Ultimate Plugins For WordPress
By Katy | Jan 12th, 2008
No doubt that WordPress is the bread and butter of blogging platforms. But really, bread and butter is just toast without the plugins.
Here’s some jelly.
I have compiled a list of the ultimate WordPress plugins (71 total plugins) that will make blogging easier, more productive, and visitor interactive.
If I have left out a plug-in you find useful, be sure to drop me a note and let me know.
Admin (15 Plugins)
WordPress Database Backup: I have said many times that backing up your website is important. Now you can streamline this process using this plugin.
WP-Cache: Efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive.
Batch Categories: Lets you batch edit your posts: assign multiple posts to a category or delete multiple posts from a category in one fell swoop.
PodPress: A dream plugin for Podcasters using WordPress.
Blog Voyeur: Using the cookie left by WordPress when a person leaves a comment on a blog they can be tracked when they come back.
TinyMCE Advanced: This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.
Exec PHP: The Exec-PHP plugin executes code in your posts, pages and text widgets.
WordPress Reports: View Google analytics and Feedburner reports in your admin area.
WordPress.com Stats: Tracks views, page views, clicks, and search phrases in your admin panel. (Requires API key).
WordPress Instant Upgrade: Fully automatic upgrades of your WordPress!
Maintenance Mode: Adds a splash page to your site for site upgrades while only allowing editors and admins to access your site.
Theme Test Drive: Test out your latest theme on your blog while visitors still see your default theme!
WP Tiget Administration: Manipulates the default style of your WP admin area to create easier navigation.
WYSIWYG Editor: Replaces the default Wordpress WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor with a more advanced version.
Time Zone: Automatically set the weblog time offset based on the time zone of the server, or using an explicit TZ value.
Navigation (12 Plugins)
Related Entires: Outputs a series of “related” entries based on keyword matching.
Evermore: Displays short previews of your posts on your home page.
Random Redirect: Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
Lightbox JS: Overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
WordPress Mobile Edition: Shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
Popularity Contest: Keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
Landing Sites: Referred visitors to your site automatically get shown a list of related posts based on search engine keywords that brought them to you.
Feed Lists: Post a feed from another site on your site.
Extend Live Archive: Implements a dynamic archive with many features.
Sticky: Create a sticky posts that stays at the top of your site.
Permalinks Migration: Safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.
Top Categories: Tell it how many of your most frequently posted to categories you want it to show and it will display an unordered list of those categories.
Better Blogroll: The Better Blogroll widget for WordPress allows you to display a configurable number of random links from your Wordpress blogroll.
Posts (9 Plugins)
Share This: Easy way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail.
WP-Notable: Displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.
WP-EMail: Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
This Day: After every post, this plugin will list other posts on the same day from previous years.
WP-PostRatings: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
No Ping Wait: Prevent waiting time for all of the update services to respond to new post pings.
Simple Tags: Easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries.
Twitter Updater: Automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.
Ultimate Tag Warrior: Add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like).
RSS Feeds (4 Plugins)
Feedburner FeedSmith: Redirects WordPress’ feed to your FeedBurner feed.
Full Text Feed: Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed.
Simple Feed Copyright: Add a simple copyright notice at end of full text articles in your feed.
RSS Signature: Allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the wordpress generated RSS feeds.
Comments (16 Plugins)
DoFollow: Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments.
Subscribe to Comments: Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.
WP Ajax Edit Comments: Allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post.
Extended Comment Options: Switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
Recent Comments: Displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.
CommentLuv: Place a link to a commentators last post under their comment on your blog.
Close Old Posts: Closes comments on old posts on the fly, without any database queries.
Paged Comments: Useful for those popular blog entries receiving many comments, or a simple guestbook page within WordPress.
NicEdit: Content editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser.
Live Comment Preview: Simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.
Moojax Comment Posting: Allows comments to be posted without refreshing the page.
Show Top Commentators: Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
WordPress Gravatars: Outputs the correct gravatar URL based on the commenters email address.
MyBlogLog Avatars: Displays MyBlogLog avatars next to comments.
Brian’s Threaded Comments: Creates a “reply to this comment” link to comments.
Comment Relish: Sends a thank you e-mail to first time commentators.
SPAM (6 Plugins)
Akismet: Blogs comment SPAM. (Requires API key).
Word Verify: Asks visitors to enter a specific word along with their comment.
Math Comment Spam Protection: Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question.
SPAM Karma: Stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. (Heavy on mail servers).
WP Contact Form w/Spam Protection: Creates a contact form for your blog that includes spam protection.
Defensio: An alternative to Akismet, stand-alone SPM plugin.
SEO (9 Plugins)
All In One SEO Pack: Streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. (I love this one the most).
Google XML Sitemaps Generator: Generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
Permalink Redirect: Replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink.
Head META Description: Provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog.
SEO Title Tag: Dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.
Enforce WWW Preference: Preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference.
Add META Tags: Adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog.
Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.
Quick META Keywords: Automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post.
UPDATED 1.13.08 : 3 to Admin, 1 to Navigation, 1 to SPAM
UPDATED 2.22.08 : 2 to Navigation,
Technorati Tags: WordPress, Blogging Platforms, WordPress Plugins, Plugins, Top WordPress Plugins, Top Plugins, Useful Plugins, Best WordPress Plugins, Great Plugins
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Thanks for posting these. I got the batch categories which I had misplaced through time.
This is a great list! It would be a lot more work to review each one, but that would make this an incredible link.
Maybe we can add some of our own comments to add meat to the list.
I noticed that comments ended on wp-cache in May of 2006. Is it still supported? And does it work with WordPress 2.3?
I have tried wp-super cache. that is supposed to do similar things as wp-cache plus do it in a better way. However, it is totally impossible to install and configure wp-super cache if you are not extremely competent technically. I tried and gave up. Then I talked to someone who is a tech expert who told me he did install it successfully on his site. But, it was the most difficult and time consuming install of anything related to WordPress he had ever done. Took him 6 hours before it worked correctly.
WordPress instant upgrade is great unless you are one of the 15% of blogs with a WordPress install that prevents it from working. The author knows about the issue, but has not been able to fix it yet.
I will save the “this one is great comments, but a lot of these are. I will single out “All In One SEO Pack” as being a great SEO tool and being probably the best supported WordPress plugin existing. I am not kidding when I say a new version is released with features users ask for (it seems, at least) once a week!
Finally I would say in case any plugin developers wander over here, we need a better Related Posts plugin. There are several that claim to do it in one fashion or another. But, even with the new WordPress tags, none really work well. Some of the related posts plugins choose can make you almost die laughing at how comic the choices are.
What is really needed in a related post plugin is to be able to easily, and manually choose which posts you want to display as related at the end of your current post. You can insert these manually with code, and I do sometimes, it would be great to have a plugin that puts a field on the write post page into which you can insert either post ID’s or urls. Then have them displayed in a neat format at the bottom of the post.
-Will
Thanks for the list.
You need to add Defensio to your anti-spam list! ;-)
Will » Great comment! I have to completely agree with you that we need a different way to display related posts. I keep looking for something like what you have mentioned here.
I’m not sure is WP-Cache is still supported but I’ll look into it and/or find something different that doesn’t require so much work. If I find something, I’ll update the list.
fatiah » You’re welcome.
Carl » I’ve added Defensio to the list. Best of luck with your plugin.
I’ve bookmarked your list, many thanks for sharing.
There’s also Vipers Video Quicktags for embedding youtube and google video, and wp-flv plug in if you want to host your own flash video files. I’m looking for an add on to the latter, which will enable thumbnails for the videos.
Just two more plug in’s I found useful.
huh huge list, i can’t read all (time 2.31 am) i’ll come back tomorrow
Thanks for the nice article site
Great list of plugins. I will definitely have to use use some of them!
I love Vipers Video Quicktags… forgot all about, I’m actually running it on this site. I’ll add it to the list when I update it again. And I’ll look into the other one you’ve mentioned. Thanks for passing those along.
Webringnet » Yeah, may be a bit early (late) for you to run through such a big list. It’ll be here whenever you have a minute. :o)
Nabil » You’re welcome!
Cary » Thanks, hope you find some that are helpful!
Wow, that’s one hell of a list!
I made a list of the ones I use, but I think you got them all covered here. Nice job.
Very nice list!
Marisa » Thank you!
GREAT list Katy! Thank you SO much!
Holy crap on a stick, Batman! What a list :)
I would suggest BadBehaviour, but after the last update, I’d advise against it. Too many people were blocked from their own sites because of the plugin creator making unnotified changes o.O
I haven’t ever used BadBehavior and now I certainly won’t.
Great list. I’ll have to try some of these out and see how they work. :)
That’s quite a list! I was looking for a good spam protection plugin(besides Akismet) and will check out word verify or math comment spam protection. I would like to suggest Lucia’s linky love to the comment section. Thanks for the list!
Love Puppy » WordVerify is great. I used it for awhile but the truth is I didn’t feel like I was getting enough spam (going past Akismet) that I had to add another level of security for regular commentators.
If you end up finding something to use that’s not on my list, please let me know. And I’ll check out Lucia’s Linky Love and get it added. Thanks for the recommendation.
very useful tools thank you
What a great list! It has taken me a while to get through it all and it must’ve taken quite a while to put together.
I put together a plugin of my own called Better Blogroll because I wanted a way to tame my Wordpress Blogroll. I noticed you don’t use a blogroll on this site, but you do on one of your others, so I hope that it’s useful.
I’ll have to check out your Better Blogroll plugin. But just for the record, I do have a blogroll on this site but have chosen to place it on a blogroll page (keeps my sidebar from looking cluttered).
Thanks for sharing your plugin and leaving a comment!
This list is included very useful information. Thanks for the great list.
I’ve added this link to my delicious. Thanks so much!
Going through the list for plugins for RA, and I thought I’d let you know that Adhesive doesn’t work with WP after 2.1.
WP-Sticky is the replacement for it.
Sarah » Thanks for the update, I’ve got quite the list to update this post with. LOL
I’ve tried a plugin from every categorie. I’m impressed with the possibilities WordPress offers. This is a great list.
I’ve seen the plugin for updateing WordPress automatically…Can you risk loosing your blog by doing so? Of I corse I’m aware of back-ups, I was just wondering.
ARG the site that had the “adhesive” plugin is not in order. Anyone know of a similar plgin?
With the adhesive plugin, Sarah said that’s been updated to WP-Sticky. I’ve got to get the link for that.
Katy, here’s the link: WP-Sticky
Fantastic list. It’ll take some time to comb through it and check out the new leads.
Quick question - how many plugins do you have installed. I’ve heard that it can slow down things and that people recommend even deleting inactive plugins to speed things up.
My plugin list is starting to build up. I didn’t realize that you can have several rows of plugins in the options menu. Is there any truth in your experience about the speed being affected by plugins? Thanks for your insights.
Currently I’m using 22 plugins. And if I don’t have a plugin active, it’s not uploaded to my hosting account.
I do believe that too many plugins can slow a site’s loading time. However I’m really unsure of where that cutoff should be and I’m sure very much depends on what the plugin requires to load.
Ultimately, if you believe a plugin is going to help your visitor’s experience on your site it should be used. But if a single plugin is a hindrance in any way, it’s got to go.
Multiple “studies” have been done that say if a website takes longer than 10 seconds to load, you’ll lose visitors. Keep in the mind and make sure you know how you site loads on various web speeds.
hi guys..
a simple hack in replacing default Wordpress editor with Nicedit.
frankly, just to show a “how to”. it’s you who would develop a better one. let me know when it’s done :D
here it is:
http://www.4shared.com/file/44141246/29140ec3/nicedit_for_wordpress.html