollow Case by Case

Allows you to selectively apply or remove nofollow attributes to comment links, comment author links, pingbacks and trackbacks and also open the comment links in a new window. If not configured it automatically strips nofollow attributes from all your comment links and comment author links.

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Mobile internet is an important channel to reach blogs, especially for popular ones. Instead of making mobile web sites, it is easy to change web interface into mobile. Such as you can access your blog admin by visiting m.wordpress.com, if your blog hosted on WordPress.com. But it is not enough, there are great tools to change blogs into a mobile interface.

In this post i covered applications and WordPress plugins which make possible to view and moderate blogs on mobile.  By these tools you can post, manage, and basically do everything you normally would do, and your visitors can discover your blog by their mobile gadgets with pleasure.  I eliminated inactive ones but if you know more than i found please comment them below the post.

1. WpToGo

Author: DanRoundHill

WpToGo is a simple WordPress app for the Android platform. This app allows you to access and post easily to any WordPress blog. WpToGo UI looks clear and it has cool features with its last version 1.9.0.

• Version 1.9.0
  – Tabs
  – Automatic saving of drafts
  – Support for large screen devices
• Version 1.8.1
  – Comment notifications

2. WpTouch

Downloads: 620,842 – Compatible up to: 2.7.1 or higher – Author: BraveNewCode

This plugin is really appreciated for touch screen mobile phones. Your WordPress blog looks cool when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device by WpTouch. WpTouch is more than just a plugin, it transforms your blog into a great experience.

• Supports some common social networking plugins
• Scaling photos, handling post and page styling all by itself — no extra code required.
• Thumbnails in the main view of WPtouch easily (With WordPress 2.9 and WPtouch 1.9.7+)
• Includes sprinkles of jQuery and Ajax visual effects
• Intuitive, polished admin panel and much more…

3. Wapple Mobile Admin

Compatible up to: 2.9.2 – Author: MobileWebJunkie

WordPress Mobile Admin is a WordPress control panel for your mobile. It works on every device and fully featured.  You can write and edit posts, moderate and reply to comments, update and manage tags, categories and pages.

• Add new posts from mobile
• Post pictures from your mobile phone and dictate where they appear on the post
• Post, Page, Tag and Category Management
• Comment Moderation – including replying to comments
• User Profile page – including colour schemes
• Support for gravatars

4. WordPress for Android

Compatible up to: 2.7.1 or higher – Author: WordPress

The official WordPress Plugin for Android. With this plugin you can write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications. WordPress for Android version 1.0.2 has been released to Android Market. Here is the last version updates of Plugin;

• Support for https (including self-signed certs)
• Connection issue fixes for self-hosted WordPress sites
• Fix for local drafts not showing if the user had no posts/pages
• UI tweaks including a new loading bar in the tab view
• Better support for WordPress MU blogs
• Automatic detection of xmlrpc.php w/ fallback to manual prompt

5. WordPress for Blackberry

Compatible up to: 2.7 – Author: WordPress

The official WordPress plugin for Blackberry.  Last version of WordPress for Blackberry is v1.0.

• Ability to record and upload videos from your phone. We now support both 3gp and 3g2 formats on older generation BlackBerry devices
• Introducing support for the HD video service VideoPress
• Streamlined UI and functionality relating to comment moderation
• Overall enhancements to the speed and stability of the app

6. WordPress for iPhone

Downloads: 31,018 – Compatible up to: 2.7.1 – Author: WordPress

This is the official WordPress plugin for iPhone. The plugin lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod touch.  New version 2.2 is in the App Store with improved comment moderation. You can find discussions on forum.

• Reply to Comments
• Edit Comments
• Highlighting the new items in the comment list

7. The WordPress Mobile Pack:

Downloads: 48,948 – Compatible up to: 2.9.2 Author: Assembla

The WordPress Mobile Pack is a useful plugin to mobilize your WordPress blog in different ways.

• Support for mobile widgets
• Mobile traffic analytics via Percent Mobile.
• Ability to list your site @ Mpexo(an online directory of mobile sites)
• Four different mobile themes (Color based)
• WordPress Admin Mobile Interface with limited functions

8.MobilePress:

Downloads: 60,158 – Compatible up to: 2.8.6 Author: Aduity

MobilePress is a free WordPress plugin which turns your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly blog when viewed on a mobile phone.

• Custom mobile themes for different handheld devices and mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Opera Mini and Windows Mobile
• Integrates with Aduity.com for ad serving and analytics
• Comes with a number of free themes optimized for normal handsets and also an iPhone specific theme

9.WordPress Mobile Edition

Downloads: 125,232 – Compatible up to: 2.9.2 - Author: CrowdFavourite

WordPress Mobile Edition shows your blogs interface designed for a mobile device on different mobile browsers. Mobile browsers are automatically detected by this plugin and it is possible to customize on the settings page.

• Compatible with WP Super Cache 0.9(using WP Cache mode)
• Support Google and Yahoo mobile search crawlers but if it is not enough, you can add any others by adding their user agents in the plugin’s settings page
• Customized interface for advanced mobile browsers and special styling to make things “finger-sized” for touch browsers.
• Recent posts shown on every page for easy access
• Customizable design as a WordPress theme

10. Mobify:

Mobify is a free(+premium) service that makes WordPress, Drupal and other websites mobile-friendly. It supports iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and 5000+ other devices.

It is a powerful solution to create a mobile layouts, capturing mobile traffic from social networks and enable regular ad servers (OpenX, DART, Google Ad Manager and others) to serve mobile ads according to the latest MMA standards.

11. W3C mobileOK Checker :

This is a bonus for you to check out if your mobile interface works well. W3C mobile checker is a specialized version of W3C.  It performs various tests to determine its level of mobile-usage.

Let us know if there is something we missed while preparing this article and we will be happy to update the article.:)

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Roughly 3-4% of our readers view this site via a mobile device and that percentage is growing week-to-week. They aren’t very high percentages but it was certainly high enough to prompt me into action – I started considering a mobile version of this site.

Let me start by saying that I didn’t want it look like an entirely stripped down version of the full site. I did want to keep the overall layout of the hompage (thumbnails and excerpt), I wanted the internal post images to be re-sized per screen rather than cropped, and most importantly, I wanted the essence of the site, albeit in smaller mode, to reflect on the mobile version.
I experimented with a few WordPress plugins, for some sites these plugins may be powerful enough, but not for me, I wanted more functionality. I also tried a few web services, I wasn’t too happy with them either.

Eventually I chanced upon the solution while browsing WebDesigner Depot on my HTC Hero (much better than the iPhone!), and there mobile site just looked amazing. It has the appearance of a mobile app while still maintaining the integrity and functionality of the full site. I went digging and found out that they were using Mobify, a web service were you can design a mobile layout for your website exactly how you want.

I since discovered that a lot of design blogs were also using Mobify (Smashing Magazine and Abduzeedo to name a couple), so I jumped in and tried it. You can see from the screenshot below what I have built, and it actually wasn’t that hard nor did it test the patience. Speckyboy-Lite looks not too bad:

Mobify Overview

In case you were wondering what Mobify is all about, have a look at this short video below.

Abduzeedo

Smashing Magazine

SitePoint

Veerle's blog 2.0

Webdesigner Depot

Yanko Design

A List Apart

TheDieline

I love Typography

Jeffrey Way

Six Revisions

Avatar NY

DesignM.ag

WebmasterRadio.FM

kristarella.com

CSS-Tricks

Just Creative Design

Amy Stoddard

MyInkBlog

You might also like…

49 Free Windows Mobile 6+ Smartphone Apps and Services »
45+ Cool Google Android Apps – The Perfect iPhone Replacement »

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As a freelancer who makes a living with WordPress , I couldnʼt help but feel like a sellout using Basecamp when I knew my site was sitting on top of arguably the most extendable and powerful publishing platform on the web. Realizing I could save myself $12 per month and keep in line with my open source philosophy, I set out to create my own self-hosted project management app built on top of WordPress from resources freely available on the web.

There turned out to be a few different options.

WP-Project (download the Plugin)

WP-Project is a plugin written by Nick Ohrn that allows WordPress users to manage projects from within the WordPress admin. You can track clients, track projects by client, add and track tasks by project, and track the amount of time youʼve spent on a project. WP-Project is the most complete solution that Iʼve found for managing projects using WordPress. Itʼs fairly easy to use and has enough features that it could potentially replace Basecamp for a user like me.

However, itʼs not without itʼs quirks and shortcomings, most notably the interface. The Dashboard doesnʼt summarize your information in any useful way. It has a smashed sort of look to it. Thatʼs not to say itʼs bad, but the author knows its shortcomings and clearly intended to improve upon them.

With a better interface, this could be one of the top WordPress plugins for freelancers, period.

P2 (download the theme)

If you donʼt mind stepping outside of the project management box (you know, the one that dictates all project management systems resemble Basecamp), then youʼll see P2 is actually a pretty elegant and minimalist solution.

For those who havenʼt yet seen or used P2, itʼs a theme that allows WordPress to exist somewhere between a traditional blog and Twitter. Once youʼre logged in, you can send messages directly from the homepage via a box that resembles a Twitter status update box, but without the 140 character limit.

Why use P2 for project management? It updates in realtime! This allows for quick collaboration and planning, which is especially handy when dealing with remote workers. In fact, Automattic — the company behind WordPress — created P2 precisely for this reason.

Plain Old WordPress

Thatʼs right, you can use WordPress, unaltered, for project management. To me, this has turned out to be the least frustrating and most efficient system precisely because it uses features already built into the platform, features you already know how to use.

For each project you have, create a category. Itʼs really that simple. You can create a post with whatever information, images, videos or other files you need attached, connect it to the project category and then youʼll be able to sort and comment every task as you go along.

There are probably more elaborate systems for using an unaltered WordPress for project management, maybe with themes designed with the purpose of properly organizing each project category and the posts they contain. It also might be helpful to install one of the many to do list plugins.

For me, though, simple is best and if simple works, why clutter it up with extra “features” anyway?

Conclusion

After checking out all these options Iʼve found the “WordPress-as-Project-Management-System” experience to be extremely lacking. The options are either simple enough that they could be replaced with Google Docs or a simple notebook or so complex that trying to use them is nearly impossible. There simply is no killer project management plugin for WordPress… yet.

I think it is worth noting that the best replacement Iʼve found for Basecamp is an open source project called Project Pier which does almost everything Basecamp does. Itʼs even themeable and they have some pretty slick options. If you want a self-hosted project management solution, Project Pier is definitely the way to go.

Iʼm sure this isnʼt a definitive list of project management solutions for WordPress, though. Maybe youʼve even found something thatʼs better than Basecamp. Maybe youʼre developing it. If you know of any other plugins or methods for using WordPress as a project management system, let us know in the comments!

JD Bentley is a freelance designer, WordPress developer and entrepreneur. His writing can also be found at wageslaverebel.com and jdbentley.com.

We use WordPress.com stats, Statcounter and Google Analytics on this blog. I know that is two too many, but what can I say, I am a stats junky!

Automattic has just rolled out the latest upgrade to its popular self-hosted blogging software – WordPress.org – version 2.9.

This release is called “Carmen” and includes a number of notable additions, including the beginnings of a WordPress image editing tool (cropping, scaling, and rotating), simpler video embeds, and batch plugin updating that should save you a bunch of time.

Writing on the official WordPress blog, founder Matt Mullenweg says that this release saw a total of “over 500 tickets, bugs, and enhancements” addressed. The release comes a little more than six months since the last major WordPress release, version 2.8.

With a major snowstorm expect to blanket the east coast this weekend, thank Automattic for giving you something you can do indoors The release is available for download here. For an in-depth overview of what’s new, you may also want to check out WordPress guru Aaron Brazell’s 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9.

Additional WordPress Resources

WordPress Themes: “Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes“, “30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,” “20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,” “30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,” “10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes”

Plugins: “50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,” “30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers.”

Miscellaneous: “WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,” “The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress“

Tags: WordPress

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Carousel Gallery (jQuery) for WordPress

This plugin builds on the builtin WordPress gallery, and replaces any gallery inserted using the tag with a neat jQuery powered carousel. By carousel it means you can browse through all the pictures in the gallery and they’ll slide from the right to the left and seamlessly start over at the end.

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.

jQuery Image Lazy Load WP

This plugin adds Lazy Load to WordPress. Lazy load delays loading of images in (long) pages. Images below the fold (far down in the page) wont be loaded before user scrolls down.

jQuery Comment Preview

This plugin gives commentors a live preview without taking up any extra screen real estate. It includes a simple HTML editor and you can customize comment preview block as you wish.

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.

jQuery Post Preview WordPress Plugin

If you don’t like WordPress built-in Visual Editor (because it puts a lot of unnecessary tags or by any other reasons), but you want to have live post preview like in Visual Editor, this plugin may be useful for you.

jQuery-Pagebar

jQuery-Pagebar displays a jQuery slider instead of the normal previous/next links.

J Post Slider

This plugin will rotate latest posts from blog, presented with selected image, post headline, and optional post excerpt.

WP-Slimbox2

This plugin implements the excellent Javascript Slimbox2 written by Christophe Beyls which utilizes jQuery.

WordPress Post Information Plugin

This plugin aims to consolidate your post information into a collapsible panel (using jQuery) that can save space on your page.

WordPress jQuery Lightbox

This is WordPress’s version of the jQuery Lightbox Plugin written by balupton.

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When I launched Cats Who Code in June 2008, there was a “Blogging Tips” category, in which I posted some posts about affiliate marketing, blogging advice and making money online tips.
Even we had some really nice articles in there, Cats Who Code is mostly a Web Development blog and most of my readers are more interested in stuff as such as jQuery or WordPress than how to make some money with affiliate marketing.

This is why CWC “Blogging Tips” category quickly became neglected and just a few posts were written. Though, I really like that kind of tip and I also thought that my experience as a blogger could benefit some people. This is why, on October 10, 2009, I decided to create a “sister-site” to Cats Who Code with a content dedicated to blogging tips. Cats Who Blog were born.

As a part of my blogs network, Cats Who Blog features my cat Fisto. The drawning was made by Zira Zulu, who had created mascots for Cats Who Code and WpRecipes as well.

What you’re going to read on Cats Who Blog.com

Cats Who Blog mades its debut a month ago, so I already have some nice articles for you to read. Here a selection:

• How to write a great blog post title
• How to manage multiple blogs efficiently
• 20+ blogs that use the Comment Luv plugin
• 7 essential things to do to protect your name and branding
• How to display Adsense ads only when you want to
• 10 professional WordPress themes to start your online business
• Talking about success : 7 questions to Pavel Ciorici of WpZoom
• How I made delicious.com front page one week after launching my blog
• Top 10 WordPress plugins to monetize your blog

Also, please note that I just published a great post about 10 WordPress hacks to make more money online.

Now, what about the existing “Blogging Tips” category on Cats Who Code? As I now have a blog fully dedicated to that subject, this category will be closed. Existing posts will be moved to Cats Who Blog, or deleted when their quality isn’t good enought in my opinion.
Of course, my readers opinion matters so don’t hesitate to let me know about what you think.

Now, it should be time for you to go to Cats Who Blog and discover it. Or you can already grab the RSS feed so you’ll never miss any of my posts there.
And don’t worry, a very cool Web Development tutorial will be published right here on Cats Who Code on wednesday!

Get 20% off on the MyHomePro Premium WordPress Theme by using this exclusive code: wpcats20.

Introducing CatsWhoBlog.com

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This week on the Friday Fix we feature some amazing illustrators, offer some quick CSS tips and we find some very cool WordPress plugins that you might be interested in.

Twitter Followers

@blogDesigner

@MikeNGarrett

@iBlend

@wpstudios

@Typophile

@DCTH

@jcroft

Web Finds

Fantastic illustrator Ben The Illustrator – just released a special wallpaper for Blog Action Day

Matej Toman – Graphic Designer and Photographer

tstout – Found this amazing illustrator while looking for some cool posters to buy – some amazing work – most of it is sold out which sucks for us, but it gives you a perspective on how amazing the work is

Really cool typography and illustration mix – Behance

Web Articles

This article from thedesigncubicle really ramped up some traffic this week, fantastic write up.

Two great articles from Colorburned – they aren’t new but I thought they offered some great tips.

Maximize Traffic for Your Contest or Giveaway Using Twitter

How to Get Noticed on Twitter

Tutorials

Style comments by alternating row and author in WordPress – Travis J Beck

DomTab – A really nice simple tab system

Adding Custom Google Maps to your Website – This is a cool little trick – STIERN

Do you want to do that with CSS? Multiple Column Lists – Community MX

WordPress Plugins

Testimonial Manager for WordPress – profitPlugs

WP Develop – Some really great WordPress Plugins – check out the Booking Calendar and Category and Page Icons

Submissions

Vote For Art will be similar to Threadless but with a collegiate focus. We are currently hosting the “Design Our Logo” contest which will be the very first of its kind. Members of the Vote For Art community will be able to design and vote for the actual logo to be displayed on our site and on all of the tees sold online and in book stores around the country. Not only will Vote For Art members create all the products sold in our stores, but they’ll also create the brand of the entire community!

Great new type video collaboration from HypeForType and futuredeluxe

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This week we have some very good collection of designed related link from the design community. The 35 Smart Logos With Second Thought To Make You look Twice from the 1stwebdesigner is the one stands out for me. Every week we post useful resources and interesting links with great content that can be useful for design community.

The best way to keep track of all these is by following us on twitter Also you can subscribe to our RSS feed to subscribe to our interesting design post from TheDesignMag as well.

Most Used and Abused Web Design Trends of All Time

3 Powerful Ways To Make Typography Talk On Your Website

10 Essential WordPress Plugins For New WordPress Installation

39 Astonishing Examples of 3D Typography

20 jQuery Plugins Worth Implementing into your Themes

33 Creative Photoshop Tutorials for Manipulating Photos

20 Stunning High Resolution Photoshop Brushes

35 Smart Logos With Second Thought To Make You look Twice

50 Surprisingly Amazing Themes for Blogger

Also Check out our New Facebook Page.

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As always I am trying to mix up topics I cover and this can be considered as continue to previous article. Last time we got inspired and examined many good blog comment form examples, but this time I went further and found 33 WordPress plugins, which can be used effectively to power up and evolve comment form possibilities and security. If programming is not your strongest side, then such automatized plugins will be irreplaceable for your blog! If you know some more effective comment form plugins, feel free to add them in our comment section! For the next time I am thinking about WordPress comment section hack roundup article, so stay with us!

1. Disqus

Disqus (dis·cuss • di(-sku(s’) is all about changing the way people think about discussion on the web. We’re big believers in the conversations and communities that form on blogs and other sites.

2. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

3. WP Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

4. OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID Consumer.

5. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. I featured this plugin some time ago already, but this is totally related to comments.

6. Comment Rating

Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently.

7. Twitter Avatars In Comments

Self explaining comment title, plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.

8. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.

9. TinyMCEComments

This plugin turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up, without the need of another separate installation. Functions that only available to writers like adding images were removed and will not show up in the toolbar.

10. CommentLuv

This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

11. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

12. Theme Options

This plugin manages theme customization. Everything is managed in the WordPress Backend. Code snippets can be activated, copied, created, deactivated, deleted, edited, and uploaded. For comments you can highlight different comments based who wrote them and where they are, also nice feature to automatically add “about author” section.

13. WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. Starting in version 1.1, WP-Paginate can also be used to paginate post comments!

14. @ Reply

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

15. Gravatar Signup

This plugin inserts a checkbox into the comment form for users who don’t have a Gravatar (based on the e-mail they typed in). If they check the box and submit their comment, it will initiate the first step of signing up for Gravatar, on their behalf. They’ll receive an e-mail directly from Gravatar and will have to follow the instructions there to complete the process.

16. IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments 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!

17. Easy Comment Uploads

This plugin allow your visitors to attach images or other file to their comments as easily as possible.

18. Quote Comments

This plugin adds a tiny link that says “Quote” on each comment on your posts. Click it, and the contents of the comment is copied to the comment area, wrapped in blockquote tags. It’s even compatible with MCEComments plugin.

19. SEO Super Comments

For each user comment plugin will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but we will create it dynamically using a WordPress plugin.

What we instantly get in this way is big jump in site’s index visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.

20. Tango Smileys Extended

Smileys in comments is also supported, and may be inserted using the standard emotion shorthand or through the CTI interface introduced in TSE 2.0.1b.

21. WP No External Links

Mask all external links to internal! In your own posts, comments pages, authors page… It does not change anything or write to base – just processes output.

22. Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering

This plugin numbers your comments sequentially and hierarchically, with full support for the new comment features available in WordPress 2.7 and later — including threading, paging, and your choice of ascending or descending date order.

23. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam

An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

24. Live Comment Preview

Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site. Simply activate the plugin -That’s it! This plugin uses only client-side Javascript to format a preview, it does not make any Ajax requests to the server. This provides a smooth live preview as you type.

25. AJAXed WordPress

AWP’s basic features include inline paginated posts, inline comments, threaded comments, the ability to submit comments with AJAX, pagination of your homepage, live comment preview and much more, but it does not, however, force you to use any feature, and it also allows all aspects of the plugin to be easily customized through a single Administration panel. It also has special features that will ensure compatibility with many other plugins.

26. Ajax Comment Posting

There are many comment-related plugins in WordPress plugin directory. However, if you’d like to find just a simple comment-posting Ajax plugin, you won’t find any. That’s why I developed a simple and small (5kB) yet functional Ajax Comment Posting (ACP) plugin. Not only will it post your comment without refreshing the page, but it will also make sure that you’ve filled all the form fields correctly.

27. Riffly Webcam Video Comments

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

28. Ozh’ Absolute Comments

Absolute Comments is a comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first.

29. NoFollow Free

This WordPress plugin remove the “nofollow” attribute from your wordpress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FRE” to encourage your users to submit comments. The last release includes new options to replace the nofollow only when the author posted X comments before and put back the nofollow when some blacklisted words are matched. The replacement of the nofollow is also based on the users type (registered and visitor users). Every option can be customized by the options page “NOFF”.

30. Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

31. Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, with Double-Opt-In Feature. Based on version 2 of “Subscribe to Comments” from Mark Jaquith

32. WP Comment Remix

WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to WordPress. From Reply and Quote links for commenters, to a full upgrade to the edit comments pages in the admin panel, WPCR will save you time and effort when running your blog.

33. Moderation Notify Author

WordPress doesn’t automatically notify the author of a post about waiting comments. Instead all comment moderation requests go to the admins. This plugin will notify the author of the post as well as the admin. This will allow the author to moderate the comments too.

Related posts:

1. 20 New, Useful And Promising WordPress Plugins
2. 35 Stylish And Modern WordPress Plugins Using jQuery UI
3. 130 WordPress Plugins You Could Ever Need: The Best Of : Part 1
4. 31 Useful Twitter Plugins For WordPress To Choose From
5. 130 WordPress Plugins You Could Ever Need: The Best Of: Part 2

Go to Source

The move comes more than a year after WordPress acquired BuddyPress, which at the time was essentially a series of plugins for adding social features to your WordPress blog. Today, it describes itself as “a suite of WordPress plugins and themes” that includes a fairly thorough set of features, like activity streams, groups, and forums.

What exactly is the need for yet another social networking platform at this stage in the game? Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg writes about it on the WordPress development blog. “I don’t think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks … but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use,” he says.

And I agree – I don’t think it’s for everybody, including every type of blog publisher. Between tools like Disqus (which we use here on Mashable), Google Friend Connect, and MyBlogLog, there are already a lot of ways to add community to your blog. Not to mention, your blog needs to have a fairly significant following and passionate fanbase to make an entire social network successful, let alone a few simple cut and paste social networking widgets.

That said, if there is anyone that can make it work, it’s Automattic, who already powers more of the top 100 blogs in the world than anyone else. Some of those, as well as other popular blogs hungry for more page views, may very well be looking for a solution like BuddyPress, that can keep readers on their sites for longer, engaging both around the content and with each other.

Tags: automattic, BuddyPress, social networking, WordPress

Below I explore and discuss the benefits of 13 WordPress plugins that I have personally used on The Design Cubicle that will give your site an extra boost and provide a better experience for your visitors (plus some other great additions you can add).

Akismet

Saves you time and frustration with spam comments. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service and filters them so you can easily scan them or delete them later.

BENEFIT: Stops all that nasty spam from getting to your reader comments.

All in One SEO Pack

An “out-of-the-box” SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

BENEFIT: Makes your blog “friendlier” and better seen by search engines (ie. Google, Yahoo, etc). Allows you to add a home title, home description, keywords (meta tags) and more.

Tip: try limiting your site to 10  keywords or less; this allows search engines to place importance on a few, dominate words providing better results when someone searches for your site.

cformsII

CformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog.

Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.

BENEFIT: Easily customize contact forms for your website for your readers and contacts to get in touch with you. Fields can be added and customized to fit you and your visitors particular needs.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.

BENEFIT: Improves your sites visibility providing search engines with information about your site, in particular a list of the pages on your site, making it more discoverable and SEO friendly.

Highlight Author Comments

Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by the post’s author.

BENEFIT: Helps your readers visually distinguish your comments from your readers.

Social Bookmarks

Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.

BENEFIT: Get your articles easily submitted to various social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and a whole lot more. Assists in increasing your sites traffic!

Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

BENEFIT: Provides a way for your readers to stay engaged and connected to a conversation. Sets the ground work for a community and discussion on your blog.

Woopra

This plugin adds Woopra’s real-time analytics to any WordPress installation.

Live track over 40 different statistical events and analytics through Woopra’s rich and efficient desktop application or from the WordPress Dashboard. Check out more information about the features and download the desktop application on Woopra’s site.

BENEFIT: Provides you with the information you need to strenthen your site, thus improving your results and visitor interactions.

WordPress Gravatars

Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section.

BENEFIT: Puts a face to your commentors. A nice touch to add more of a community feel to your site.

wp-cache

Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.

BENEFIT: Speed up the load time of your site. Works like a charm for those high traffic days and social media spikes.

Also try WP Super Cache for even more responsive load times.

WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

BENEFIT: Adds a more advanced page navagation, instead of the standard ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links – helps your readers get around more effectively.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

BENEFIT: Help readers discover similar content and related posts – adds to a more enjoyable and resourceful visit.

Self Ping are both good and bad and are equally liked and disliked by webmasters. One thing about them is that it can increase the number of page views and interconnection between your blog posts but many webmasters also feels that it is not necessary specially when you are using related posts plugins, which shows 5 related posts at the bottom of every post. Also self pings looks very intrusive and probably don’t add lot of value too.

Anyway if you want to disable self pings, you can do one of the two things -

1. While linking to posts of your own blog, do not use http:// but instead use relative paths. For example if I want to link to http://mwolk.com/blog/5-wordpress-plugins-for-adsense/ then I should use /5-wordpress-plugins-for-adsense/ and no self pings will occur.

If you are using visual editor, then probably the editor will automatically add http:// in front of it, for that, go to html editor and then remove it. Personally I feels its always good if you work in html editor only as it keeps your html clean.

2. Second method to avoid self pings is to use this plugin. You can check its homepage too to read the latest comment about it since I can see its an old plugin so may create some issues with latest wordpress install.

3. Another option is to use WordPress Tweaks plugin. Its a very powerful plugin and provides way too many features and wordpress tweaks other then disabling self pings, so you should install it or at least look at its features once.

This plugin will scan your wordpress installation for security vulnerabilities and give you hints for fixing them.

Features:

• passwords
• file permissions
• database security
• version hiding
• WordPress admin protection/security
• removes WP Generator META tag from core code

Download Here

2) Change all accounts that have known usernames (example: admin).

Even though this will not protect you if someone knows your password or gets into your wordpress blog through some other vulnirability, it will be one less piece of information a potential attacker can use to compromise your site.

3) Remove WordPress Version

This plugin removes the wordpress version from everything, including the RSS feed.

If you have extensions installed that requires the wordpress version information, this might break them. So install with care.

Plugin available Here

4) adminSSL

Features:

• Forces SSL on all pages where passwords can be entered.
• Works with both Private and Shared SSL.
• Can be installed on WordPress MU to force SSL across all blogs (only works if you have a Private SSL certificate installed) from WPMU 1.3 upwards.
• Custom additional URLS (e.g. wp-admin/) can be secured through the config page.
• You can choose where you want the Admin SSL config page to appear

Download Here

5) askApache Password protect

This plugin allows you to set up Password Protection for your blog using HTTP Basic Authentication, or you can choose to use the more secure HTTP Digest Authentication. Choose a username and password to protect your entire /wp-admin/ folder and login page. Forbid common exploits and attack patterns with ModSecurity, ModRewrite, Mod_Alias and Apache’s Core Security features.

Download Here

6) WordPress firewall

Features:

• Detect, intecept, and log suspicious-looking parameters — and prevent them compromising WordPress
• Also protect most WordPress plugins from the same attacks.
• Optionally configure as the first plugin to load for maximum security.
• Respond with an innocuous-looking 404, or a home page redirect.
• Optionally send an email to you with a useful dump of information upon blocking a potential attack.
• Turn on or off directory traversal attack detection.
• Turn on or off SQL injection attack detection.
• Turn on or off WordPress-specific SQL injection attack detection.
• Turn on or off blocking executable file uploads.
• Turn on or off remote arbitrary code injection detection.
• Add whitelisted IPs.
• Add additional whitelisted pages and/or fields within such pages to allow above to get through when desirable.

Download Here

This list has few of those many, or better say, Unlimited WordPress Plugins. Hope you enjoy this 21 Really Useful WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Must Own.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
Download:

http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

20 Top Blog Submission Directories WordPress Plugin

A new WordPress plugin has been created that will have direct links to 20 different places to submit your blog. These twenty blog submission directories are popular places to advertise your new WordPress blog. They appear as links inside the back office of your WordPress blog.
Download:

http://www.coolchecks.net/blog/wordpress/wordpressplugin.html

Ultimate Google Analytics

A Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links
Download:

http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga

Quotable Commentary

This plugin makes using the Encouraged Commentary to quote post snippets within WordPress fast and easy. It easily integrates the Encouraged Commentary by Jim Jeffers into WordPress.
Feature summary
* 100% client side, no server dependency
* Wide browser support
* Very lightweight
Download:

http://www.ezwpthemes.com/templates/quotable-commentary.html

All in One SEO Pack

Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog.
Download:

http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
Download:

http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/

WP Greet Box

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url.
Download:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/

WP DB Backup

This is an easy-to-use plugin to quickly backup your WordPress database. You may download the backup file, or have it emailed to the address of your choice.
Download:

http://skippy.net/wordpress-database-backup

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. 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.
Download:

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

Easy AdSenser

Easy AdSenser provides a very easy way to insert Google AdSense code into your existing blog posts. It gives you a widget to display ads in your sidebar, and another to show a Google Search box. Easy AdSenser is perhaps the first plugin that gives you a complete solution for managing everything AdSense-related.
Download:

http://www.thulasidas.com/adsense

WordPress Popular Posts

WP-GravatarWordpress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget to show the most popular posts in your blog. Many options has been included in it so you can customize it to your liking.
Download:

http://rauru.com/wordpress-popular-posts/

Global Translator

Automatically translates a blog in 34 different languages.
Download:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/global-translator/

Community News Plugin

With this new Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.
Download:

http://www.frank-verhoeven.com/wordpress-plugin-fv-community-news/

WP-PostRatings

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
Download:

http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-postratings

Insights

Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts, Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant information to your post in just a few seconds.
Download:

http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/insights

Flexible Upload

Flexible Upload is a plugin for WordPress intended to extend WordPress basic upload functionality. It can Resize pictures at upload to the size you specify and optionally incrust a watermark signature in all pictures you upload.
Download:

http://blog.japonophile.com/flexible-upload/

twitME

This plugin allows you to automatically post your new posts on the twitter website.
Download:

http://www.phpvrouwen.nl/twitme/

Add to Any Subscribe Button

Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all the rest. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.
Download:

http://www.addtoany.com/buttons/

cforms

cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page.
Download:

http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

CommentLuv

Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking for their feed while they type their comment and appends it once they submit.
Download:

http://www.commentluv.com/download/ajax-commentluv-installation/

Plugin Manager

Plugin Manager lets you to view, download and install plugins from wordpress.org from an AJAX’ed interface, instead of manually downloading, extracting and uploading each plugin.
Download:

http://www.drunkadmin.com/projects/plugin-manager/

A blog/website is driven by the number of people you can reach. In this article you’ll learn more about some WordPress plugins that can help increase the number of visitors to your site. Let’s take a look at some plugins that do automatic search engine optimization tasks, learn more about your visitors, and allow your visitors to submit your article to social bookmarking sites.

Search Engine Optimization

It’s very important that you make your blog search engine friendly. The average person looking for content via a search engine like Google or Yahoo won’t dig past the first or second page. This plugin helps you considerably improve SEO (search engine optimization) by dynamically optimizing your titles for search engines and generating meta tags. You can easily override any title and set any meta description and meta keywords that you’d like. This plugin should result in better page rankings, and people finding your blog easier.

Download the All In One SEO Pack

Social Media

There are quite a few social media plugins available for WordPress, but they all do about the same thing. All of these plugins give your visitors the ability to submit your post to social bookmarking sites like: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, etc. Sometimes, these social bookmarking sites can generate a huge amount of traffic to your blog.

Download one of these: Share This | Sociable | Gregarious

Post Ratings

This plugin adds an AJAX rating system to your posts or pages. You’re probably wondering how this plugin will help your site gain more visitors? Well, your visitors will give you feedback about the posts/pages they like the most. By learning more about your visitors likes and dislikes you can target your posts more; this will help you get more loyal readers and overall higher traffic numbers.

Download PostRatings

Customized Referrer Messages

This plugin displays a greeting message to visitors that come from different urls (known as referrers). For example, you may want to welcome Diggers with a message that reminds them to digg your story, or you may want to ask Delicious users to bookmark your post, and so on. You can also customize the message that is displayed. This plugin really helps you interact with your visitors.

Download the Referrer Detector

Visitor Information

When you know what your visitors like and how they act, you can use this information to attract more of them. That’s why the information about your visitors is so important. There are various way to keep track of your readers, some people use Google Analytics, but I prefer the StatPress-plugin. This plugin collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. You can check preferred pages, posts and categories. Another useful feature is that you can see the keywords that visitors used to reach your blog via a search engine. You can use this information to write more posts about a certain keyword.

Download StatPress

Final Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. I’d love to get your feedback on the WordPress plugins you use to help drive extra traffic to your WordPress blog