WordPress Plugins
ADVERTISEMENTSWordPress Plugins are extensions to the basic functionality available in WordPress. You can extend the way WordPress works by using plugins.
Here I have listed all the WordPress Plugins that I have found useful so far. I will be updating this list whenever I find new useful plugins, so bookmark this page.
- Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. I highly recommend this plugin.
- Live Comment Preview: Like the name suggests, the plugin supply users with a live preview of comments.
- Gravatar: This plugin allows you to display your commenters gravatar.
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Ajax Contact: Provides your readers with a mail form to email you using AJAX.
Download Ajax Contact
- Bunny’s Technorati Tags: The plugin allows easy addition of a space-separated list of tags which can be displayed with Technorati links to a post. It can display keywords instead if no tags are available.
- coComment Enhancer: Simply inserts the needed javascript to improve interaction with cocomment.com of your WordPress Blog
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Del.icio.us cached: Outputs a list of your del.icio.us bookmarks
Download Del.icio.us cached
- In Series: Provides navigation controls for next/previous within a connected series of posts.
- Page Links To: Allows you to set a “links_to” meta key with a URI value that will be be used when listing WordPress pages. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WordPress sections of your WordPress Blog.
- Jalenack’s Wordspew: This plugin will create a shoutbox on your WordPress blog. But it isn’t any old shoutbox. It uses AJAX, a technology that allows information to be transmitted to the server without the user refreshing the page. So what makes this special is that your users can carry out live chats from your blog without having to refresh the page. It’s kind of like instant messaging!It’s features include distinguishing whether a user is logged in to wordpress, and if he/she is, then it users their nickname as their name, so that they don’t have to type it in every time they refresh the page. Also, if that user is an admin, they get a special link “Administrate” This will take them to the admin panel for the plugin. This admin panel allows you to set colors, change timing, and edit/delete comments.
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WP-ContactForm: WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+
Download WP-ContactForm
- WP-EMail: Enables you to send your webblog entry to a friend. I could not get this plugin to work. If you are able to do, please let me know.
- WP Grins: A clickable smilies hack for WordPress.
- WP Since Last Visit: This hack will show an image next to post and comments that are new since someone’s last visit to your site.
- WP-Polls: Adds a Poll feature to your WordPress blog.
- WP-PostViews: Enables you to display how many times a post had been viewed.
- WP-Stats: Displays your WordPress blog’s statistics.
- WP-UserOnline: Adds a Useronline feature to your WordPress blog
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XD Forum: A plugin that installs a simple forum with the same style as phpBB and vBulletin type forums
Download XD Forum
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XD Talk: A plugin that enables visitors and members of a WordPress blog to chat with each other.
Download XD Talk
- Google Sitemap Generator: This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported. The priority of a post depends on its comments. More comments, higher priority! If you have external pages which don’t belong to your blog, you can also add them to the list. This plugin will automaically notice Google whenever the sitemap gets regenerated.
- Popularity Contest: 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.Numerical values are assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a popularity score for each post.The values assigned to each view and feedback type are editable and can be changed at any time. When you change any of these values, the ‘popularity score’ for all posts are updated immediately to reflect the new values.
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Related Posts: This is one of my favorites. It returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. This will help you bring out those posts that are hidden in your Archives.
Download Related Posts
- Search Meter: Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog.The Statistics page also lists out the searches that yielded no results under ‘Unsuccessful searches’. I often check these ‘Unsuccessful searches’ and write posts on them. I suggest you do the same to keep your visitors.
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Brian’s Latest Comments: This plugin shows an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them. This is one of the plugins that are supported by K2.
Download Brian’s Latest Comments
- Extended Live Archives: This plugin implements a dynamic archive which allows you to dig into your blogs archives in a fast and efficient way, without having to reload the page as you explore.Check my Archives page to see this plugin in action.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior: The Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is designed for WordPress sites to increase the possibilities and functions for tagging posts and expanding site navigation through the creation of lists of tags.It allows storing a set of tags against posts that behave like categories - the tags can be displayed on a post as links, and when clicked, the visitor is taken to an archive page for that tag. There are also RSS/atom feeds available for each tag.Beyond the category-like behaviour, Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin provides ways of getting an overview of your tags through tag clouds and graphic representation such as a long tail graph and/or weighted bar arrangement. UTW can also be coaxed into linking to other tag-savvy websites such as del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement: Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.
- PXS Mail Form: Creates a mail form with multi part verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. Recent updates include referrer checks and exploit management. Also, allows the sender to CC themselves.
- Subscribe to Comments: Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
- Sociable: Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
- BAStats: This plugin calculates statistics for your WordPress weblog.
- Digg This: Digg this is a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg to your wordpress post and automaticaly displays a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.The detection is based on the referer URL, which has to come from Digg. In case there is more than one digg posts to your page, only the first one will be displayed.
- Browser Detection: Detects and shows commenters web browser and operating system
- Show Top Commentators: Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment. Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one).
- Landing sites: When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, they are definitely looking for something specific - often they just roughly check the page they land on and then closes the window if what they are looking for isn’t there. Why not help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog? This plugin lets you do that, works with a long list of search engines. The related posts are shown only when visitors come from search engines.
- Noteworthy: Mark posts as ‘noteworthy’. Useful when you want to let your readers know which posts are important.
- WP-PageNavi: Adds a more advanced page navigation to WordPress.
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Live Plugin: Live is a free WordPress plugin that lets you watch your website activity in real time. You can watch as people are visiting your pages, leaving comments, and grabbing your feeds.The plugin uses log files and some Ajax magic to keep showing you everything that’s happening on your website.
This plugin will only work with WordPress 2.0.
- WordPress Cache Inspect: This plugin will help you analyse the behaviour of the cache builtin to WordPress v2.0. It provides the administrator with a quick overview of how the cache is performming and allows the cache to be cleared manually from an admin page. Click here for more info on the plugin.
- SEO Title Tag: SEO Title Tag is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to optimize your WordPress blog’s Title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation.Download SEO Title Tag
Know any other good plugins that you think are important? Feel free to share them here.
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Posted on April 6th, 2006 | Category: WordPress, WordPress Plugins |
Joao Inacio
April 6, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Very nice!
I’m having a bit of trouble though, with the “Live Comment Preview”.
After enabling the plugin on my site, typing a comment becomes VERY slow. i think there could be something in k2’s default css that may cause this, but i’m not sure where to start looking…
As for the rest of the plugins, i have about half of them installed and i can’t say anything except that they absolutely rock!
Using some (or all) of these plugins according to our personal taste, is a must to make a rather dull wordpress blog turn into a great-looking, feature-full website.
johntp
April 6, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Joao- I am using K2 theme just like you and have not had any such problems.
I just commented on your blog and found no problems with the ‘Live Comment Preview’ plugin.
karthiksn
April 6, 2006 at 6:08 pm
MAn i guess you dont use the Cocoment one anymore as i have to edit some options in cocoment to make it work on this blog. This mostly happens to me on Squible themed and K2 themed blogs
johntp
April 6, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Karthik - I removed Cocoment plugin the day I installed itself. I think the plugin will be irritating for those who don’t use Cocoment.
Madhur Kapoor
April 9, 2006 at 10:58 am
Hi John
Tried the plugins . Can you tell me whether there is also plugins for displaying Popular Posts etc in Sidebar
johntp
April 9, 2006 at 11:00 am
Madhur - Try Popularity Contest Plugin, it’s already listed above
Madhur Kapoor
April 9, 2006 at 11:13 am
Thanks John . and one more thing , i installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior . When i create a new post , a tags column is displayed , do i need to enter the technorati tags there only or do i need to make any more adjustments there ?
johntp
April 9, 2006 at 11:15 am
Just enter your Technorati Tags there
Ashwin
April 11, 2006 at 3:38 am
hey man.. can you tell m how to install the latest comments that you have in your blog?
I’ll download and upload the plugin, but tell me from where I need to add the codes.
johntp
April 11, 2006 at 4:58 am
Ashwin- Add this in your theme’s sidebar…
< ?php blc_latest_comments('5','3','false'); ?>Note: There need not be any space between ‘
<‘ and ‘?php‘ in the above code.More directions for use can be found at http://meidell.dk/archives/200.....-comments/
Ashwin
April 13, 2006 at 7:50 pm
thanks man. I have added it and that thing is working fine.
Now how do I remove the prefix dot?
Or can you paste the code that you have used?
johntp
April 13, 2006 at 11:41 pm
I can’t seem to get the code to display properly here. I will send it to you via email
Ashwin
April 14, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Thanks a lot man.
I am yet to update my theme. When I do that, I’ll add in the code you gave
johntp
April 14, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Are you changing your theme?
Thomas
April 18, 2006 at 5:15 am
Great resource!
johntp
April 19, 2006 at 2:15 am
I will be adding more plugins as I find them
EcoGraphic
April 27, 2006 at 6:35 am
How to make the WP-Email plugin work in K2:
Add the code into the single.php page as shown here, not into theloop.php as you would expect:
[div class="primary"]
[ ? php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/theloop.php'); ? ]
[ ? php comments_template(); ?]
[ ?php if(function_exists('wp_email')) { email_popup(); } ? ]
[/div]
All of the []’s are supposed to be ’s obviously………..
Once you have added in the code, be sure to go to te permalinks page under ‘options’ and reset your options. Also, click on ‘EMail’ in the main navbar, set your choice of mail servers, and hit ’save’. I just used ‘SendMail’ and it works fine.
johntp
April 27, 2006 at 7:37 am
EcoGraphic- I think I had done the coding part well. The error had something to do with ‘mail server’ option. I do not know what to enter there
Anyways, thanks for trying to help
CNTS
June 13, 2006 at 2:34 am
Hi…
I’m trying to install the AJAX Contact form and just can’t get any e-mail to be sent…
I’ve tried several contact form plugins for Wordpress and none of them seems to work…
any idea on what could be wrong?… I’m guessing server issues…
Thnx…
johntp
June 13, 2006 at 4:35 am
CNTS- I recommend the PXS Mail wordpress plugin. After activating it go to Options>PXS Mail and enter the details like your email address.
Ryan
July 4, 2006 at 3:18 pm
John,
Nice list of plugins. I’m having a problem with the Related Posts plugin, though, and the author site was no help.
I installed it, activated it, clicked the link to modify the table in the database, set the options, and added the code to the theloop.php. Nothing happened. No related posts displayed, not even the “no related posts” text. I tried deactivating and reactivating, still nothing. I tried moving the code snippet fom the very end of the loop file to somewhere in the middle, and that broke my entire site.
I’m not exactly worried about it, but maybe you know where I could find the answer?
Ryan
John T P
July 4, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Ryan- I had problems too when I had first installed the plugin. But that was because I had not set the options.
But it looks like you did everything properly. I had first put the plugin code in sidebar.php, now I have it in single.php. Why don’t you try putting the code in any of these two files?
Also did the index table setup go well? Which version of WordPress are you using?
Ryan
July 4, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I’ll try that when I get home. I’m worried I may have messed it up, because when the plugin didn’t work right away I tried to delete it and then re-upload the file to my plugins folder. I then tried to run the script on the database again and I got an error message, so I tried to do it manually from phpMyAdmin and got another error. But it worked fine the first time.
I stuck the code in theloop.php, like the readme file said, and I tried in two different spots in the file but neither worked. I’ll let you know if sticking in another file works.
Great blog by the way. I’ve been coming here for WP tips ever since I started trying to modify my blog, and it’s been a really huge help!
Alok Shenoy
July 7, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Dashboard Options
Favicon Manager
Fold Category List
Yahoo/MSN style Smilies
Laziest Gallery
Now Reading [ plugin and widget ]
WP-Polls [ P and W ]
WP-UserOnline [ P and W ]
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Jalenack’s Word Spew
Joe’s Quotes widget
Last.fm Covers [ widget ]
Apart fromt he default widgets and plugins that come [ like askimet, google search etc. which i have not activated ]
Now after installing all these, suddenly my in my Presentations>Sidebar Widgets, the widgets can be dragged and dropped, but when i click on the little options box on each of them, nothing happens. i had this problem in my old WP installations also on another host. I used to reinsall the whole wp 2.03 again . What am I to do?
Aalekh Kapoor
July 17, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Thanks for replying John
Can you also suggest a plugin for blogger ? since Ultimate Tag is a wordpress plugin.
Aalekh
http://aalekh.nomadlife.org
Jamsi
July 19, 2006 at 11:51 am
Hi folks,
Just wanted to suggest a rank-checker plugin that I’ve created.
If you’ve entered the Ambatch SEO contest, you may be wondering how you rank in Google. This WordPress plugin gives your readers the ability to check their ranking for the keyword “ambatchdotcom seocontest”.
Lee Collins
July 21, 2006 at 8:07 am
Looks like the “Brian’s Latest Comments” link isn’t working … can you tell me the link so I can download? Thanks
John T P
July 21, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Lee Collins- Actually the link was being redirected to the homepage for some reason. I found another link. Try downloading “Brian’s Latest Comments” again.
Michael
August 2, 2006 at 12:00 am
*Nice List*
Chris
August 3, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Nice list of plugins there.
ill have to try some of them
steve
August 10, 2006 at 10:07 pm
nice review, I used tons of word press plugins you suggested on http://www.ipodnikeplus.net.
indra
August 15, 2006 at 7:05 pm
is there a plugin to add “post/bookmark to del.icio.us” in each post?
John T P
August 15, 2006 at 8:36 pm
If you want to add links to popular social bookmarking sites, use Sociable. You can find the link in the above list.
If you want just Del.icio.us use this plugin
Fashion Guru
August 17, 2006 at 7:16 am
Excellent list.. I have seen quite a few but none this comprehensive. will take me hours just to read all of them… keep up the good work
Tom
August 20, 2006 at 9:44 am
I’m looking for a plugin that will work in WP 2.0.
I would like to create a Page and link a Category, or multiple Categories to it as an Archive. For instance: if I have a 50 posts, and 5 of them are in the Beauty Category, When you click on the Beauty Page, you will receive an archive of all posts in that have been tagged Beauty.
Do you know of a Plugin like this?
Thanks!
Tom
Kev
September 15, 2006 at 12:30 am
Hey,
What is teh plugin you use for your comment system (eg. avatars, the beautiful blue borders and the dashed line around the user comments?). Please let me know and is it free?
Kev
John T P
September 15, 2006 at 4:33 am
The comment system was designed by me for my theme. It is not for download.
Cleopatra's Corpse
September 17, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Very useful list of plug-ins, very helpful!
Philippine Central
September 21, 2006 at 7:45 am
This is a nice list of useful WordPress plug-ins. It saves me lots of time looking for them individually. I bookmarked this page already so I hope you can continue to add more here.
Kailani
September 26, 2006 at 1:09 am
Thanks for this great list of plugins! They’re very helpful.
Do you have any recommendations for a plugin that will allow me to respond to individual comments on my blog?
Thank you!
John T P
September 26, 2006 at 4:26 am
Kailani - I did not understand. WordPress already allows to respond to individual comments.
doug (dougs travels)
September 29, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Thanks for a great list of plugins! Of all the plugin lists for Wordpress, this is the easiest to work through, with clear formatting, and short, to the point descriptions.
I have just started my site, and am working hard to improve many things. Content is one, but presentation is very important, as is navigation and a host of other factors. Plugins really help and your list really helps sort through what is available. Well done!
Ninjaboy
October 3, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Wow - thats a great list of plugins! I have been developing on WordPress for about 18 months, it is a REALLY good platform for websites, not just blogs! There are quite a few plugins that perform the same task (or similar) task, but I really think that you have pointed out some real gems… good work!
I use quite a few of these myself and out of the list I’d consider the ones below are pretty much ‘essentials’ for WordPress installs:
Akismet
Related Posts
Search Meter
Jalenack’s Wordspew
WP-PostRatings
PXS Mail Form - Just replaced my previous WP-ContactForm from Ryan Duff, seems good and allows multiple recipients.
Google Sitemap Generator
Subscribe to Comments
Brian’s Latest Comments - had trouble with this one with the conditional statements to control the output, still playing but may look at an alternative.
The only functionality I’ve had toruble with this ad banner plugins. Yup, sure, there are nice ones for inserting google Adsense, Amazon and other affiliate code. Hell, I can insert banners and such myself. However, the problem is that ‘users’ get a bit lost when they have to look at code! What would be really good is a plugin that allows upload through admin panel of banner image (jpeg/gif) and insert associated link. Obviously it would be nice to have click tracking and display weighting of ads, but just this would be great…any ideas?
Narendra
October 8, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Hai your site is so Nice.But iam using blogger to earn money, but i dont have wordpress.Can i get into blogger?
JohnTP
October 8, 2006 at 1:47 pm
These plugins are for WordPress only.
Ninjaboy
October 9, 2006 at 1:58 pm
I have just been updating some plugins and have noticed that there are a few that I might suggest as quality ‘must haves’ for WordPress users:
http://www.labnotes.org/
Advanced WYSIWYG Editor
This is a bit tricky to set-up, so a bit of reading and research involved, but this is very good… does what is says on the tin, kinda an upgrade to TineMCE. Allows advanced text editing far beyond the base install.
http://somethingunpredictable.com/wp-no-ping-wait/
No Ping Wait
Ever have that long wait when you post? Thats because WP is trying to ping your post out to various update services, depending on your configuration. This can result in time-outs, blank screens and all sorts of trouble. It basically speeds up posting by moving generic pings to ‘execute-pings.php’
Ninjaboy
October 9, 2006 at 3:11 pm
AMENDMENT TO PREVIOUS
http://somethingunpredictable.com/wp-no-ping-wait/ - site is down at the moment, but if you Google it you should find it out there somewhere.
Julian Winter
November 2, 2006 at 10:03 am
Hey John
Thanks for this great list! I can’t believe I only just stumbled upon it. I have 3 questions for you (sorry ;))
1. I’ve been trying to download Show Top Commentators, but the link is down and I can’t find it elsewhere. Would you perchance happen to know of an alternate download-location?
2. Are you using Bunny’s Technorati Tags on top of UTW? If so, what’s the added value?
3. I feel sheepish even asking this, but Sociable displays an ugly border around each icon on my site, no matter what I do to the css. Did this happen to you too upon install? And if so, how did you get rid of it?
Thanks a bunch,
Julian
JohnTP
November 2, 2006 at 10:43 am
Julian Winter-
1. I don’t think there is any alternate download-location
2. I only use UTW
3. I do remember having borders around each icon in the past. However I don’t have them now. I don’t remember if I had done anything to remove them.
Anyways try adding this code to the last line of ’sociable.css’ if it is absent:
.sociable img { border: 0; }KOF
November 18, 2006 at 1:04 am
TO LONG List
THanks alot.
Kev
November 29, 2006 at 2:48 am
I am completely new to wordpress and completely impressed, have bookmarked your list to explore at a later date.
I have two questions if you have the time.
I want to be able to start a new blog that is just for a small group of people to share and want to have a list of users in the side panel that people can click on and read their profile and number of posts etc.
Do you know of a plugin that will do this on wordpress.
Any help much appreciated.
Richard
December 1, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I’d like to mention a great wordpress plugin for using the GoStats web traffic reporting engine in your blog:
http://counterblog.gostats.com.....ss-plugins
razvanr
July 18, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Hey,
For all you guys out there supporting video content, you can now monetize it free with the NoPrimeTime wordpress plugin. You can also crosspromote your sites if you lack advertisers.
The plugin can be found here: http://www.noprimetime.com/plugin
Symbian
September 25, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Thanks a lot. Great bunch of links!
Jo
October 13, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Live Pluggin for wordpress 2.0 is not downloadable. It went into Http 404. Help.
Alvin
December 10, 2007 at 10:13 am
Hmmm…the link to NoteWorthy is broken
Tommy
January 18, 2008 at 9:47 am
Superb list of plugins john, thank you very much.
IdeaLog
June 10, 2008 at 2:51 am
Hallo. Here is one wp plugin that helps to increase the number of feed subscribers. It’s name FeedOnly.
Sure it should be used wisely.
glaydenty
June 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm
thanks for info bro, u the best.
Fman
June 20, 2008 at 6:10 am
really good post dudes!..
i like to use all plugins.. hehe
Gerard
June 21, 2008 at 5:10 am
Sweet list man. Thanks.
Vic
June 24, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Hi there,
Know anyone which plugin to use if I want only a part of the article to be displayed? If someone want to read more there will be a “read more” link…
On my blog right now is displayed all of article content and I don’t want this…
I’m talking about the latest 10 articles displayed on the first page of my blog.
I’m using Wordpress.
Can anyone help?
venkat
July 8, 2008 at 12:45 am
wow ! nice collection ! worth it to bookmark it!
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