Latest and Greatest WordPress Plugins

This is a list of WordPress Plugins that I use and recommend for almost every WordPress site I work on. I will try to keep it up to date with the best that I can find in each category. There are plenty of great plugins out there, but I find myself using these ones over and over again. If anyone knows of better options or can add ones that I missed, please leave a comment below and I will try to add them in.

Best Plugins for Spam:

• Askimet – One of the default plugins. It has been all I have needed for spam so far. Activate this right away.

Best  Plugins for SEO:

• All in one SEO Pack – Lets you control metadata on everypage and post.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Automically generates a sitemap and submits it to Google, MSN, and Ask.com.
• KB Robots.txt – Easily control your robots.txt file and help search engines know which pages to crawl and which ones to avoid.
• Google Analyticator – Adds the code for Google Analytics and allows you to shut it off so that visits by admins are not counted. You wouldn’t want to inflate your stats with the 100 times a day you visit your site, right?

Best Social Networking Plugins

• PingPressFM – Use ping.fm to broadcast your content to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Myspace and more.
• Share This – Add buttons to every post to enable easy sharing by visitors
• BackType Connect -BackType.com tracks comments and allows you to follow other people’s comments. This plugin will bring in a lot of conversation, including other people linking to your post, and Tweets that mention and link to your post. This is a great way to add some conversatin to otherwise slow posts.

To make your life easier

• Post to Page converter – Convert posts to pages or pages to posts with the click of a button.
• WP Post Thumbnails – Easily upload, crop and save up to three thumbnails of varying sizes for each post.
• Photo Dropper - Adds a button to the WYSIWYG editor, right next to the regular image uploader. It searches Flickr for Creative Commons images that can be used for free and automatically adds the neede attribution and credit.
• User Photo – Upload and assign photos for each user from within the admin panel. Great for multi author blogs!

Great Plugins for Developers

• Reveal IDS for Admin – Especially for theme creators, this will display all the ID’s for categories, posts, pages, tags… right in the admin page.
• The Excerpt Reloaded – Control how many words are in an excerpt, what html tags are allowed, and what the text for a ‘read more’ link would say.
• User Level Themes - Allows you to activate differrent themes so that when logged in as an admin, you can see the new underconstruction theme, while other visitors will see the current one.

This Article was written as part of the WpJumpStart System

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