WordPress is a fantastic blogging environment with an easy to use interface and incredible extensibility. One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to add plugins. Plugins let you extend the capabilities of your original WordPress installation and enable all sorts of new and exciting tools.
The WordPress community supports and develops hundreds of plugins that are made available to everyone for FREE. Read on to see our list of great WordPress plugins.
We can’t stand spam. Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
Social Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin that adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of different social bookmarking sites. It features an AJAX front-end interface. You can see the plugin in action at the end of this article (just before the comments section). Furthermore, the plugin adds a page in the WordPress admin section that lets you customize it.
The real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect statistics information. Using StatPress you could spy your visitors while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
- WordPress.com Stats
(Update: May not work with all WordPress themes.)
There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
cforms is a plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.
Come on! is that it? Well.. we were in a little bit of a hurry to get this list posted, so keep your eye on this post as we will be adding more and more great plugins to the list.