Thirteen More “Lesser Known” Helpful WordPress Plugins

Thir­teen More “Lesser Known” Help­ful Word­Press Plugins

Here are thir­teen more use­ful plu­g­ins for your consideration:

1. Admin Theme Preview

Want to try out a new theme but do not want to make it live and vis­i­ble to read­ers while you con­sider whether to imple­ment and/or mod­ify it? This is a must-have plu­gin! It allows you to pre­view any theme you have uploaded while your exist­ing theme remains live.

2. Blo­gRush Click Man­ager

You can decide whether to include a par­tic­u­lar post in the Blo­gRush feed, as well as give it a unique title designed to attract read­ers when it appears in the Blo­gRush wid­get on other sites. Since Blo­gRush auto­mat­i­cally allows only 40 char­ac­ters in post titles, this can be extremely help­ful. The num­ber of char­ac­ters used is dis­played in order to help you stay within the limit.

3. Com­mentLuv

This ver­biage appears just beneath the com­ment “Sub­mit” but­ton below:

The Com­mentLuv plu­gin parses each commenter’s feed and dis­plays a link to their site’s most recent post. Please be patient as it may take a moment for the plu­gin to fetch the infor­ma­tion. Thanks!

The link beneath some of the com­ments to that visitor’s last blog post is cour­tesy of Com­mentLuv! It’s a great way to give some link love back to your read­ers. Note, how­ever, that it only works with Feed­burner. So if your vis­i­tor has not burned a Feed­burner feed for their site, the link will not appear.

4. Dif­fer­ent Posts Per Page

This plu­gin gives you the flex­i­bil­ity to direct how many posts will appear on your front page, as well as archive and search result pages. For instance, I have five posts on the front page, but if you per­form a search, you will see up to 20 post excerpts on each results page.

5. What Oth­ers Are Say­ing

In the side­bar, I invite you to “Check Out These Other Great Sites!” There I dis­play the most recent post from some of my favorite blogs. How? It is so sim­ple using Sarah’s won­der­ful plu­gin! Just install it and then insert the feed address for your favorite sites in your blogroll. Under “Blogroll Man­age­ment,” expand the “Advanced” tab and place the address on the “RSS Address” line. Every three hours (by default), the feeds will update. Again, this is a great way to kick the blogroll con­cept up a notch and spread some link love.

6. Track­back­ers

Speak­ing of link love … in the side­bar, I say “Thanks for the Link Love!” using this plu­gin. When another site links back to yours, “if their server is con­fig­ured to send a track­back (and most all blog­ging soft­ware is), your blog will be noti­fied and that track­back will dis­play on your site.” This plu­gin counts the num­ber of times a site has linked to you and dis­plays the ten who link most often (default value).

7. Digg This

Want to let your read­ers know when one of your posts has been Dugg? This plu­gin detects when a par­tic­u­lar post has been Dugg at least once and appears. If it has not yet been Dugg, the Digg badge is not displayed.

8. Short­cut Macros

Alex King has writ­ten sev­eral really great plu­g­ins and this one is no excep­tion. If you link to the same web­sites from time to time, you can set up a macro, enter the code into a post or page, and the link will mag­i­cally appear! So, for instance, I have set up a macro labeled “##hl” which will auto­mat­i­cally insert a link to my other web­site and save me from hav­ing to type the full code, <a href=“http://www.jhsiess.com/hereslookingatme”>Here’s look­ing at … me!<a> each and every time.

9. WP-Page Navi 2.20

Want to pro­vide your read­ers with greater flex­i­bil­ity when nav­i­gat­ing your site? Just add one line of code to the theme’s footer and acti­vate this plu­gin. Vis­i­tors will be able to see the total num­ber of pages that make up your site and review each one sequen­tially or jump to a spe­cific page. You can cus­tomize the appear­ance via the Word­Press plu­gin edi­tor. You can see it in action at the very bot­tom of this page.

10. Delink Com­ment Author

Per­haps a vis­i­tor left a nonob­jec­tion­able com­ment along with a link to a site that you do find objec­tion­able. Once again, Alex King has pro­vided a solu­tion. This plu­gin allows you to sim­ply remove the link while retain­ing the comment.

11. WP-Print 2.20

Your read­ers may appre­ci­ate your arti­cles so much that they want to print them to read later or share with friends. Just click on the link that appears under every post and a new win­dow will open dis­play­ing the arti­cle in print­able for­mat, along with a sum­mary of all links con­tained in the article.

12. KB Advanced RSS

How did I get the lists of my recent Stum­bles and Diggs into the sidebar?

Did you know that your Stum­ble­upon home page has an RSS feed link in the lower right cor­ner? If you log into Digg, visit your Pro­file page and click on the “His­tory” tab. You will find the orange RSS icon right next to the drop down box. Just grab the address of the feeds by hold­ing your mouse over the icons — the address will appear in the lower left cor­ner of your browser window.

Yes, Word­Press fea­tures built-in RSS wid­gets, but there is no flex­i­bil­ity. By installing the KB Advance RSS wid­get, you can con­trol the title, icon, num­ber of items dis­played and add HTML code to style the way the feed items appear.

Just enter your RSS feed address and you can dis­play all the pages you have recently Stum­bled or Dugg, yet again giv­ing a shout-out to your favorite sites.

13. Word­Press Upgrade Pre­flight Check

Have you upgraded to Word­Press 2.3 yet? If you are feel­ing unsure about whether or not to upgrade, you can uti­lize this plu­gin to check your site and pin­point any poten­tially incom­pat­i­ble themes and plugins.

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!

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Tech­no­rati Tags: Thurs­day Thir­teen, Word­Press Plugins

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