Before I share some of the visual WordPress plugins, I have one more to add for backend support which I just ran across a couple of hours ago:
- Block Bad Queries by Perishable Press: A simple plugin that consists of a total of 849 bytes (which includes the plugin declaration all WP plugins contain). This is to help thwart malicious URL attacks the like of which attacked many WP blogs back in September ’09. A little more protection never hurts.
I’ll mention right from the start, that there are quite a few other plugins out there that I probably won’t mention, mainly because they are things I don’t use. On with the list:
Edited @ 9:15pm, 1/2/2010
- Simple:Press Forum by Andy Staines: As the name implies, a simple forum plugin, well designed and integrated directly into WP, as opposed to a lot of 3rd party forum that people attempt to bridge into WP, some having better results than others.
- Sociable by BlogPlay.com: A plugin that sits nicely at the bottom of your posts which make it easy as pie for visitors to share your stuff with social network/media sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook and many more
- WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson: A box that sits atop your posts when a visitor arrives greeting them differently based on who referred them to your site. Many referrers are built in already and you have the ability to add more
- WP-PagiNavi by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: Rather than have your blog pages list newer/older links at the bottom of each page this nifty little bit of code can replace those links with Pages instead similar to how Google and Yahoo display links to the next pages of search results. I find it to be a much cleaner type of interface that can add character to your blog.
- WP-Polls by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: An AJAX polling system that can be added to individual posts as well as to your sidebar. Multiple polls can be used and active at the same time.
- WP-Print by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan: Something to make printouts of your posts look quite nice. If you’ve ever tried to print directly from your browser you’ve probably come across something that looks like a dog chewed up you page and spit it back out in some random order. With WP-Print everything is neatly placed with annotations of links, the choice to print comments, images and videos.
- Zemanta by Zemanta Ltd: If you’ve ever been writing a post and finish thinking its missing something, Zemanta just may help. It suggests content for you to add into your post and even places it there for you, with just a click. Zemanta recommends related articles, in-text links, images and SEO optimized tags. If interested here is a demo of Zemanta.
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- Edit: After giving some thought to it, consider using the Firefox and/or Chrome browser extension, Internet Explorer plugin or Chrome/Safari/etc bookmarklet versions of Zemanta. I’ve switched to the Firefox extension as that is my browser of choice and there is very little visual difference between it and the WP plugin and no difference in how it performs.
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As I mentioned before, I’m sure I’ve left out some really good plugins and themes from this post and the previous two posts, please feel free to contact me with suggestions.