Web Design Booth » Wordpress

8 Handy Wordpress Plugins For Font Lovers

Dicky — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:09:37 +0000

Font plays a very important role in our blog. If your blog design’s uses special font type that doesn’t exist in most readers’ machine, then you are bringing trouble to yourself.

Back to few years ago, the only solution is replace the text with image. But this is not a good solution, as search engine can’t read image. Various solutions came out, such as sIFR and FLIR. In order to implement these techniques, you may need some programming skills. However, there are a lot of Wordpress plugins that make implementing them easier.

Today, we are going to look into some Wordpress font plugins that make implementing various image replacement techniques easier. We hope readers who don’t really familiar with programming will benefit from this series of font plugins.

WP sIFR

WP sIFR was created for easier embedding custom fonts to a wordpress site. What you need to do is upload the SWF font files to the correct location, activate and configure its style.

Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR)

Facelift Image Replacement is an image replacement script that generates image representations of text. It is an alternative to sIFR. This plugin implements FLIR and configuration can be done from Wordpress Admin Panel. Several fonts are included by default and adding fonts are allowed through uploading to the “/facelift/fonts” folder.

WP-Cufon

Cufon is yet another image replacement technique and WP-Cufon makes implementing this technology into your blog absolutely breeze. To use this plugin, simply go to Cufon site and generate your font file, place it under “wp-content/plugins/fonts” directory and you are ready to go.

TextImage

TextImage is a really simple plugin to display your post text as a PNG image. Any text enclosed between and will be rendered as an image and cannot be read by most robots and filters. Some users use this technique to “hide” the content from search engine.

Typekit Fonts for Wordpress

Typekit offers a service that allows you to select hundreds of high quality fonts for your website. The fonts are applied using the font-face standard, so they are standards compliant, fully licensed and accessible. This plugin allows users to use Typekit feature without modify the original theme. Signup with Typekit is required and this plugin works for both Wordpres and Wordpress MU platform.

AnyFont

Any truetype and opentype font is supported. The plugin supports both PHP4@GD or PHP5 & Imagick or GD. Before start using AnyFont plugin, please upload your font and create a new style for it. All these can be done through Wordpress admin panel.

Font Burner Control Panel

With this plugin, you are able to add more than 1000 free fonts available on FontBurner website(fontburner.com). This plugin is for users who want to have nice typography but are not familiar with Flash or image replacement techniques.

All in One Cufon

This is an alternative plugin that implement Cufon technology into your Wordpress blog. It is able to automatic detects uploaded font files and offers a preview for it.

11 Wordpress Plugins To Manage Your Ads Banners

Dicky — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:25:40 +0000

How to monetize your blog? The simplest way is to signup for Adsense, right? But there are actually a lot of Ad Networks that offer different types of banners for different niches. For a design blog, the most popular one is BuySellAds. However, they are some bloggers which prefer direct ads selling, which can save the middleman’s commission.

Direct ads selling is good, but you need to effectively manage your banners. For example, record down when the banner expire, the order of banner, track banner impressions, click through rate and much more. There could be very time consuming especially when you have a lot of banners.

So, why not installing some ads management plugins to your blog. They come with basic features such as randomly rotate the banners, banner expired date, insert ad code without modifying your template file and etc.

Today, we are going to look into 11 Powerful Wordpress Plugins To Manage your advertisements. You probably need only one of them, but you should go through each of the plugin before you make your decision.

1. Adrotate

Adrotate is a powerful Wordpress Advertising plugin that lets you create and manage your banners easily. In order to create banners, you have to create a group first, then add banners to the group. For people who doesn’t really familiar with it, you can use the “Banner Wizard”, which guide you step-by-step to create banner.

Summary of features:-

Manage banners by groups.
Able to set banner expiry date.
Click tracking.
Wordpress Dashboard widget to show you the summary.
Easy integration to Wordpress template.

2. Author Advertising Plugin

If you are running a multi-authors blog, then you probably need this plugin. It is a good revenue sharing plugin for different authors. Various configuration can be done through the admin page. For example, you can configure how author see their “My Advertising” page. This is the place where they insert their ads code.

Summary of features:-

Good for multi-authors blog.
Able to support multiple ad network.
Advertising page is customizable.
The code block support any HTML code, but not PHP.

3. WhyDoWork AdSense Plugin

With WhyDoWork, you can insert Adsense code into your blog without modifying your template file. You can define up to 10 sets of advertisement codes and displaying them at different pages/posts. For single page article, you can define different sets of ad code after x days. This way your regular readers will not be bothered by your ads.

Summary of features:-

Define 10 sets of ad code.
Automatically inserted into the article.
Able to show ads at different location:- Top, Middle and Bottom.
Exclude ads at single post through the configuration page.

4. Buy Sell Ads

If you are a Buy Sell Ads user, then you should check out this cool plugin! After installing the plugin, simply insert your BSA site key and you are ready to go.

Summary of features:-

Easily insert BSA code block to your Wordpress article through the PHP code.
Ability to automatically place ads into posts/pages and widget sidebar.

5. Advertising Manager

Powerful ad manager for Wordpress. It is able to detect and recognize various ad network including Google Adsense, OpenX, Commission Junction and etc. It is created and maintained by OpenX team.

Summary of features:-

Able to detect various ad network.
Call ads through PHP call or through the “[ad#name]” on your blog post.
Ad limitations by author, category, tag, page type, and much more.
One of the most popular Wordpress advertisement manager.

6. Ad-minister

Ad-minister helps Wordpress users create banner easily by defining your “position” for banners. In order to use this plugin, you need to define your “position” by modifying your template file. After you define your position, you can start adding banner( they called it “content”). Installation and configuration require some investigations and reading at the documentation, but indeed it is a good plugin.

Summary of features:-

Define your own “position” for both template or widget.
Configure/customize banner for each post through custom field.

7. Advertisement Management

With Advertisement Management, you can add advertising code straight from the backend system. There are totally 8 places where you can insert your banner code.

8. OIO Publisher

OIO Publisher is an Ad Manager that gives full control of your ad space. You can define the ad space, and the plugin able to handle the selling process completely automatic. However, it is a paid plugin, which is the reason people don’t go for it. But if you are serious about your website advertising and looking for great plugin, you should consider it.

Summary of features:-

Own complete control over the ad space.
Automated sale and ad serving process.
Bypass middleman commission.
Get exposure through the free ad marketplace.

9. Post Layout

Effective plugin to inject advertisement into your article. Generally, this plugin is able to “inject” any HTML or Javascript code to your blog post. So, you could use this plugin to insert everything, the sky is the limit! If you want to have more features, you could go for the “Pro” version.

Summary of features:-

Able to inject both HTML/Javascript code.
Injected code can be placed at either before, middle or after the content.
PHP code allowed in code block.
Target the injected code at different places such as Single Post, Page, Home, Tags and Categories page.
Detect mobile device and surf another set of ads.

10. WP125

WP125 able to manage and display banners in either one or two columns and inform the administrator once the banner is expired. Although it is not the most powerful Ad manager plugin, but there are some really unique features that make me love it.

Summary of features:-

Inform the administrator x days before the banner expire.
Able to choose one or two columns ads show. Customization of banners is allowed.
Define your own default banner and ad sale page.
Specify number of banners and also the displaying order.

11. Wp-Insert

Wp-Insert is more than just a simple ad management plugin. It is able to manage your feeds, Google Analytics, blog editing and even make editing your themes easier for you.

Summary of features:-

Support multiple ad networks.
Insert ads at different position in post content.
10 ad widgets at your disposal.
Exclude ads for posts through the configuration panel.

One of the feature that this plugin doesn’t have is to set banner expire date. So i would say it is good for you to insert Adsense or banner that you probably want to display permanent.

9 Useful Wordpress Poll And Rating Plugins

Dicky — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:17:22 +0000

Polls are very useful way to get in touch with your readers. Polls can be used to get your readers’ opinion and even new article idea.

There are various websites that let you setup your own polls. Once you insert the given code, you will be able to start using the polls immediately. PollDaddy is one of the great free online polls and serveys.

However, if you are a person who not really familiar with HTML, PHP, CSS or JavaScript, inserting these codes will probably takes the whole day. Furthermore, you probably don’t have all the features for a free account,or you probably just want a really simple rating feature.

If you are a Wordpress user, then you are lucky. There are a lot of useful Wordpress poll and rating plugins where you can download and use freely. Here, we share 9 useful Wordpress poll and rating plugins with our readers.

1. JR_Ratings

This plugin allows you to enable a rating form where users can rate a particular post. After you upload and activate the plugin, you will be able to edit the JR_Ratings plugin’s settings in the Administration panel.

2. WP-Polls

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

3. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin.

4. Democracy AJAX Poll

Democracy adds polling functionality to your WordPress blog. It grew out of frustration with the only other WordPress polling option, WP-poll.

5. WP Easy Polls

WP Easy Polls is a quick and easy way to create money making polls for affiliate marketers. You can create polls within minutes and you can easily theme your polls with different designs.

6. SodaHead

With SodaHead, you can create a free poll for your blog with images and a fully customized look in seconds using the best poll widget available.

7. PollDaddy Polls & Ratings

The PollDaddy Polls and Ratings plugin allows you to create and manage polls and ratings from within your WordPress dashboard. You can create polls, choose from 20 different styles for your polls, and view all results for your polls as they come in.

8. Star Rating for Reviews

Star Rating for Reviews is a simple WordPress plugin that inserts pretty rating stars based on the score you assign using intuitive, inline [rating:] tags. It can also calculate and output overall ratings for you based on all previous scores you have assigned.

9. Vote-The-Post

Vote-The-Post plugin is a professionally-designed computer application for WordPress, which allows users to vote on the individual posts on your blog or website.

If you like our article about Wordpress plugins, then we are sure you want to look into our previous articles about Facebook plugins for Wordpress, Anti-spam plugins and also useful contact form plugins for Wordpress. These plugins will help you to extend your Wordpress functionality and push it beyond a simple blogging platform!

18 Useful Wordpress Contact Form Plugins

Dicky — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:43:15 +0000

Contact Form is one of the most important page for all websites. If you are running an e-commerce website, you need a contact form so that your potential buyers can reach you to get more information. Even if you run a personal blog, you will also need a contact form so that bloggers from same niche or advertisers can contact you easily.

There are some great online form providers such as Wufoo and FormSpring. These services allow you to create contact forms, survey forms and registrations form easily without knowing much about web programming languages.

If you are using Wordpress, then you can use Wordpress plugins to build your contact form easily. However, there are a lot of Contact Form Plugins in Wordpress Plugin Repository. Some of the plugins are rather too old, not able to support the latest version of Wordpress or just having too little features.

So, we decided to gather 18 Best Wordpress Contact Form Plugins that will suit everyone needs. These plugins are tested by us and support Wordpress 2.9.1.

1. cformsII

cforms is a highly customizable Ajax driven contact form plugin. It lets you to create multi page forms or multiple forms on one page easily. They are few more cool features such as Role Manager support, Tell-A-Friend, Fully localization, Backup and Restore. Antispam is also supported by using CAPTCHA or Q&A.

2. Contact Form 7

Another highly customizable form plugin. You can add fields and alter the look and feel of your contact form through CSS. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

3. Clean Contact

Clean Contact is a simple contact form for Wordpress. It requires less to no configuration and able to run out of the box upon installation. You can specify the Thank You Message and also Thank You Url, which is the URL that users would be redirect to after the form is being sent.

4. Dagon Design Form Mailer

This plugin also known as Secure Form Mailer, offers a lot of features such as multiple forms, multiple recipients, auto reply, multiple attachments, message template system and also numerous security features.

5. MM Forms

MM Forms is an easy form build for Wordpress, but it has a lot of features. With this plugin, you are able to create multiple contact forms for your site, spam filter with Akismet, protection by CAPTCHA, Ajax submission with jQuery and also custom fields. Some of the special features that offered by this plugin include saving form submission to database, export to CSV and even has a RSS feed for form submission.

6. WP Contact Form

Simple Contact Form plugin for Wordpress. You can use this plugin to add contact form for both a post or page.

7. SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF)

This Wordpress plugin utilize both jQuery and its plugin SimpleModal for the modal dialog box. You can even insert the contact form to your template files. So, it is suitable for theme developer who want to include contact form in the template files.

8. Tiny Contact Form

A very simple contact form, without fancy features but you are allow to add contact form through sidebar widget or template files by calling the correct function name.

9. Scaleable Contact Form

With Scaleable Contact Form, you can have either Ajax or non-Ajax version contact form at no time. Extra fields can be added and set to both required or non-required. Able to add contact form to your template files too.

10. Visitor Contact Forms

To use this plugin, you need to create a contact form at http://www.visitorcontact.com/. After that, just fill in your form ID to the plugin page and you are done. There are a lot of cool features, such as Geocoding, Captcha Spam Protection, Contact Manager, Skype Status and much more.

11. Fast and Secure Contact Form

This plugin allows optional extra fields of any type: text, textarea, checkbox, radio, select. It doesn’t require Javascript and has very tight security features.

12. ONW Simple Contact Form

ONW Simple Contact Form is a small Wordpress plugin that allows Wordpress users to add contact form to any page or post through Wordpress short code. However, users are not allowed to add fields to the form.

More Wordpress Contact Form Plugins

Besides the 12 Wordpress Contact Forms, here we list 6 more Wordpress Plugin to build your own contact forms. They might not be as powerful as the 12 plugins listed above, but it is good that we keep them in the list so that you can have them as your reference in future.

WordPress Usability: Plugins That Make Your Blog More Visitor Friendly

Editorial Staff — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:54:03 +0000

In a recent post, We touted the benefits of hacking WordPress over the installation of plugins. One of these benefits is that plugins can cause your blog to become bloated. Among other issues, a bloated blog takes longer to load. With the blogosphere being saturated with content on virtually any topic you can think of, making your blog as visitor friendly as possible should be one of your primary design goals.

While I certainly promote the use of hacks over plugins, I know that part of the beauty of the plugin is so that a blogger can create a fully-functional site without having to get their hands dirty with the code that drives their blogging software. Instead of looking at hacking the code, let’s take a look at a few plugins that can help build a more usable blog for your visitors.

Usability

The best definition of usability I have seen comes from the Base One Agency who states that “usability refers to how simple it is for customers to perform the desired actions on a website. Good usability can improve the conversion rate of a web site.” So in addition to how long it takes to load a WordPress blog, to achieve usability, you would need to look first at what the desired goals of your blog are. Is it to drive sales? Then your content needs to establish trust among your readers. For a more detailed look into the psychology behind usability, have a look at our previous post that covered Webpage Usability.

The Plug-ins

In the following sections, we will take a look at five different plugins that will help increase the level of usability for your blog.

Akismet

Installing Akisment and including your API key from WordPress helps keep spammers at bay. A blog with no spam is a blog that people can trust without having to worry about the comments being loaded with links to garbage.

Subscribe to comments

Provide a checkbox for your users to select whether or not they want to be notified via email when someone has commented on your blog. Of course, they need to comment in order to use this but it does wonders to encourage the building of a community around your blog.

WP-Print

While it is great that reading on the web saves paper and toner, sometimes your visitors want, or need, to print out your words of wisdom. WP-Print lets them do this by creating a printer-friendly version of your blog page.

Post Teaser

One of the most difficult things to do is read a web page that falls below the fold. Post Teaser helps by providing your visitors with a preview of a post for the main, archive and category pages of your blog. A link below directs them to the full post page. Other features include a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.

WP Super Cache

The way wp super cache works is much more complicated that this, but what it does is take the dynamically created WordPress page and generate a static html page from it. This static page is then served to the following visitors:

Visitors who are not logged in
Visitors who have not left a comment on your blog
Visitors who have not viewed a password protected post

Without the need to process all of the labor intensive PHP scripts that aren’t required by the static html file, your blog will load much faster for a majority of your site’s visitors.
Again, these are my recommendations. If you know of a plug-in that has greatly enhanced your blog’s usability, I encourage you to share your experience in the comments section. If you have experience with any of these plug-ins as well, we would like to hear your thoughts.

Manage Your Blog’s Content with Two Simple WordPress Hacks

Editorial Staff — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:40:11 +0000

It’s amazing that in my own non-scientific poll, half of those who work in some technology field still get the term hacker confused. A hacker is not someone who is leering in cyberspace ready to infiltrate their unsuspecting victim’s computer and pillage any information of use from its hard drive. A hacker is someone who looks for ways to manipulate things to make them work better. So when I speak of hacks for WordPress, I am looking at ways to change the code to make the application work better for us, not how to scrape content or steal log in information.

Hacks vs. Plug-ins

There are many different plug-ins available to help manage content on a WordPress blog so why would we want to mess with the code?

For starters, getting our hands dirty with the code of WordPress gives us a much better insight as to how the software works. As we become more comfortable with the source that powers our blog, we gain a better understanding of how to secure it from malicious attacks.

A second reason to avoid turning to a plug-in as a first resort is that an accumulation of plug-ins causes your blog to become bloated. Eventually, this bloat may begin to affect the way your blog loads and delivers to your audience.

Finally, if you pride yourself on going green or you just want to do what you can for the environment, you may be interested to know that code bloat can unnecessarily burden your server’s CPU. Making your server work harder uses more energy. Cooling a hard working CPU uses even more energy. Reducing code bloat saves energy.

Instead of relying on plug-ins, we are going to look at a few hacks that can help better manage a blog’s content. Each one of these hacks requires a bit of PHP knowledge and the ability to upload to your server.

Display a List of Future Posts

One of the most successful techniques television news uses is the teaser. Right before commercial break, they leak bits of information about upcoming stories to keep the viewers interested and glued to their television sets. You can do the same with your blog by letting your audience know about some of the upcoming posts that will soon be published displayed right in your blog’s sidebar.

Create a new post but instead of posting it immediately, schedule it for another date.
From your Dashboard, navigate to Appearance | Editor. From the list of files on the right hand side of your screen, select sidebar.php.
Where ever you would like your future posts to appear, paste the following code:
```
No future events scheduled.
```
Click on Update File.

Now your blog’s front page will display any future posts. There is one parameter, showposts, that you can change to the number you choose.

Tell Your Posts When to Expire

Just like any food in the cupboard, your posts might get stale after a little while. This next hack allows you to set an expiration date on your posts so that when the time comes, they leave your blog gracefully.

Locate the WordPress loop that begins here:
And ends here:

Replace your loop with the following code:


$expirationtime = get_post_custom_values('expiration');
if (is_array($expirationtime)) {
$expirestring = implode($expirationtime);
}
$secondsbetween = strtotime($expirestring)-time();
if ( $secondsbetween > 0 ) {
// For example…
the_title();
the_excerpt();
}
endwhile;
endif;
?>

Save your changes.
Write your post and from the custom fields, select the key expiration. Set the expiration date in the following format: mm/dd/yyyy 00:00:00.

Now, when your post hits the expiration date, it will be not be displayed in the loop, therefore, your audience will no longer see it.
In addition to trimming stale posts from your blog, this can be a great solution if you are running a contest and only want content posted for a short time, or if you are advertising a sale and want the related posts cleared from your blog when it is over.

Wordpress XSS And What Can You Do About It

Editorial Staff — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:22:28 +0000

Just recently, Wordpress released 2.8.6 with a critical security update that patches a cross-site scripting vulnerability found by Benjamin Flesch. That’s right, the same kid who discovered a way to patch your Wordpress blog by exploiting a similar XSS vulnerability has found another.

Cross-site scripting

When I started working more with web application security, I was amazed at the amount of web developers who are unaware of all the possible entry points the applications they develop have. Of these vulnerabilities, cross-site scripting (or XSS) still leads the pack according to WhiteHat Security.

A cross-site scripting vulnerability takes place when an attacker injects a client-side script into a web page. This attack can be used to bypass access controls, steal cookies, and hijack an active session to steal sensitive information.

What does this have to do with Wordpress

So you have been running a pretty successful blog for the past couple of years. You don’t store credit card data or social security numbers, so what’s the big deal right? After all, no one is going to try to break into your database to read your posts right? If only it were that easy.

Exploiting an XSS vulnerability, an attacker can upload a link containing malicious content in a comment on your blog. When an unsuspecting user clicks on this link, the attacker is able to collect data from the unsuspecting visitor who clicked on the link. Your blog serving as the springboard to the attack.

What can you do about it?

Of course, upgrading your Wordpress blog to 2.8.6 will address the immediate problem found in this vulnerability. However, this isn’t the last XSS vulnerability that will be found on Wordpress, or any other popular web-based application.

To better protect your blog, a few simple steps can be taken:

Always keep your Wordpress software up-to-date. Most of the time, critical updates are released to address security issues such as XSS vulnerabilities.
Make sure that any plug-ins or widgets you install are free of XSS vulnerabilities. Third-party add-ons can be full of vulnerabilities if the developer has not taken care to ensure that all input is validated and escaped (http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#sec-Escaping).
Take care to make sure any themes you use for your blog are not vulnerable to XSS exploits. Themes, like plug-ins and widgets, that have been created be people who may not even know that a vulnerability exists. You can check themes for these exploits by accessing http:///index.php/index.php/”> . If an alert window opens, the theme is vulnerable. You can find more about this check from The H Security.

Wordpress Multi Languages: 5 Plugins To Build A Multilingual Website

Dicky — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:05:33 +0000

If you are using Wordpress as a CMS, then you probably want to present your content with multiple languages. Recently, I came across a Wordpress blog that presents their content with three different languages, so I decided to investigate the methods and plugins to turn Wordpress into a multilingual website, and share my findings with WDB’s readers.

Maintaining a multilingual website is not easy. The best way to present multilingual content to your visitors is to allow them to switch between different languages anytime. So, the plugin needs to take care of this and links different languages’ content together.

Beside linking the content, the URL of the translated content also important. There are two different ways to present your URL:

You can have the same permalink for the translated content, and add a language flag at the end of the URL (ex: www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=en, www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=es, www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=zh).
The translated content will have absolutely different URL.

So, how to choose your URL is yet another main consideration before you launch the multilingual website? In SEO point of view, having an absolutely different URL will gain better advantages Later on, we are going to look into 5 different plugins to manage your multilingual Wordpress website. These plugins have their pros and cons, so choosing the best plugin that suit your needs in the most important.

1. WPML

In my opinion, WPML is the most powerful Wordpress multilingual plugin. WPML has a complete startup guide for new users and its side-wide navigation adds top navigation with drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail navigation and also sidebar navigation. WPML is rather too powerful for a simple multilingual website. You can have a lot of options and configurations through the backend admin menu. Adding a non-support language is not that easy. For example, when I tried to add a language which is not supported by default, I need to go to my MySQL backend and manually add in the SQL queries. Hopefully future version will make this easier.

2. qTranslate

qTranslate is yet another powerful multi languages Wordpress plugin. It has advantages over WPML because it allows users to add new languages to the system through the Simplistic Configuration Page. In terms of URL structure, qTranslate provides three modes to make your URLs pretty and SEO friendly:- everywhere compatible ?lang=en, simple and beautiful /en/foo or nice and neat subdomain en.domain.com.

3. ZdMultiLang

You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel. Adding a new user-defined language is very simple through the admin panel, but there are a couple of important things that you should check before adding a new language. For example, the language code and the language permalink. You can read more about this is the plugin website.

4. Language Switcher WordPress Plugin

Setting up the language switcher plugin to work with your Wordpress site does take some work. The official website provides a very comprehensive startup guide which covers installing, theme and plugin modifications, translating and Q & A.

5. xLanguage

xLanguage is a full featured plugin which allows you to blog in different language. It works for blog post, page, tags and categories. xLanguage uses tags to differentiate different languages and serve the content to the user based on their selected language.

10 Essential Wordpress Plugins For New Wordpress Installation

Dicky — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:02:43 +0000

Wordpress has a lot of powerful plugins that will add extra functionality to your blog. There are more than 6k plugins available in Wordpress Plugin Directory when this article is written.

Different Wordpress plugins surf their own purposes, and installing too many plugins will slow down your system and increase the loading time. So, how should we choose the necessary plugins for our blog? Most of the new Wordpress users will ask this question.

In this article, we will list down 10 essential Wordpress plugins for a new blog. These are common plugins that will help you to secure your Wordpress blog, fight spam, and increase your search engine ranking.

1. Akismet

Akismet is a powerful anti spam plugin for Wordpress. It comes with your Wordpress installation, but you need to register at Wordpress.com in order to get your unique API key and activate the plugin. Some Wordpress users choose to review the spams, because sometimes Akismet will incorrectly marks a legitimate comment as spam.

2. Google XML Sitemap Generator

The Google XML Sitemap Generator will create a sitemap for your blog. The generated sitemap will compliant with Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. Furthermore, this plugin can automatically notify the search engines about the updates of your blog.

3. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a must have plugin if you want your blog ranks higher in search engine. After install this plugin, you can tweak your title, description, and also insert keywords for each of your articles. You can have this plugin to dynamically generates keywords for your posts too.

4. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7, as its name explains, is a Wordpress plugin that easily lets users create a contact form. This plugin supports Ajax-powered submitting and CAPTCHA anti spam. However, the CAPTCHA module had been separated as Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin. With this plugin, you can have different inputs in your contact forms. For example, yuo can have checkboxes, selection boxes, radio buttons, textboxes, email inputs and etc.

5. Wordpress Related Posts

This plugin can automatically generates related posts via Wordpress tags. There are a lot of similar Wordpress plugins that able to generate related posts too, but i personally prefer this plugin because it is easy to use without much configurations. This plugin able to automatically insert related posts for RSS feed too.

6. Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

If you are using Feedburner to host your feed, then you should download this plugin. The Feedburner Feedsmith plugin will automatically redirect your feed to Feedburner.com. So, it will slightly increase your Feedburner RSS subscribers counts. I can’t find the official page for this plugin, so i include the direct link to the plugin file. After the installation, just go to your Settings -> Feedburner to set your blog’s Feedburner address.

7. WP DB Backup

WP DB Bakcup allows Wordpress users to easily backup the database. This is essential so that you won’t lost your content even if your site get hacked. There are 3 different methods to backup your database:- save to server, download to your computer, and email. You may also schedule your Wordpress backup using this plugin.

8. Broken Link Checker

This handy plugin can performs checking on your outgoing links and list out those dead links. Dead links are dangerous because they will affect your search engine ranking.

9. StatPress Reloaded

StatPress Reloaded is a powerful plugin that able to track your visitors. It shows your daily visitors, pageviews, spiders and also feeds accesses. StatPress Reloaded also tracks the search terms, referrers and last pages. You may still need to install Google Analytics to do more complicated analysis, but this plugin provides you a quick view of your visitors and page views.

10. Antivirus for Wordpress

This cool little plugin will help you monitors and detects malicious code in your Wordpress system. You can enable the daily antivirus auto scan feature, the administrator will receive an email if the plugin detects any virus the the system.

12 Useful Facebook Wordpress Plugins For Bloggers

Dicky — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:57:51 +0000

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites. There are a lot of information exchanges happen daily through Facebook. So, some serious bloggers start paying their attention on Facebook and threat it as a medium to promote and share stuffs with their friends.

If you are a Wordpress user and looking for Wordpress plugin to connect, integrate or share stuffs with Facebook, then you had came to the right place. Today, we are going to look into 12 useful Wordpress Plugins for you to work with your Facebook account.

1. Add To Facebook

Add To Facebook is a simple plugin which will add a link at the bottom of the current article, so that your readers can easily share the article with their friends on Facebook.

2. Facebook Dashboard Widget

This powerful plugin uses Wordpress widget function to pull and display your Facebook friends status, your posted items and notifications at your Wordpress admin dashboard. By using this method, you can read these updates without logging to your Facebook accounts.

3. JanRain RPX

JanRain RPX Wordpress plugin allows your site to accept logins via various methods, including Facebook Connect, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, MySpaceID, AOL, Windows Live ID and OpenID. After installing this plugin, your users can sign-in and commenting to your blog through these providers and have the providers icons beside the commenters.

4. Facebook Posted Items

Facebook Posted Items plugin allows you to display posted items from Facebook on your blogs. The fetched post items are in unordered list and you can style them easily. The plugin page shows you how to get the link for your Facebook posted items.

5. Wordbook

Wordbook allows wordpress users to publish blog updates to their Facebook’s profile mini-feed. To use this plugin, you need to link your Wordpress blog with your Facebook account.

6. Facebook/Twitter Status Updater

This plugin wil automatically updates the Facebook status/ Fan Page Wall/ Group Page Wall/ Twitter when you publish any new post.

7. Gigya Socialize

Gigya allows you to authenticate users through Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and AOL. Beside this, you can update your social networking sites within your blog and invite your friends to visit your blog through this plugin. Upon activation, just go to Gigya website and get your API and Scret Keys to use this plugin.

8. WP-FacebookConnect

WP-FacebookConnect adds Facebook functionality to Wordpress using the Facebook Connect APIs. It allows single-signon with your Facebook account, publish comments to the newsfeed, and use Facebook profile pictures as comment avatars.

9. QuailPress

QuailPress allow you to add a button so that your readers can easily share your stories on their Facebook account.

10. Fotobook

Fotobook lets Wordpress users to link to their Facebook accounts and import photos so that they can use these photos in their blog posts. With this plugin, users can import photos from multiple Facebook account and display these photo albums at the sidebar. It has an easy-to0use ajax photo albums management panel too. Note: This plugin doesn’t work with Wordpress 2.8.

11. Facebook Fan box

This plugin lets Facebook users to add a Fan Box to their blog. The Fan Box will be displayed as a sidebar widget. To use this plugin, simply create a fan page at Facebook, get your unique API Key and Profile Id and you are done!

12. Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook

This plugin will generate a separate feed for Facebook. If you don’t like how Facebook handles your blog feed, then you can use this plugin to generate excerpts only feed for Facebook.