Top 10 WordPress plugins

Here is the list of top 10 WordPress plugins which I have setup on Blogs@DiGiTSS, why they are good and why you should install them if you're using WordPress Blog. If you use and choose them wisely these plugin will help you make most of your WordPress blog by making it more search engine friendly, will help you spread the word and to keep visitor busy on your website.

Google XML Sitemaps: It generates XML sitemaps for your WordPress blog automatically based on configuration you specify. It will help search engines like google, yahoo, bing or ask.com and many others who use Google XML sitemap format to crawl your website/blog. It is a kind of must have plugin for any WordPress blog.

All in One SEO Pack: This plugin provides out-of-the-box SEO for WordPress blog. You can specify different title, keywords and meta-description for any post. So that title of the post can be different than the meta-title under head tag which can help in SEO. As well as it will build custom keywords for post-lists by collecting keywords from each post. (For example home or any category list - it will collect list of keywords from each post and build a keyword list).

WP Super Cache: WP Super Cache is the best plugin if you want your posts to load faster as once loaded your blog-page will be cached as html file so that subsequent requests will be served by that html file only avoiding database query, which will improve the performance of your WordPress blog and let you serve more requests per second.

Similar Posts: This plugin brings list of similar posts for any blog post. It is highly configurable in terms of functionality and it can configurable by # of keywords used in posts or tags or categories etc. Similar Posts will help you retain your blog visitors on your blog for more time and reduce bounce rate. I am sure that once you'll install this plugin you'll observe your bounce rate going down with your analytics tool.

WordPress Popular Posts: Show your most popular posts on your blog, where visitors have commented on your posts. Just need to paste a function call and it can be placed in any of the text-widgets of your WordPress blog.

Akismet: Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and track-back spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. If you're using 3rd party comment integration like IntenseDebate or disqus - the one which we have used for Blogs@DiGiTSS you may omit use of this plugin. But for plain comment form it's one of the best protection against the spammers.

IntenseDebate: IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers' experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you.

It's very easy to export our old comments from our WordPress blog to either IntenseDebate or disqus commenting system. I chose IntenseDebate over disqus after trying it on this blog as IntenseDebate is better for SEO and loads comments even if the javascript is disabled on client browser. Do not forget that IntenseDebate is from the team which works on WordPress platform development.

FeedBurner FeedSmith: FeedBurner let's you publish your feeds and helps you keep track of them. Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. FeedBurner is now acquired by Google as Google is the company who likes to keep track of everything you do over the Internet.

CodeHighlighter: This is syntax highlighter for source code using GeSHi. If you're a programmer who blogs about programming and need to paste in code inline with your blog-post consider this as a very important plugin, which will make your code look beautiful just like it does in you see that inside IDE w/o any hard-work. It will require you to place your code inside pre tag, just specify attribute like "PHP" or "Javascript" etc and you're done. (Thanks Joe for reporting broken link for this plugin, it seems like this plugin is dead now and not being maintained. While finding out correct link for CodeHighlighter, I have come across another plugin WP-Synhighlight, which is more promising and have toolbar integration and GUI as well. I might switch to WP-Synhighlight soon, but if I want to keep my old code still highlighted I have to keep my old plugin active.)

Conclusion: Do not end up installing all the plugins and choose your plugins wisely. We have installed Webiya and Meebo-bar respectively for social interactivity but later on removed that as a trade of to improve the load-time of our blog. Recently there are good improvements with Webiya and we might turn that on again soon. Other than discussed plugins there are plenty of social-bookmarks plugins available which can help you have your visitors bookmark your website/blog on their favorite bookmark website but that's deal you need to take care very precisely. While adding all these plugin we still want our site/blog to look decent and not cluttered or jammed with too much stuff. One of such plugin is AddToAny: Subscribe Button.

Also Facebook Like button is a must have tool now a days since it is launch and it's wise decision to place one on ours. Like us on Facebook if you liked this post.

Finally, don't forget to share your favorite WP Plugin with us.!Similar Posts:

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Since I came to know that WordPress3.0 is under the hood and being backed I can't stop myself from downloading a copy and install it on my local system.

Wordpress 3.0 with new default theme

• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
• New default theme "Twenty Ten" takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom header and background APIs.
• Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
• Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
• Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
• Support for shortlinks.
• Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
• A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

Now let's see What's new and exciting features WordPress3.0 has packed with it:

Custom Post Type:

Previous version of WordPress allowed us to define our contents in Posts and Pages and now we can categorize further our Posts into different categories with the help of Custom Post Types. Read here how to create Custom Post Types or download WordPress Plugin which provides UI to create/define Custom Posts.

Menu Management:

Menu Navigation allows us full control over site’s navigation menus. It has an easy to use drag and drop interface UI where you can place internal or external links.

So if a website has several static pages, plus a blog, featured video posts, and we also want to promote your social media presence.  We can customize our main navigation to look something like this:

• HOME
• BLOG (links to the main blog page)
• VIDEOS (links to the video category, or post type)
• INFORMATIONAL PAGE
• INFORMATIONAL PAGE
  • SUB PAGE
• TWITTER (links to Twitter profile)
• FACEBOOK (links to Facebook profile)

Changing the order, titles, and destination of these links is very easy with menu management in WordPress 3.0.

Custom Taxonomies:

This feature adds great value for those who user WordPress as CMS. Custom Taxonomies allows us to create additional pieces of meta information for posts. By default there are "Categories" and "Tags", now we can add additional types with the option of being hierarchical or not.

Multi-site (WordPress MU in the Core):

WordPress MU allows us to run multiple websites (with multiple domains) in versions prior to 3.x, but now we have WordPress MU at the core of WordPress 3.0. Which means they are merged together. Though it requires some code/configurations but this is great addition at the WordPress-3.0 core .

Custom Author Templates:

With WordPress 3.0 we can have personalized templates for authors. Meaning that we can create two or more template and can name them like "author-digitss.php" or "author-11.php". WordPress will call applicable template based on author username or id from the template hierarchy.

Shortlinks:

WordPress 3.0 provides "Get Shortlink" option by default, just below the post title textbox. Which will get us the short link for our post in following format http://blogs.digitss.com/?p=380, with the help of which we can avoid using 3rd party short-link utilities on websites like Twitter.

That's all for now from DiGiTSS, please let us know your experience with WordPress 3.0.!

References:

http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/new-features-wordpress-3/

http://www.blogohblog.com/whats-new-in-wordpress-3-0/

P.S: We have upgraded both our blogs Blogs@DiGiTSS and Life@DiGiTSS with WordPress 3.0 with ease and running smooth..!Similar Posts:

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Wordpress Auto Login Plugin

I had come up with requirement where I need to provide a auto-login to WordPress blog with Guest user credentials. To accomplish that requirement first I had looked up at available plugins which can let me do that without writing a line of code. Finally I got something similar I wanted and I have modified that and written a plugin to match up that requirement. I owe lot to WordPress; and to add up my little contribution to WordPress community I have generalized that plugin and published it here on my blogs and WordPress Plugins directory.

To be fair this plugin is simple and do not have any interface from where you can configure it. Simply open up the auto-login.php file and edit following configuration array; that's it you are done.

How to configure WordPress Auto-Login ?

It's simple just look at code snippet and you will find out yourself..!

// Allow guest login from Friend URLs. Please specify list of all websites from which guest login is allowed.
// You can choose/specify different user to auto-login them from different websites.
$aFriend[] = array('URL' => 'http://life.digitss.com', 'USER' => 'guest');
$aFriend[] = array('URL' => 'http://www.digitss.com', 'USER' => 'guest');
$aFriend[] = array('URL' => 'http://www.dgtss.com', 'USER' => 'guest');
$aFriend[] = array('URL' => 'http://blogs.dgtss.com', 'USER' => 'guest');

Specify list of friend or ally websites along with USER. Yes, you can specify different User for auto-login from each website. So you can configure those websites based on roles/rights and set them up..!

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I tried to drill-down problem into little more and I found that following URL does not seems to be returning anything:
http://blogs.digitss.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=1&ver=3241-1141 which has caused the real trouble. The reason behind it was that wp-tinymce.js.gz file was missing under wp-includes\js\tinymce directory.

Placing wp-tinymce.js.gz from my local directory to live has immediate impact and WordPress WYSIWYG TinyMCE started working well.

Tiny MCE WordPress Error

TinyMCE WordPress WYSIWYG Working again

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