10 Free WordPress Plug-ins Make Blogging Better

[dhilipkumar]

10 Free WordPress Plug-ins Make Blogging Better

Judging from the 150 million sites that make up the blogosphere, anyone can call himself a content publisher. But to stand out from the crowd, a blog needs more than just a stream of original content. A well-designed site needs a functional presentation that offers both author and readers the tools they need to create, find and share information.


Dagon Design Form Mailer

When visiting a site, I expect to find five basic features: "About" and "Contact Us" pages, a search box, an RSS feed and a site map. The omission of a search box is forgivable  nowadays every Web browser has such functionality built in  and RSS feeds (which WordPress generates automatically) aren't applicable to all kinds of content. This leaves three basic features, two of which "Contact Us" and the site map  must be created with plug-ins.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator

The author of Dagon Design Form Mailer also offers Dagon Design Sitemap Generator for WordPress. This plug-in creates a site map -- a tool that I've always considered a quick and easy way to get a broad view of a site's content, where everything is found and how it's broken down.

Sitemap Generator requires only that the plug-in be activated and that you have a page (usually with the slug "sitemap") that consists of a simple HTML tag that calls the plug-in. From then on, each new piece of content you add to your WordPress site will be indexed into your site map (unless you specify otherwise on a case-by-case basis).

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[dhilipkumar]

Google Analyticator

It's hard to engage with your audience if you don't know who they are. Where are they coming from? What operating system or Web browser are they using? What pages are they reading and where do they go from there?

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WordPress.com Stats offers similar but limited analytics from the comfort of your own WordPress dashboard - but if you don't mind giving up your site stats to Google, the data you get with Google Analyticator is surprisingly comprehensive for a free


Simple Tags

WordPress 2.3, released in September 2007, added support for tags, with which authors categorize their posts by keywords. But this metadata is cumbersome to manipulate and exploit without a plug-in like Simple Tags, which adds three menu items to your Posts menu: Manage Tags, Mass Edit Tags and Auto Tags. Manage Tags offers bulk adding, deleting, renaming and editing capabilities. Mass Edit Tags lists all your posts' tag fields for manual manipulation of up to 100 posts simultaneously. And Auto Tags will automatically tag posts that meet user-defined criteria.

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WordPress 2.8 brings some of these tools into the CMS's core functionality, and if you prefer to write in a stream of consciousness without categorizing or linking your posts, then Simple Tags won't prove useful.

pcworld

[dhilipkumar]

All in One SEO Pack

Search engine optimization (SEO) is "black magic" according to one Computerworld developer. Nonetheless, there is some value to writing content and code specifically to improve a site's ranking in search engines such as Google

If you want to make it easier for search engines to find your blog, you can write keyword-laden headlines or rely on WordPress's SEO-friendly features.

Exec-PHP

WordPress is written in the versatile scripting language PHP. However, PHP code can't be used directly within blog posts - not without the Exec-PHP plug-in.

Why would you want to embed PHP code in a blog post? It depends on how wily you want to get. If you need to disable WordPress's automatic formatting of line and paragraph breaks, a single line of PHP code can do it. Some plug-ins are meant to be used as sidebar widgets, but with PHP they can be called from within a page or post instead.

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By default, WordPress does not enable embedded PHP code, partly because of security concerns: Should malicious or broken code find its way onto your site, WordPress will safely ignore it without this plug-in. Any user who can edit your site can take advantage of Exec-PHP, so be sure you know and trust your content providers before activating this plug-in.

pcworld

[dhilipkumar]

NextGen Gallery

WordPress 2.5 introduced a robust media library for uploading and managing files, but the library is best suited to storing individual pictures or PDFs to embed or link to in your posts. For full-fledged photo galleries, look to NextGen Gallery.

NextGen accepts image uploads via HTTP or FTP in both graphic and Zip format. Once placed into a gallery, each picture can have its own title, description and keywords, as initially defined by the images' Exif, IPTC or XMP metadata. Galleries can be sorted automatically using this metadata or manually via drag-and-drop, and related galleries can be grouped into albums - sort of a gallery of galleries. Configurable thumbnails and display sizes ensure the pictures fit into your WordPress theme, whether viewed individually or in a Flash-enabled slide show that offers both mouse and keyboard navigation.

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Subscribe to Comments

In the best blogs, authors aren't just speaking their minds, they're engaging with their audience. You want to cultivate and respond to your readers' comments, and a good way to promote discussion is to make it as easy as possible for readers to reply to your posts.

Subscribe to Comments adds an optional checkbox to your comment form. WordPress normally requires an e-mail address from all comment authors; Subscribe to Comments uses this information to inform comment authors of all additional comments posted after theirs. Comment authors can choose to unsubscribe themselves at any time, or the blog's administrator can manually unsubscribe users.

AJAX Comment Preview

You wouldn't publish a post without first clicking the "Preview" button in order to see it as your readers will see it, would you? And shouldn't your readers have the same option? When they write a response to a blog post, they'll find a "Preview" button beneath the comment field if the AJAX Comment Preview plug-in is installed. (Click image below for larger view)

With AJAX Comment Preview, readers' comments will be translated into their final appearance without the page needing to be refreshed; comment authors will then be able to tweak their text before clicking "Submit Comment." Not only a handy proofreading tool, AJAX Comment Preview is also an excellent way for your readers to test whether your site accepts HTML, BBCode or wikitext markup languages.

[Sudhakar]

Dear Acumen,

Thanks for this useful information. 

I found Google Analyticator and Exec-PHP to be a most powerful word press plugins.