14 Cool WordPress Plugins

Plugins are one of the reasons that wordpress is so extremely powerful! There are thousands of plugins for your WordPress blog that are completely free, that will make your blog an instant powerhouse without writing a single piece of code. There are tons of great plugins – it is really hard to make a list of just 14 (plus 1), but, alas, I have. If you have more to add please put them in the comments below. (While you’re at it, would you mind hitting the Tweetmeme button above? Yes Tweetmeme is on of my favorote WordPress plugins! And away we go…

1. Akismet – is a plugin that fights spam. 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. Like I like to say: “Kills spam DEAD!”
2. Contact Form 7 – is a plugin that you can use to make contact forms for your site, easily, without writing any code. Some slight html might be needed but for the most part Contact Form 7 is plug and play. One of the key features of this plugin is that it uses spam filters from the akismet database (see above) and will filter out any spammers on your form. It supports multiple contact forms so you can use it on as many pages as you need. It also has bot prevention which uses a CAPTCHA form to make sure the comments are real and not from a bot. This form is really simple to use and saves a ton of time it would normally take to code a form like this by hand. All very cool stuff!
3. Tiny MCE Advanced – This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ wysiwyg editor: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Together these plugins can add over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row. Some of the new features added by this plugin are:
   1. Imports all CSS classes from the main theme’s stylesheet and adds them to a drop-down list.

   2. Font size and font family selection.

   3. Support for making and editing tables.

   4. Advanced link and image dialogs that offer a lot of options.

   5. Search and Replace while editing.

   6. Supportfor XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers.

   7. Support for adding inline css styles to any element.

4. Exclude Pages – This plugin allows you to add pages to your website and keep them out of the navigation bar. Some pages you do not want your visitors to see until the complete a required action (like thank you pages or offers that you have for people after they opt in to your list).
5. Page Links To – is a plugin that allows you to make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URL to the new one, using a redirect style of your choosing (302 Moved Temporarily is standard, but you can enable 301 Moved Permanently redirects if you wish.)For instance, say you have an E-Commerce program (like Zen-Cart) installed, and can’t integrate it into WordPress. You’ll still probably want to have a link to it from your WordPress blog. With this plugin you can create a new page called “Shop,” and point it to the URL of your online store. “Shop” will show up when you use wp_list_pages();, but instead of linking to the (blank) “Shop” page, it will link you your online store!
6. Google Site Map – This plugin is really self explanatory. All you have to do is download it and install it and it will create a site map for you. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. In a nutshell it will notify Ask.com, Google, Bing and YAHOO about changes to your blog and blog posts via ping. It is an invaluable tool for Search Engine Optimization and is extremely easy to use.
7. Tweetmeme – Tweetmeme is an invaluable plugin that will allow your visitors to retweet your blog and blog posts with the click of a button. It will also count the number of times the blog post has been retweeted. Tweetmeme will install a button within your posts and content and when it is clicked it will open up Twitter in another window and allow your visitors to log in to their twitter accounts and tweet about your blog from within their own Twitter accounts. Tweetmeme is so easy – go ahead, give it a try and see for yourself…
8. Viper’s Video Quicktags - Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. One of the great features of Vipers video quicktags is that you can control the width, height, colors, alignment on the page with ease. And you can customize these every time you upload a video. Video is becoming a huge factor for SEO and getting your blog noticed – so this plugin is a must have.
9. WP-DB-Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. I still have never lost a WordPress database – But I subscribe to the theory that it is better to be safe than sorry… Get this plugin and back your database up regularly.
10. Comment Redirect - Getting comments on your blog is really important, it creates a conversation and helps reate a community. Your first time commenters are precious. This plugin allows you to redirect just those people to a page of your choosing! I use this plugin along side the exclude pages plugin to create a thank you page on my blog that is hidden and when a first time commenter comments on my blog I use this plugin to redirect them to that thank you page.
11. WP 2.5 Gallery Lightbox – This WordPress plugin adds the Lightbox feature to image links and to the new WordPress gallery feature (2.5+). It uses the jQuery Lightbox Plugin by Benjamin Arthur Lupton to create the lightbox effect (dimmed background as images rises up), and adds rel=”lightbox” to image links in posts, pages and galleries. Much nicer image presentation than the standard WordPress image handling.
12. Featured Content Gallery is a WordPress plugin that creates an automated rotating image gallery of your posts or pages for use anywhere within your theme. Completely customizable, the Featured Content Gallery is very easy to integrate. Choose to automate the plugin and simply add a custom field to each post or page you want to display and the gallery will show the image, an auto-generated thumbnail in the upper carousel, and the title and first few lines of page/post text. Advanced options allow inclusion of custom thumbnail images, custom text, and custom gallery styles and transitions.
13. GigPress is a WordPress plugin built specifically with musicians and performers in mind. Manage all of your upcoming and past performances or events right from within WordPress, and display them using simple shortcodes or template tags on your WordPress-powered website. You can optionally link each show or performance to a post, or automatically create a new post each time you add a new show. With a little tweaking – the GigPress work great as an events calendar too!
14. All in One SEO Pack – As they say, this plugin is streamlined for best SEO practices for WordPress. Actually very easy to install, and the user interface is easy to fill out. Recommended for the serious blogger. Looking for a simpler but very effective WordPress Solution? I also like the easy to use: Add Meta Tags – This plugin adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. The addition of the META tags is fully automatic , but it also includes all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags.

If you like this list or have some more cool WordPress to add, please post your comments/additions below.

Rock on,

Lennie