Noupe Editorial Team May 18th, 2008

35 (New) WordPress Plugins for an Effective Blogging Experience

Today i wanted to highlight some of the latest WordPress Plugins that you might find very interesting. Some of these Plugins are for managing posts, some are comment related and some are just to enhance the way admin can manage his blog. In any case, you will hopefully find some useful for your WordPress blog. You can also take a look at other 4 articles in our WordPress series : So let's get started and don't forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed to keep track on our next post in this series.

Comment Related Plugins

1) Comment Info Tip Plugin- This WordPress plugin provides you and your commenter’s a bit of information on their posting stats. . When you mouseover a commenter’s name you will see a tip appear displaying some information about that given commenter.
2) BT Active Discussions- This is a recent comments plugin that displays customizable number of blog posts with recently updated comment. The output is very similar to phpBB’s View Active Topics and vBulletin’s Today’s Posts functions.
3) Absolute Comments: Comment Manager with Instant Reply- Gives you the ability to reply to comments from within the same page as where you manage them. What you want is a real “Manage Comments” page.
4) Delink Comment Author- This plugin gives you the ability to remove the link a commenter left as their URL without removing the entire comment. A link to do this is added to your new comment e-mail notifications and to the comments list in your admin area.

Post Related Plugins

5) Random Featured Post- The Featured Post plugin allows you to display a random post from a designated category. Ideally this should draw readers landing on your homepage to some of your best posts.
6) Smart YouTube- Smart Youtube is a Wordpress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in RSS feed. It is small, fast and does not depend on any external scripts.

Admin Plugins

7) Admin Management Xtended- A For those who are using WordPress as a CMS, it's important to be able to manage contents easily and quickly. This plugin adds some icons to the Manage posts/pages view with AJAX-driven CMS-known functions like toggling post/page visibility, changing publication date and title without having to open the edit screens or reload the page, plus changing page order with drag'n'drop.
8 ) Level2Categories- Allows you to create a relationship between User Levels and Categories, so only users with a defined level will be able to post on a chosen category. Its useful if you want to reserve a category only for Editors or Administrators (or whoever you choose) to be able to post on.
9) 404 Notifier- This plugin logs 404 hits on your WordPress powered site and will notify you of them via e-mail or in an RSS feed.
10) The Admin CSS Designer Tool: a COLOURlover WordPress Plugin- This amazing plugin pulls colorful palettes from COLOURlovers, and lets you re-arrange, tweak and modify colors, then save them real time. No dirty hand CSS editing.

Security Plugins

11) AskApache Password Protect- If you are worried about your WordPress blog getting hacked, this will definately ease your mind. It adds multiple layers of security to your blog by requiring a username and password to access anything in the /wp-admin/ folder.

Developer's Plugins

12) Custom Function Widgets- Allows you to create sidebar widgets without ever touching the theme’s files and use these widgets in any theme you like. This plugin offers you up to 20 widgets you can then add to your theme’s sidebars.
13) WP-CodeBox- WP-CodeBox provides clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.
14) My FTP - My FTP is a file management Plugin for WordPress that enables a blog administrator to (much like an FTP client) navigate folders and files on the server where their WordPress installation is hosted. The administrator can then edit, delete or upload files on the fly.
15) WP pngfix- This plugin uses CSS technique to fix the png image transparency issue and jQuery to apply this script to all of png images shown in the page.

Twitter Plugins

16) Twitter Blaster- Twitter Blaster is a plugin that will allow your visitors to post to your Twitter account.
17) Twitter Tools- Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Feed Related Plugins

18) MultiFeedSnap- Allow multiple RSS feeds on a single page.
19) Feed Wrangler- Feed Wrangler is a simple plugin that allows one to create custom feeds for their WordPress blog.

Enhancing and Tweaking Plugins

20) WordPress Tweaks Plugin- WordPress Tweaks is a plugin that adds a “Tweaks” page to your WordPress options. Each individual tweak can be enabled/disabled at will using a checkbox. Tweaks include: Remove “nofollow” from comment author links, Open external post links in new windows, When displaying post excerpts on archive and search pages, display a “Read more »” and more.
21) WordPress Better Plugin Page- Better Plugin Page brings simple yet valuable enhancement to your Plugins page by making things fast when you want to find a particular plugin to de/activate or edit it, or when you want to quickly find the ones that are outdated and need an update.
22) Linked Image- This plugin takes the first image in your post and links it to the post itself.
23) Category Order- The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop. It doesn’t require a special widget or anything, just install and reorder.

User Related Plugins

24) FirstTimer- This plugin checks a cookie on your visitor’s PC and identifies if the visitor comes for the first time. If yes, it displays some text and image, usually encouraging the visitor to subscribe or read some introductory posts.
25) Donations Cloud- The donations cloud is something like a tag cloud, only that it displays – donations. The more a person donates, the larger the link to his/her website will be.

Spam Plugins

26) Devowelizer- The Devowelizer plugin for WordPress replaces the vowels in most “bad language” within your own content and within comments left by visitors.

Sidebar Plugins

27) pb-embedFlash- pb-embedFlash is a filter for WordPress to display any flash content in valid XHTML 1.0 Strict code offering the possibility to specify attributes and parameters individually.

Social Bookmarking Plugins

28) WP_DeliciousPost- WP_DeliciousPost is a free WordPress plug-in that auto submits your post and pages to Delicious as you publish them.
29) Add to Any Subscribe Button- Lets readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and all the rest. The Subscribe button comes with a drop-down menu that appears on rollover.

Worth Checking Plugins

30) TW-asides- tw-asides is an asides widget for WordPress. It lets you publish short posts that appear in your sidebar rather than in the main content column.
31) Google Maps for Wordpress- The Google Maps for WordPress plugin allows you to easily insert Google maps into your blog. Can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type, activate zoom using mouse wheel, and more.
32) Gengo- Gengo is a full featured plugin that provides multi-language blogging for WordPress 2.5+. It allows for an unlimited number of translations and summaries for any post and provides template tags to display language information.
33) WordPress Mobile Edition- A PDA friendly interface for your blog. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser.
34) Skribit- Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.

Noupe Editorial Team

The jungle is alive: Be it a collaboration between two or more authors or an article by an author not contributing regularly. In these cases you find the Noupe Editorial Team as the ones who made it. Guest authors get their own little bio boxes below the article, so watch out for these.

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47 comments

  1. @Rainer How would that be a spamsource? Tags on YouTUBE are not a spam source for example.

    Imho, I think it would help give more visibility to comments. For the moment they are just added at the bottom of a long list. There is no way to filter comments to get directly to an argument/topic that may interest the visitor. The comment is lost in a mass and very few persons will eventually read it.

    We should give the love back to the commenter who spend time giving feedback. One way is to use CommentLuv (fantastic plugin btw). Another could be to give him more visibility (with a widget like top commenters, last commenters, and commentag).

    Would be interested to hear your thoughts about it anyway! :-)

  5. Cool plugins…Does anyone know of a Google Maps type plugin that will allow others to input their information(via web form) and appear on map?

  8. A great collection of wordpress plug ins. I think that if you had added some SEO plug ins it would have been even better.

  10. An excellent summary of plugins.. Some of the plugins were exactly what I needed ;o)

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