Thirteen “Lesser Known” Helpful WordPress Plugins

There are zil­lions of Word­Press plu­g­ins avail­able, with many new ones released each day. Some are well known and almost uni­ver­sally employed, e.g., Akismet, Google Sitemap Generator.

I have dis­cov­ered some use­ful plu­g­ins that are not as widely known, but extremely help­ful. If you are not using the fol­low­ing plu­g­ins, you might want to con­sider them:

1. WP Plu­g­ins Tracker

Are all of your plu­g­ins up to date? This plu­gin will add a link to your Dash­board, allow­ing you to see the ver­sion of each plu­gin you are using, as well the most recent release, allow­ing you to update. This is help­ful because plu­gin devel­op­ers fre­quent issue updates cor­rect­ing bugs dis­cov­ered and sub­mit­ted to them by folks who have down­loaded and employed the plugin.

If you upgrade to Word­Press 2.3, you will no longer need this plu­gin as the soft­ware auto­mat­i­cally checks for the lat­est ver­sion of the plu­gin and pro­vides a link to the site where the newest edi­tion can be downloaded.

2. Dupli­cate Con­tent Cure

This plu­gin pre­vents “search engines from index­ing word­press pages that con­tain dupli­cate con­tent, like archives and cat­e­gory pages.” Allow­ing those pages to be archived dilutes the search engine rank and value of your site.

3. Feed Copy­righter

Adds copy­right ver­biage to the end of your posts alert­ing read­ers about web-based aggre­ga­tor sites that steal con­tent and repub­lish it with­out permission.

4. Full Text Feed

The whole point of sub­scrib­ing to feeds is to read posts in a blog reader such as Blog­lines (my favorite) with­out hav­ing to actu­ally visit each site. How­ever, excerpts on a site’s main page are a great idea because they allow vis­i­tors to peruse recent con­tent with­out exces­sive scrolling.

Even though you set your Word­Press options to deliver a full feed, if you man­u­ally insert the <!–more–> tag in a post, the feed will be trun­cated and many read­ers, includ­ing me, will unsub­scribe. This plu­gin allows you to employ the use of excerpts while still deliv­er­ing a full feed to your readers.

Sub­scribe to my feed to see it in action!

5. Enforce www. Preference

Pre­serve your perma-links! The research I have done on this topic leads me to believe that it doesn’t mat­ter whether you use www or not. But what does mat­ter that you pick one ver­sion of your address or the other and use it con­sis­tently. This plu­gin also strips “index.php” from the ends of URIs.

6. WP-Chunk

Has a vis­i­tor ever left a com­ment that include an extremely long link that bled into your side­bar, ruin­ing the look of the page? This will trun­cate that long link while retain­ing its functionality.

7. My Dash­board

Stream­lines and mod­ern­izes the look of your Word­Press dash­board, allow­ing you to pick from a few skins. The stan­dard included gad­gets can be moved into a cus­tom con­fig­u­ra­tion. They are: Lat­est­Com­ments, Lat­est Posts, Blog Sta­tis­tics, Quick Links, Incom­ing links, Word­Press devel­op­ment blog RSS feed, Word­Press Planet Other news, Sched­uled posts and Akismet sta­tis­tics, in addi­tion to a generic RSS Feed reader.

8. My Dash­board Gadgets

This brand-new plu­gin adds four use­ful gad­gets to your My Dash­board con­fig­u­ra­tion: Activ­ity Mon­i­tor, Your Drafts, Tech­no­rati Graph and a replace­ment for the stan­dard Word­Press Blog Sta­tis­tics gad­get. This improved ver­sion dis­plays the num­ber of com­ments and ping­backs separately.

9. Exe­cutable PHP Wid­get

Ever find a great plu­gin that you couldn’t use because you could not under­stand how to insert the PHP code into your side­bar or other file? This plu­gin is a life­saver! It gives you up to nine addi­tional boxes akin to text boxes into which you can insert PHP code. For exam­ple, I used this plu­gin to place the code required by Alex King’s Pop­u­lar­ity Con­test plu­gin into a PHP box so that the list of “Most Pop­u­lar Arti­cles” would be dis­played in the sidebar.

10. No Self Pings

Word­Press auto­mat­i­cally pings sites to which you link within an arti­cle. If you ref­er­ence one of your own prior posts, you will send a ping to that post when you click “Pub­lish”. This plu­gin pre­vents Word­Press from send­ing pings to other posts on the same site.

11. One Click

How did we live with­out it? After you unzip, upload and acti­vate this plu­gin, a new option appears on your Dash­board, “One Click Install.” You never again have to unzip and upload themes or plu­g­ins before acti­vat­ing them. One Click does it for you! This fab­u­lous plu­gin is a bit dan­ger­ous, how­ever. If you decide to delete a theme or plu­gin, there is no dia­logue box say­ing, “You are about to delete ______. Are you sure?” So use this one care­fully, but you def­i­nitely should be using it.

12. Auto­matic Upgrade

Like One Click, this one is a life­saver. You can back up your data­base and upgrade to the newest ver­sion of Word­Press with just a cou­ple of clicks.

13. Con­tact Form

There are fancier con­tact form plu­g­ins avail­able, but this one works nicely and Dou­glas Karr’s recent improve­ments include a drop-down menu (check his out … you can use it to pro­pose mar­riage to him if you are so inclined) and spam protection.

Is there a plu­gin you use on your own site and/or have devel­oped that is not listed here? Leave a com­ment with a link to the site where it can be downloaded!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Thurs­day Thirteen

On the Same Topic:

• Colloquium’s Best of 2007
• Thir­teen Mem­o­rable (for the Par­ents) Vis­its with Santa Claus
• A Thir­teen Ques­tion His­tory Quiz for Baby Boomers
• Thir­teen Obser­va­tions About Life
• Thir­teen More “Lesser Known” Help­ful Word­Press Plugins