WordPress platform is widely used by bloggers over the world can be due to the powerful and useful WordPress plugins. There are thousand of WordPress plugins are available, many of them have same features, but how you choose the best ones? We have recommend you some popular and useful WordPress plugins that you will need them when you blogging.

Google related WordPress Plugins

1. Google Sitemap Generator – Create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Every time 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.

2. Google Analytics for WordPress – Automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.

3. Google Analyticator – adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging.

Pages Related WordPress Plugins

1. WP Pagenavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

2. Excluse Pages – Adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages.

3. Page Links To – Allows you to make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL.

Comment WordPress Plugins

Blog comments are a critical part of a successful blog, they are what make a blog interactive and social. Here is the list of most popular WordPress comment plugins.

1. Askimet – A plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs with integration to various blogging systems. You have to get the API key to active it.

2. Subscribe to Comments – Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

3. Get Recent Comments – Displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.

4. Show Top Commentators – Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.

5. Brains Threaded Comments – Adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. For example, when you click the reply link for comment no. 2, then your comment is placed directly under the comment no.2.

6. NoFollow Free – Removes the “nofollow” attribute from your wordpress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FREE”.

Contact Form WordPress Plugins

It is necessary to have a contact form on your blog so that your visitors can easily contact or reach you.

1. Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – Easy-to-install form has many accessibility, usability, and security features and it’s now a fast and easy-to-use plugin for WordPress web logs.

2. Contact Form 7 – Manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

3. cForm II – Is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

Twitter is very hot and popular now, without any doubt that there will be many twitter plugins for WordPress to attract more traffic to your blog.

1. TweetMeme – Easily allows your blog to be retweeted.

2. WP to Twitter – Posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

3. – Displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

4. Twitter Tools – Creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Social Bookmarking WordPress Plugins

Social Bookmarking WordPress plugins allow you to add social bookmarking buttons to your content, making it easy for your visitors to submit your articles and build traffic to your website.

1. Sociable – Adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.

2. Social Drop Down – Displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown. Unlike other social bookmarking displays, this does not cause clutter and takes up little screen space.

3. SocioFluid – Icons for major Social Bookmarking websites, blogger widget and wordpress plugin are available.

4. Bookmarkify – lets you put social bookmarking links in your posts and other pages. Help your readers promote your blog and watch your traffic grow.

5. SociBook – add bookmark links of Del.icio.us, Digg it, Slashdot, RawSugar, Yahoo! MyWeb, and many other links to your wordpress. You can decide which bookmark services you want to show and in what order. You also can define, a own iconset.

RSS Management and Tweaks WordPress Plugins

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Below are some WordPress plugins that help you manage your blog’s RSS feed, track subscribers, and much more.

1. RSS Feed Campaign Tagger – Allows you to tag links in your WordPress RSS feed. It readies the links in the RSS feed for tracking with Google Analytics.

2. Feedburner Widget – Display your FeedBurner subscriber number in a widget on your sidebar in easy and quick way.

3. Feed Subscriber Stats – Uses FeedBurner’s Awareness API to get your feed subscriber stats directly from FeedBurner. So now you can easily check your subscriber stats from the WordPress Administration section.

4. Feedage – Allow you to add subscription buttons to your WordPress blog. Users can user the buttons to add your RSS Feed to the major readers and will allow you to use the Feedage.com tracker to monitor your RSS Feed usage.

5. Extra feed Links – Adding appropriate auto-discovery links to every page type: Comments feed for single articles and pages, Category page feed, Tag page feed, Search page feed, and Author page feed.

Database Backup WordPress Plugin

1. WordPress Database Backup – Creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database

Others

1. All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

2. GD Star Rating – Allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.

3. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress – Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, or both. In order to post comments, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots.

Rockstar theme is original owned by Adii Rockstar. Since he is changed the new theme design for this blog, then he has decided to provide free download for all wordpress users. This theme is integrated with banner ad management and 6 difference color schemes for you to choose as well as widgetized sidebar. If you like Rockstar theme, check out the demo and download for free now.

Most WordPress theme designers will run WordPress on their PC instead of uploading the file to hosting for editing and testing, some people also test run the downloaded WordPress themes before using, this is why they want to install and run WordPress on their PC. Let see how to install and run WordPress on your PC as per below steps.

1. Download WAMP and then install it in C drive C:\

2. After installed, download latest WordPress version and extract the ZIP file to C:\wamp\www

3. Start Wamp Server. Go to Program Files > Wamp Server > start Wamp Server.

4. Left click WAMP icons on the toolbar and then choose Localhost.

You will see this page.

5. Go to PHPmyadmin and create new database. Name it as “WPtesting” and then click the create button.

6. Open Dreamweaver (or any text editor) and open C:\wamp\www\wordpress\wp-config-sample.php. Fill in with your database connection details andn then save the file as wp-config.php. (default username is root and default password is blank)

7. Finally, go to your web browser and type localhost/wordpress to install WordPress, done!

Most people pay money to convert PSD files to WordPress templates because they only know to design website in Photoshop, but they don’t know how to convert PSD file into WordPress theme. Now, you don’t need to pay money for people to do this for you, you can create websites from Photoshop to WordPress promptly with Divine Project and it is absolutely free.

How it Works?

1. Open your design in Photoshop and launch Divine.
2. Assign all WordPress elements in turns.
3. Specify FTP parameters and upload your theme to web.
4. Check the site in browser.

This free software is currently in Beta version, and only available to the Windows platform, version of Photoshop required is CS3 and CS4.

The excerpt in WordPress is a short summary of a post. It is written by hand and it can replace the full post in places where a summary is preferable. The manual excerpt in WordPress telling you what is Wordprese Excerpt, why write excerpt in WordPress, how to write WordPress Excerpt, and etc.

The space of the default WordPress excerpt for editing is too small, and WordPress Excerpt Editor plugin is the recommended plugin for you to edit your WordPress excerpt more easier at the convenience place.

Let see how we customize WordPress excerpt as below:-

1. Default Usage with No Parameters
Displays the post excerpt. Used on non-single/non-permalink posts as a replacement for the_content() to force excerpts to show within the Loop.

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

2. Control Excerpt Length using Filters
By default, excerpt length is set to 55 words. To change excerpt length, add the following code to function.php file in your theme:

function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 20;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_length’, ‘new_excerpt_length’);

3. Using The Excerpt Reloaded Plugin
The Excerpt Reloaded has the following parameters that can be used to fine tune excerpts, detailed parameters will explained in The Excerpt Reloaded plugin page.

<?php the_excerpt_reloaded(excerpt_length, ‘allowedtags’, ‘filter_type’, use_more_link, ‘more_link_text’, force_more_link, fakeit, fix_tags); ?>

Should I continue to upgrade latest version (2.7) of wordpress for all of my blog? Currently Blogging Secret has been upgraded to wordpress 2.7 version, but I really dislike wordpress 2.7 because it takes quite long time to navigate and loading. I don’t know what is the problem, but I don’t this is my internet connection problem.

Another thing is spams. Although I have installed Askimet, but there are lots of pending comments which are waiting for approval. More than 90% of them are spam comments, it really waste my time to delete all of them.

I don’t like wordpress 2.7 at all, so I have decided not to upgrade all of my blog to this version.

We use tag cloud to highlight the most important and/or popular subjects. The more important a tag is, the bigger and louder it appears. But, I didn’t use tag cloud on my blog because I’m lazy to put the tag cloud.  Anyway, if you want to generate your own tag cloud for your website, there is a cool tool that you should give it a try and this online tools named Tag Cloud Generator and it is free. Tag Cloud Generator allows you to generate tag-clouds based on the links on your blog or the most frequently used words on the blog.

This is high quality free wordpress theme named Infinity has 3 fixed columns, thumbnail integration, flickr and delicious enabled, and compatible with wordpress 2.5. Infinity theme is designed by Zhang Yichi, the creative mind behind Vikiworks Studio from Shanghai, China. Unfortunately, Infinity theme is not widget ready, but you can see the development kits. It is free to download, grab it now!

I don’t use related post plugin on my blog anymore, there is no other reason why removed it, I just simply don’t like to use it now.

Recently, I found Yet Another Related Post plugin (http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp) that gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Some additional features of this plugin are as below:-

1. Limited by threshold
2. Using tags and categories
3. Disallowing certain tags and categories
4. Related posts and pages
5. Simple installation
6. Miscellany

For more information about the installation and related functions to be used, you can check out their site.

Congratulations to Gary Blue for winning one copy of Revolution Theme! He will be able to choose one theme out of 8 available Revolution Theme from http://www.RevolutionTheme.com.

Sponsor of the contest

Big thanks to Brian Gardner of http://www.RevolutionTheme.com for sponsoring this contest.