10 Un-Usual Wordpress Plugins that Improved my Blog
Author: Stefan Vervoort | Please Comment!After the redesign I have implanted many new tricks and plugins into my Wordpress theme to improve performance, the look and productivity options of my blog.
Other blogs have been writing articles like these too, but I will add a couple that aren’t the usual plugins that you have already implanted.
1. Advanced Excerpt - Because I needed to customize the default excerpt function of Wordpress I decided to give this plugin a go. I can now do everything I want with my excerpts like the number of words, the html characters that are allowed, the ending character and more.
2. DoFollow - There has been numerous discussion going on about the Dofollow. Is it a good step to take with your blog? I think it is, it haven’t increased my spam posts, but it have increased the ‘look-like-real-comments-but-are-spam’ comments. You will get more discussion, and a little more moderation.
3. FD Feedburner Plugin - If you are using Feedburner as your RSS service, you should have this plugin installed. This make sure all the subscribers subscribed to www.yourblog.com/feed/ are redirected to feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog.
4. Feed Pauser - Feed Pauser was exactly what I was looking for. After almost every post I found some small typos in my article but the article was yet send to the RSS feed, I couldn’t change the typos there. With Feed Pauser you can choose to let Wordpress send your post to the RSS feed after a number of minutes so you make sure everything is fine.
5. FV Code Highlighter - If you want to highlight code tags like HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript on your Wordpress blog you could use the other plugins out there. This plugin however is developed to give the blogger full control over their codes. You can style everything in this code highlighter!
6. RSS Footer - My fellow Dutchman Joost de Valk know what bloggers need. This RSS footer plugin let you do exactly what its name tell us: add a line of text, a copyright notice or even advertisements after or before each post that is published in your RSS feed.
7. Samsarin PHP Widget - If you want to use widgets for your sidebar, there might be time you need to use PHP to get the functionality you like to have. This “PHP widget” is a an awesome solution as you can choose as many widgets as you like.
8. Search Excerpt - The default search function sucks, we used to sort by date and not by relevance. Fortunately there has been some talking about this and this plugin has been developed to help us.
9. WP Existing Tags - This small plugin adds an existing tags-section to your new post page. This makes it easy to choose a tag for your post and makes sure you don’t make two tags almost identical to each other.
10. Wordpress Download Monitor - If you offer downloads for your visitors it might be nice to know how many times files are downloaded. This awesome plugin does a good job.
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7:28 pm on October 26th, 2008
highlighter is the exact thing i am looking 4. thx for that
9:37 pm on October 26th, 2008
No problem, that is the plugin I am very proud of that my buddy developed it! Spread the word!
2:25 am on October 27th, 2008
Thanx for providing info on Code highlighter and RSS footer. I like the un-usual benefits of having these plug-ins.
3:06 am on October 27th, 2008
This is a very nice post. I like the download monitor and FV Code Highlighter. I will used it in my future site. Thanks for sharing.
8:31 am on October 27th, 2008
I have been using only Advanced Excerpts from this list. I will be trying out Feed Pauser and WP Existing Tags - they look useful.
I’m not sure Search Excerpt is useful - I’ve been using Google CSE, and in addition to relevant searches, it monetizes the search well too.
12:48 pm on October 27th, 2008
Nice angle - I’ve mostly given up on the best WordPress plugins posts, but you really did focus on some of the unknown ones.
I technically don’t use any of them, although I do use some which are similar (a different dofollow plugin, a different download plugin, ExecPHP widget instead of Samsarin, a couple of my own plugins which give me the equivalent of the FeedBurner and RSS footer plugins).
The FV Code Highlighter and WP Existing Tags are ones I’ll be checking out. Thanks!
By the way, the comments section appears a little messed up using Firefox 2.
1:46 pm on October 27th, 2008
@All - Great these somewhat unknown plugins has been helpful for you as well! Thanks for commenting!
@Stephan - I will check it out. Never heard that comment before: thanks for pointing that out.
9:09 am on October 29th, 2008
Thank you for your advice. I am big fan of the SEO plugins and Google site-map generator as it enables blog to get picked up well in Google.
10:47 am on October 30th, 2008
Awesome list. This is bookmarked.
Already using some, dofollow is in there. Using ultimate google analytics and all in one SEO.
1:29 am on November 2nd, 2008
The more SEO plugins that you can have the better….
I think I will have to look into this a little further…
Thanks for the share..
8:38 am on November 2nd, 2008
Great resource! Thought you might also like Kaltura’s All in One Video Pack. This is not just another video embed tool - it includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists and much more… Check it out and download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-video-pack/ Showcase your blog, see examples and pictures of the plugin and get support in our forum: http://community.kaltura.org/viewforum.php?f=4
12:31 pm on November 2nd, 2008
I found you looking for download monitor plugins but I’ll add my two sense.
I have used excerpt editor for a long time on various blogs and quite like it though for my money I prefer the limit post plugin that allows me to limit how many characters any section has independently of each other. Another one to use with excerpt editor is “fancy excerpt” which will make sure you don’t have an excerpt ending mid sentence.
As for the dofollow plugin I prefer nofollow-free it allows you more control over your comments than the dofollow plugin. Though my real preference is to control the majority of dofollow through my theme.
7:27 am on December 4th, 2008
Keep up the great work