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WordPress – best plugins

“Why blog with WordPress?”

Well I’m glad you asked, when I started blogging I was using a website called blogger to publish my blog. I like blogger initially because it made setup easy and would FTP and automatically update pages for me when I made new postings. The problem that arose as my postings increased in number was that the blogger category system doesn’t make much sense. WordPress allows me to customize categories and subcategories to make the site easier to navigate for you! WordPress is also full of useful widgets and plugins. It lets me create a blog that is easy to navigate through my random content and very user friendly.

My blogger experience was overall quite enjoyable. They make the template easy for you to setup and modify with very little effort. Unfortunately the customization of blogger templates and themes was very technical. If you have your blogger site hosted on your own domain (as I did) then you cannot install widgets! The only way to update components of you blog was to do it manually in the code. Being a tech savvy individual this was not too difficult for me to do but I foresee it being an issue for a less experienced individual.

WordPress is installed onto your server. It uses PHP and SQL to maintain an updated and dynamically integrated website. It allows you to customize just about everything you can imagine and you can also download a large variety of plugins, widgets and templates. I found an excellent website for getting WordPress templates and downloaded several templates from there to customize later. I also searched through the 4,000 available WordPress plugins and found the best few worth downloading.

All In 1 SEO Pack – This plugin allows you to customize and integrate your META data with your blog. Definitely worth downloading, installing and configuring.

Buy Me A Beer – Lets you put a link at the bottom of your posts to allow people to donate money to you. I set it up so that people can donate money to help me replace my stolen laptop.

Contact Form 7 – Lets you create forms for your website. For example Contact Me

Events Calendar – Allows you to update an events calendar so your viewers can stay on top of upcoming events.

Google Site Map Generator – If you don’t know what a site map is I recommend googling it. This plugin creates one for you automatically!

WordPress Reports – If you own your website and your not using Google Analytics or another traffic reporting service I HIGHLY recommend you set it up. This plugin integrates your traffic reports with your WordPress dashboard so you can easily monitor your site traffic.

Lightbox 2.0 for WordPress – I like this plugin alot. It makes it really easy to integrate light box with any link your using on your page simply by including this code in the tag: rel=”lightbox”

WordPress Greet Box – Lets you to configure a custom greeting box for users based on how they found your website. Very cool and useful plugin!

Suscribe2 – Lets readers sign up to receive email updates on new blog postings.

Add to Any Share/Save & Subscribe Buttons – Creates pop-up buttons to allow people to share your posting on a number of social networking sites or subscribe to your blog using any feed reader.

AdSense Manager – Easily upload your AdSense advertisments and place them in your blog template.   You can create multiple ads and configure exaclty how their displayed.

Ad Rotator – Create your own content changing advertisements and have them cycle through on your site.

WP Polls – Allow your web viewers to vote in your own online poll.  Then broadcast your result as a press release and generate even more traffic for your site.

Register Plus – Change the way people register to become part of your site.  Allows you to change the logo displayed as well as insert a captcha to keep spammers out.

GD Star Rating – Create a star rating system on all your posts, pages and comments.  Extremely customizable and easy to use.  Excellent plugin for creating a rating system.

PageEar – Advertisement for the upper right corner of your site that when scrolled over folds down to show the entire ad.

EasyPayPal – Require members of your site to sign up and pay to receive updates on your content and have full access to your blog.

If there are any other WordPress plugins I left out please feel free to mention them in the comments below!

© 2009 Soft Thoughts.