Top WordPress Plugins and Widgets

The wordpress plugins are arranged broadly by category of usage. As far as I know, all these plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress 2.5 version. Please feel free to suggest great plugins in comments that I can add to this list.

Image by Peregrino

Manage WordPress Comments

• Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
• WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post inline using AJAX.
• Close Old Posts – Closes comments on old posts without any DB queries.
• WP Grins – allows you to put clickable smilies on your post and comments forms.
• Live Comment Preview – the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.
• Show Top Commentators – Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
• CommentLuv – shows a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment.
• MyAvatars – shows MyBlogLog�s avatars in your comments
• Comment Relish – Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
• Favatars – displays the favicon associated with the commenter�s website.
• Dofollow – lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments.
• OpenID Comments for WordPress – allows users to leave comments using their OpenID.
• Extended Comment Options – allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
• Get Recent Comments – displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.

Stop WordPress Spam

• Akismet – intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
• Bad Behavior – is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
• WP-Contact Form with Spam Protection – creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you easily.
• Defensio is a spam filtering web service to block comment spam.
• Digital Fingerprint � useful for detecting content theft.

Expert WordPress SEO

• Google XML Sitemaps Generator – creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.
• Permalink Redirect – replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry�s (or archive�s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• Head META Description – Insert HTML META description tags using post excerpts.
• Enforce www. Preference – will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
• Broken Link Checker – monitors and notifies you for broken links on your blog.
• Quick META Keywords – will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post based on categories under which the article is categorized.

Easy WordPress Navigation

• Related Entries – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced page navigation to WordPress, which is very useful for navigation on index and category pages.
• Evermore – Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. Helpful to create expandable posts summaries in WordPress. Combine with Less that changes the (more�) link so it displays the entire post, not just the part after the “more”.
• Random Redirect – Allows you to create a link to a random post on your blog. Lets readers browse in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
• WP-Cumulus – displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere
• Lightbox JS Plugin – used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
• Homepage Excerpts – Gives flexibility to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.
• 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.
• Extended Live Archive – implements a dynamic, AJAXified way of digging into the archives of a blog.
• Landing Sites – When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
• Clean Archives – designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion. It lists the Month / Year, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article, and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
• Custom Query String – set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.
• KB Advanced RSS Widget – a wordpress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.
• Permalinks Migration Plugin – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website or affecting your search engine rankings.

Interactive WordPress Posts

• Share This – lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
• Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
• WP-Email – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
• WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• Viper’s Video QuickTags – easy posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo etc.

WordPress Twiter Plugins

• TweetSuite -� integrates Twitter with your blog with server-side TweetBacks, ReTweet-This buttons, digg-like Tweet-This Button, automatic tweeting of new posts etc.
• WP Twitip ID – Lets users add their twitter username to the comment form
• Check out more top Twitter plugins

WordPress Database tools

• WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today.
• WP-Supercache – A modification of WP-Cache that produces static html files.
• DB-cache – another caching plugin which claims your site will work much faster and will use less disk space for cached files.
• WP-DBManager – Lets you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

WordPress Admin Management Tools

• PodPress – adds lots of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
• TinyMCE Advanced – adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, the WordPress wysiwyg editor. Adds over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
• Exec-PHP – allows php tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files.
• Photo Dropper – lets you add free photos (Flickr / Creative Commons) to your blog posts without leaving WordPress.
• WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
• Admin Drop Down Menu – eliminates the need for this double clicking on the Admin screens by allowing you to see the second level menu just by placing your mouse over a main menu.
• Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.
• Theme Test Drive – allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as an administrator, while visitors continue to see the default one.

WordPress Advertising

• Ad Rotator – Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
• AdSense-Deluxe – is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. More Google Adsense WP plugins.
• Buy Me a Beer – allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal on pretext of buying a beer.
• WordPress BankRoll – offers to help you cut out the middleman by allowing advertisers to buy reviews directly on your blog.

WordPress Blog Translation

• Global Translator – Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
• Translator Plugin Pro – provides automatic machine translation of your blog in 13+1 languages. Costs $30.

Enhance WordPress RSS Feeds

• FD Feedburner – Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com
• Simple Feed Copyright – adds a simple copyright notice to full text wordpress feeds.
• Add Related Posts to Your Feed – adds a list of Related Posts to your full text feed. Requires either UTW or Related Posts plugin installed and activated.
• RSS Signature – allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds.

Random WordPress Stuff

• Democracy – adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
• flickrRSS – allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog.

If you liked this, you might like our wordpress articles. I know there are many great wordpress plugins out there I might have missed, please suggest them in comments, and I might add them here. This post is constantly updated.

source:http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/12/best-wordpress-plugins-for-power-blogging/