Best Wordpress Plugins

Add Post Footer
By Freetime
This useful WordPress plugin automatically places an optional custom paragraph block (handy for affixing author bios, related links, or any number of other items) at the end of every post.

Akismet
By Automattic
Comment and trackback spam are an unfortunate price of website success. The more traffic you accumulate, the more likely you are to be inundated by fake comments. Automattic's Akismet checks comments and trackbacks against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam. If the comments and trackbacks are deemed bogus, they're automatically shuffled over to your WordPress installation's spam folder. Clicking Aksimet Stats (located in your Dashboard) shows a breakdown of your spam, missed spam, ham (Akismets term for real comments), and false positives (legit comments and trackbacks mistaken for spam by Akismet that you've since flagged as genuine).

All in One SEO Pack
Widely considered a WordPress essential, Michael Torbert's All in One SEO Pack should be one of the pillars in your search engine optimization efforts. With it, you can give your page an SEO-friendly title (which shows up at the top of a Web browser), homepage description (which appears beneath your URL when people search for it via Google or other engine), and keywords related to your topic. Warning: Be careful with your keyword density. If Google suspects that you're stuffing keyboards or using black-hat SEO techniques, your search engine placement may be penalized.

Cool Author Box
By Morten Rand-Hendriksen
The Cool Author Box plug-in adds author information to the bottom of a WordPress post or page. Not only does it display the author name, but it also showcases the author's Gravatar and a link to the author's website.

Dagon Design Site Map Generator
By Dagon Design
 Dagon Design's useful plug-in generates a fully customizable sitemap that helps search engine spiders easily rifle through your content. Dagon's tool manages this through multilevel categories, pages, and permalinks support. The plug-in lets you choose which links to display, their order, comment counts, and post dates. In short, this is everything you need to create a highly searchable WordPress site for both people and search engines.

Disqus Comment System
By Disqus
The Disqus (pronounced "discuss") plug-in integrates with WordPress' native comment system to allow more interactive Web talk. It features threaded comments and replies, social media mentions, the ability for moderators to approve or reject comments via email, and a load of other useful tools.

JetPack
By WordPress.com
JetPack is an official WordPress.com plug-in that gives your self-hosted WordPress blog a truckload of extra features. The plug-in serves up visitor stats, social media sharing options, and After The Deadline, a grammar and spell checker.

SEO Friendly Images
By Vladimir Prelovac
SEO Friendly Images, designed by Vladimir Prelovac, is a WordPress optimization plug-in that updates your uploaded images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. The ALT attribute is considered an important part of SEO as it provides an image description to search engines, and helps create a match when someone keys in a search query. The TITLE attribute plays lesser role; the text associated with this attribute appears when a visitor mouses over an image.

SEO Smart Links
By Vladimir Prelovac
Vladmir Prelovac's other must-have plug-in lets WordPress automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your site. After installing the plug-in, you simply open its configuration option and enter the keywords you use the most often and the links that you'd like to associate to them. So, for example, if you want to link the word "cat" to "cat.com," the plug-in can do this automatically. SEO Smart Links lets you determine how frequently a single keyword or phrase is linked within a single post so that you don't end up with link overload.

Simple: Press
By Andy Staines and Steve Klasen
Want to add a forum to your WordPress setup? Simple Press lets you do just that. But don't think that it's not full-featured; you can customize the forum with skins, create sub-forums, grant user rankings based on post numbers, and more.

Thank Me Later
By Brendon Boshell
A little courtesy goes a long way. Thank Me Later automatically sends a customizable "thank you" email to people who have commented on your blog. The plug-in lets you set the time when the email is sent, create multiple messages, and tinker with restriction settings.

Ultimate Google Analytics
By Wilfred van der Deijl
Google Analytics is the favorite site-analytics tool of many webmasters due to its meticulously detailed graphs, charts, and traffic numbers—it's also free! Wilfred van der Deijl's Ultimate Google Analytics plug-in adds JavaScript to each page (without making any changes to your template) so that you can track outbound links, downloads from your own site, mailto: links, and more without requiring you to install the code manually. Simply sign into your Google Anaytics account to see your traffic data. The only downside? Google Analytics doesn't supply real-time traffic numbers.

Viper's Video Quicktags
By Viper007Bond
If you're tired of copying and pasting HTML into your site's backend when you want to embed video, this plug-in can simplify the process. After you install Viper007Bond's plug-in, icons representing your favorite online video respositories (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and more) appear above the main content area. Clicking one of them lets you enter the video's URL and dimensions. Clicking "Okay" inserts the video (centered) into the blog. It's just that easy.

WordPress.com Popular Posts
By Frasten
This is one of the few plug-ins that actually requires the use of another plug-in—WordPress.com Stats. But once both are installed, Frasten's WordPress.com Popular Posts can work its magic by displaying your site's most popular posts and pages over the course of a user-selected number of days. You can exclude select posts and pages, show excerpts (when applicable), and select the number of posts to be shown.

WordPress Database Backup
By Austin Matzko
Consider this the ultimate WordPress safety net for when disaster strikes. This sanity-saver backs up all of your files to either your server, desktop, or inbox once you select the frequency (hourly, twice daily, once daily, or weekly). The speed with which your file is restored depends on the amount of content that's been backed up (it once took me two hours to restore my personal site, 2D-X after a mishap), but I was more than happy to wait, given the alternative. You shouldn't go without Matzko's excellent plug-in.

WP Greet Box
By Thaya Kareeson
Thaya Kareeson's plug-in is all about welcoming new visitors and building loyalty. It displays a user-defined greeting to fresh readers depending on the referrer URL. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they might see a pop-up that asks them to digg your post. For new visitors who don't come from any matching URLs, you could set a message that suggests that they subscribe to your RSS feed.

W3 Total Cache
By W3 Edge
Protect your WordPress blog from sudden, huge traffic spikes, and pokey system performance with W3 Total Cache. This plug-in works by caching browser, page, and object data, as well as compressing databases. It also speeds load times by delivering fresh blog data only as needed.

WPTouch
By BraveNewCode
WPtouch automatically streamlines your WordPress blog for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android, and other devices. Paying for the $39 WPTouch Premium gives supports iPhone Retina Display and ad monetization.

WPVN-Username Changer
By Minh-Quan Tran
The default username for a WordPress administrator is "admin," which gives potential hackers a head start, should they wish to misbehave. Using this plug-in improves your blog's security by changing the default "admin" administrator's name to something of your choosing. Now, you can sleep a little easier at night.

Google XML Sitemaps for Videos
By Digital Inspiration
Do you want to ensure that Bing, Google, and other search engines recognize and index your videos? Digital Inspiration's Google XML Sitemaps for Videos plugin does just that by generating a sitemap for your YouTube clips that have been embedded within blog posts.

WordPress Rich Media Plugins

Rich media is easy. Well, it takes some work, and there is some learning involved, but plugin developers have made it much easier to adorn our sites with the glitz and glamor of all things interactive. Play with some of them and see what they're capable of. You'll be amazed at how far this medium can take your site and how you'll be better able to serve your site visitors.

So what kinds of plugins are out there and what are they capable of? Let's find out, shall we?

1. All-In-One Video Pack

Available on the  WordPress.org.

This is a fully-functioning video tool. You an import, upload, and record video right in the post. Video editing, mixing, thumbnails, video players, and other features that rival those found on YouTube can be added as well.

The whole thing installs pretty easily and sets up pretty quick. If you're going to get the most of this plugin, however, take some time to explore everything, read up on the features, and play with it. This is a fantastic option for those looking to try vlogging, artists, and those who currently use a number of different social networks for their videos.

2. WPaudio MP3 Player

Available for download from WordPress.org. 

If you're a podcaster or blog about music, poetry readings, voice overs, or other audio, you need an audio plugin that's clean, stylish, and easy to use. Compatibility is often a huge problem when working in this format as well. The WPaudio MP3 Player plugin takes care of a lot of that.

Like the video plugin, this one is pretty quick to set up and doesn't seem to slow page loads down like many of the others available out there. I think the best features of this one are the controls themselves and its use of tags. It also works with HTML 5.

3. Smooth Slider

Available for download from WordPress.org,  ClickOnF5,  and you'll find a demo in the upper left hand side  of the home page.

Neat features are not something WordPress is known for on its own. Even getting a basic set of columns and tables can be almost impossible, and often break more things than you have the patience to fix. The Smooth Slider Widget, however, seems to solve the problem.

Simple, fully customizable, and easy to use, you don't have to know how to code to use it. It supports custom post types, pages, and media, pure images or image/text combinations. You can use your own text and even replace the number system. Definitely worth a try if you're looking to add special features or update your site's style.

4. Apture

Available from Apture  (Warning: Direct Download). See Apture in action at The Economist  (highlight a term) and check out the links on the Apture home page. 

Apture is all about search, and I have to admit, they do it well. Once installed:

 Links are given a popout to their respective pages
 Media is a snap to upload and imbed
 Search for terms
You'll find it's easier for you to serve up the added content, without having visitors leave your site. They'll be able to explore all they like, and can even search farther within the Apture window. I had this on my own blog for quite some time and really enjoyed it.

5. Lightbox Plus

Download from WordPress.org, and you can see a demo of the plugin at 23Systems  as well.

If you use images to help explain a point, or like to feature images, but find you need a thumbnail and the ability to call up a larger image for a closer look, this is your plugin. It's light, simple, and basic.

6. Fancy Box

An alternative is Fancybox. Similar in concept, this one is fully customizable, allows you to customize the various features, and is applied automatically. you can download it from Wordpress.org  and see it in action on Moskis. I've tried numerous ones (am currently testing another), and liked this one the best so far. Others easily became too complicated or lacked the basic functionality.

7. Incorporating Social Media

There are a ton of plugins available for the various sites, many of them work on a post by post basis and communicate back to the network. Unfortunately, there are just too many varieties to cover. My suggestion is to make a list of the features you want, have a look around, and try a few out.

8. Twitter Goodies

Available from WordPress.org,  Twitter Goodies gives you a tweet button, search widget, and a profile widget. Quick, simple & clean

9. Simple Facebook Connect

No matter what you want to do with Facebook connect, this easy set of plugins will help you do it. There's no need to be a coding wiz, either. Great for DIY-ers. You'll find it on WordPress.org 


10. Embed Facebook

Why waste your time posting the same thing twice, when you can post it on Facebook and embed it anywhere on your site you'd like? That's what the Embed Facebook plugin does. 

11. Social Bookmarking RELOADED

Why restrict your readers to only one or two social networks when you can let them share and save on whichever site they'd like? This one is neat and pretty comprehensive. Offered on WordPress.org. 

12. Niche Specific Plugins

If you're in a particular niche, why not use that to your advantage and offer something a little bit different that your visitors could actually use? Here are a few interesting ones:

13. Real Estate Finder

Visitors can search the US, Canada, Australia and the UK for property. Download it from Wordpress.org.  You can also find a Mortgage Loan Calculator plugin  they might find helpful.

14. WP Flash Clock

If you give away hourly deals or otherwise use time in your marketing or niche, this could be an interesting one for you. You might even want to incorporate it right into your theme. You can find it here.

15. Protein Shake Recipe Calculator

Making protein shakes is a big thing for dieters and fitness nuts. Make it easy for them to figure out how many calories they're consuming so they can stay on top of things. Available in a widget.

16. Foursquare Latest Checkins

I realize this probably should have gone in the social section, but to be honest, I thought this would be so great for a personal travel website, local review site, or even for marketing (traveling mascot), I had to move it to this section. Displays the latest checkins for a user. Get it on WordPress.org.
Have you used any rich media plugins? Which ones did you like the best?