Turn Your Blog into A Chocolaty Cake with WordPress Plugins
…metaphorically speaking. You can’t actually turn it into a cake, otherwise I’d have done it already.
Why a chocolaty cake? Because they’re delicious and pretty much universally accepted as so. People eat them up with vigor and wherever someone gets a good cake, they’re bound to return for more. So it should be with your blog.
Here’s a quick list of all the must have WordPress Plugins:
- All in One SEO Pack - optimize titles, descriptions, keywords and get rid of duplicate content.
- ArchiveByCategory - print a list of all your posts, organized by category.
- Audio Player - simple and effective way to provide unobtrusive audio on your blog.
- Blog Metrics - calculates average number of posts per month, average number of words per post, average number of comments per post, without your own comments and the average number of words used in comments to posts. It displays them on your dashboard.
- CommentLuv - visits the feed of the comment author and attempts to pull the last post they made on their blog and displays it under their comment.
- Comment Relish - sends a customizable e-mail message to users who comment on your blog who have never commented before. You can thank them and give them a link to your RSS feed.
- Contact Form 7 - simple, supports multiple forms, spam filtering and CAPTCHA.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - detects all ways to access your feed and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
- Full Text Feed - if you use the <!–more–> tag, it cuts off your posts on your blog as well as your RSS feed, this plugin allows your feeds to contain the full text regardless of <!–more–> tag.
- (XML) Sitemaps Generator - generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your blog. Supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. Helps you get indexed by the major search engines.
- NoFollow Free - removes the “nofollow” attribute from your blogs comments. Very customizable.
- ProgressFly - create one or more progress meters to track your projects. Check them out on the sidebar.
- Smart Archives - display your archives in a much “cleaner” format. Can be combined on a page with the ArchiveByCategory plugin above to create the best of both worlds. Check out my archive page to see how it works.
- Subscribe to Comments - allows comment authors to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.
- WordPress Database Backup - creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.
- WP-DBManager - goes a bit further than the one above. Manages your WordPress database and allows you to optimize the database, repair the database, backup the database, restore the database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries and supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of databases.
- WP-Polls - adds an AJAX poll system to your blog. Extremely customizable via templates and CSS styles.
- Related Posts Plugin - generates related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags, and adds the related posts to your RSS feed.
There you have it folks 18 WordPress Plugins that will have readers eating up your blog in no time. I use all of these, so I know how hard it can sometimes be to get them working. If you need any help setting any of these up I’d be glad to point you in the right direction.
Update: Rudy from Amid.com just pointed me to a great WordPress plugin. It’s called Theme Test Drive - allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. Thanks Rudy!
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, chocolate overload! Thanks for the list and the shout-out.
I’m still on the fence with the all-in-1 SEO pack thingy. I’ve seen several people recommend that, but I’m not sure if it’s appropriate since my goal is not to drive as many visitors as possible to my site.
I’ll check out Feedburner Feedsmith and WP Poll, they look useful!
Rudy’s last blog post..A new year, a new look
Yeah, if you’re not concerned with SEO it may be an extra hassle…but, it’s always nice to see your site in Google with an appropriate title and summary.
Go search amid.com on Google; the second link is your blog. The title is correct but the summary below it doesn’t make sense. It takes on the first few lines of the post Google last crawled. You can change that to say whatever you’d like. Same with all your other static pages. And if you get crazy, you can do it with every post.
Nice list. Why wouldnt you want to drive as many people as possible to your site? Thats ridiculous sounding to me
That Single Guy’s last blog post..Babe Download of the Week - Veronica Varekova
This is neat, thanks for these whole-bunches of wp-plugins, I have some of those but my blog maybe taste better like your chocolaty-cake blog if I get the other plugin more.
manilenya’s last blog post..Slumbook Question Number 1 and 2 (Describe Me and My Blog)
Thanks Single Guy. Some people blog to keep their families and friends updated on their life. In which case random traffic isn’t necessarily needed or wanted. To each his own I suppose. Me…I like traffic. ;o)
Thanks manilenya, I like my chocolaty-cake blog too. :o)
My January 14 post reveals why I don’t drive as much traffic as I can to my site.
Rudy’s last blog post..I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
Great site. Thanks for the plugin info.
Cheers,
Kim
Kim Kinrade’s last blog post..Fender Piano Bass
My pleasure Kim.
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I spend hours looking for plugins, but seem to miss a few here and there, thanks for the list, I found a couple that I didn’t have! Great Job!
CarpetGuy’s last blog post..Bye bye Fred, OK, now what?
My pleasure CarpetGuy.
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You had me at the stock chocolate cake photo, and I’m not even a WordPress user. Guess I’d better switch….wait….snap out of it
Is there a wordpress plug-in to disable right-clicking so people can’t copy and paste my text or pictures. And if so how do you use it. I am new and unsophisticated at blogging and using software.
Not sure if there is a WordPress plugin that will do that Rita, but you can simply add this piece of JavaScript: Disable right mouse click script. However, you should read this article before you go ahead with it: Don’t Disable Right Click!
CommentLuv is a fantastic one. It gives commentators some significant exposure they wouldn’t normally get with just a “top commentators” list. It sort of equalizes the playing field a bit.
Flimjo’s last blog post..Buffett-isms: The Wisdom of Warren Buffett
Thanks for the Full Text Feed Plugin. I have been wondering what to do about my feed getting cut off because of the “more” attribute. Thanks for sharing.
NaijaEcash’s last blog post..Why you should start your online business with a blog?
Sadly, I don’t use a Wordpress set-up. If Wordpress is like a chocolate cake, then Blogger is sort of like a sugared and syruped scone. Both are good in their own rights, but you can’t help but want the other.
Chauncy’s last blog post..Bill Gates Says Windows Vista Sucks
Wow, that’s really a nice list. Thank you.
dianis last blog post..How Much Money Can I Make from Articles?
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