10 Useful Wordpress Plugins
Posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008There are an amazing amount of Wordpress plugins to choose from (over 3000!), some of them are great, some of them leave a lot to be desired. Here’s a list of 10 wordpress plugins that have proved their worth and are definitely worth a look!
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WP Super Cache
Super Cache is a true life-saver, especially if you’re likely to get Dugg or Stumbled quite a lot!
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.
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HeadSpace 2
HeadSpace 2 is wonderful, it allows you to modify every tiny bit of SEO related info on pages, posts, categories etc.
HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.
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WP-Syntax
This is the BEST way to highlight your code syntax if you’re using Wordpress. Forget those unreliable and slow client-side alternatives, this will do it all behind the scenes!
WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.
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Live Comment Preview
I’m quite lazy and haven’t got round to implementing this one but it looks great!
Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site. Simply activate the plugin — That’s it! This plugin uses only client-side Javascript to format a preview, it does not make any Ajax requests to the server. This provides a smooth live preview as you type.
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Get Recent Comments
It’s quite nice to have widgets like this in your sidebar, just to assure your users that your blog is active.
This plugin displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.
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Related posts
A handy plugin, especially useful for blogs with vast quantities of similar content.
WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.
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cformsII Contact Form
There are quite a few contact form plugins for Wordpress, this one seems to be the best reviewed.
cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!
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Sideblog
Sometimes you just want to update your blog with a little info instead of an entire post - that’s what this plugin is for!
Sideblog is a plugin for Wordpress Blog Platform. It is one way of implementing “Asides” - a series of “short” posts, 1-2 sentences in length. Sideblog is now in version 3.
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Breadcrumb NavXT
Breadcrumbs can seem quite an old-fashioned feature but can really enhance the usability of your site, this plugin makes it really easy to add that functionality to your blog.
Breadcrumb NavXT is a WordPress plugin compatible with WordPress versions 2.5 and up. This plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog.
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Sociable
Sociable appends a list of the social bookmarking sites (ie. Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit) at the end of your posts. Very useful!
Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.