Plugins and Advanced Functionality

Functionality at Your Fingertips

WordPress is a database-driven website and one of the leading benefits of WordPress are the tools that enable you to easily tap into the power of a database. These tools are called plugins. They make your job a lot more simple and if you work well with them you can put them to work for you.

The WordPress Plugins You Need

All in One SEO Pack

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.

FireStats Charts

This plugin adds a graphical chart of the FireStats statistics plugin on the admin dashboard.

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.

Top Commentators Widget

The Top Commentators Widget a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin at Personal Financial Advice, this widget is easier to manage via the control form (no need to edit the PHP file); additional options are also available to make it more flexible.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 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.

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily. It adds the asynchronous tracking code for Google Analytics and automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It’ll add custom variables while tracking to show you pageviews per author, post type, category or publication year.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

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

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

WordPress.com Stats

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer.

WP e-Commerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

Custom Admin Branding

The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to re-brand the WordPress login screen, the admin header and footer with your own custom images.

Login With Ajax

Login With Ajax is for sites that need user logins and would like to avoid the normal wordpress login, this plugin adds the capability of placing a login widget in the sidebar with smooth AJAX login effects.

Favicons

Choose easily a favicon to make your site eye-catching and easily recognizable by visitors that have several windows opened on their navigator.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

AdRotate

Add and manage the code from the dashboard and show a random banner, or multiple, on your site. The plugin supports groups for banners allowing to tie certain banners to different areas of the website. Easy management from the dashboard allows you to quickly oversee, add and edit banner code.

Fluency Admin 2.3

Now compatible with WordPress 3.0. Added more customisation options including iPad friendly menus, and the ability to turn on/off hover menus and hot keys as needed.

Ad-minister

Ad-minister is a plugin that adds a easy to use WordPress management system for adverts and other static content.

Advertising Manager

This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks.

Buy Sell Ads

This simple plugin helps you easily integrate your Buy Sell Ads zones and includes anti-AdBlock meaures to prevent AdBlock (and similar software) from blocking the advertisement.

WP-Polls

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

PollDaddy Polls & Ratings

The PollDaddy Polls and Ratings plugin allows you to create and manage polls and ratings from within your WordPress dashboard. You can create polls, choose from 20 different styles for your polls, and view all results for your polls as they come in.

All-In-One Cufon

All-In-One Cufon allows you to replace your standard fonts with whatever font you want.

Lightbox Gallery

The Lightbox Gallery plugin changes the view of galleries to the lightbox.

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!