Xatal

Hands down my favorite part of WordPress is how easily expandable it is through plugins. The big open source community creates all sorts of useful plugins to help expand WordPress from the great blogging software that it is into something incredible.

I use all sorts of plugins on Xatal, and since I’ve been blogging, I’ve steadily found certain plugins to be especially useful for a variety of different tasks. Here are 30 of the best WordPress plugins and how I’ve put them to work:

Additional features for you and for readers:

1. Popularity Contest – One of my favorite plugins, this displays lists of the most popular posts on your website. You can assign different weight to different kinds of hits. You can display a list of the most popular posts by category and by time period as well. The list of the most popular posts in the middle bar is generated with this plugin.
2. WordPress Related Posts – This plugin adds a list of posts at the end of each post. The list is based on the tags given to each post and is highly customizable. I used this plugin to create the list of similar posts at the bottom of this article.
3. Sociable – Sociable adds small icons to the end of each post for submitting the site to common social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Sociable has a lot of websites you can choose to add and is highly customizable. The small icons at the bottom of this page come from Sociable.
4. Clean Archives Reloaded – When used, creates a list of your WordPress blog’s archive. This list is collapsible by month, allowing for a quick glance through a website’s old posts. I use this plugin on my Archives page.
5. Contact Form 7 – Creates forms that can alert you via e-mail. This is a great way to create a Contact page (and I used this plugin for mine) and is highly customizable, giving you full control over each field. This is one of the best contact plugins.
6. WP-PageNavi – Makes navigation far simpler for pages. Instead of the basic “Previous” and “Next” links, WP-PageNavi enables pagination to allow for more intuitive and quicker navigation through categories, tags, and archives. WP-PageNavi can be seen in use at the bottom of most pages that list posts on Xatal.
7. WP-Polls – A poll manager for WordPress! Allows you to create functional polls with a variety of options and embed them into posts or sidebars. WP-Polls uses AJAX to load the results without requiring a page refresh and prevents vote spamming. I use WP-Polls on my sidebar, and tit’s a great way to encourage reader interaction.
8. WP-PostRatings – Uses AJAX to create a simple post rating feature for readers. You can easily view detailed overviews of which posts are popular. I’m trying this one out now, and so far so good!

WordPress SEO

1. All in One SEO Pack – A great plugin for quickly optimizing your WordPress blog. This plugin optimizes titles and allows you to insert meta keywords and descriptions into your posts and pages. All in One SEO Pack is used on every page of Xatal.
2. Robots Meta – Gives more control over the robots.txt file that search engines use when crawling your website. You can use this plugin to prevent search engines from crawling irrelevant pages.
3. WordPress Duplicate Content Cure – Similar to Robots Meta, this plugin prevents search engines from crawling erroneous pages.
4. Nice Search – Makes search result pages look better — instead of “?s=mysearch” in the URL, your URL will look like, “/search/mysearch”.

Handling Comments

1. NoFollow Free – Takes off the default “nofollow” on links in comments as a way to encourage readers to comment and to give something back. You can set this plugin to remove the nofollow after so many comments have been made. Xatal is NoFollow Free. Other plugins will remove the nofollow, but I liked this the best.
2. Subscribe to Comments – Allows commentators to subscribe to new comments. Whenever a new comment is posted, an e-mail is sent informing them of the new comment. That e-mail also gives them the option to unsubscribe, if they’re no longer interested. This WordPress plugin is a great way to keep commentators involved in the discussion.
3. CommentLuv – Creates a link in each comment to the commentator’s most recent blog post. CommentLuv encourages more people to comment because the links will grab the attention of readers, potentially bringing more traffic. Another way to give back to your readers.
4. KeywordLuv – If you’re tired of people sending comments using just keywords, KeywordLuv allows you to keep things personal yet still give them their keywords. KeywordLuv allows commentators to specify keywords that are used when linking to their site while still providing a name. See here for a lengthier description.
5. Top Commentators Widget – Installs a widget that displays the readers who have commented the most in the last time period (such as a month, week, etc). You can choose to give links back to their website and to make those links nofollow free as well.

Stats & Blog Traffic

1. Google Analyticator – Inserts the code for Google Analytics into your website. Google Analytics is an essential stat tool that provides a wealth of information.
2. WassUp – A WordPress stats plugin that provides real-time results using AJAX. You can view your stats in a variety of timeframes, from the last 6 hours to all-time. WassUp also displays referrers and separates different types of users (including spam). WassUp is my favorite way to monitor blog traffic during the day.
3. WordPress.com Stats – Another stats plugin that provides quick graphs on your stats by the day. Also displays the most popular posts, the most common keywords, and the most popular outgoing links. When combined with the above two plugins, you’ll have a solid set of blog traffic stats to look at.

Spam Prevention

1. Akismet – This plugin comes with WordPress for a reason. Akismet does a pretty good job of sorting out spam comments from real comments. Akismet has blocked 900 spam comments so far. For comparison, I only have 700 ‘approved’ comments that aren’t spam.
2. WP-Spam Free – I recommend this plugin too. It also does a solid job of preventing spam comments, and in fact they’ll never even reach your spam inbox. WP-Spam Free has blocked 500 spam comments in the last month or so. Between these two plugins, I don’t end up with much spam and readers don’t have to jump through hoops to post comments.
3. Simple Trackback Validation – If you receive a lot of trackbacks on your blog, this plugin will be helpful. It quickly checks to see which trackbacks are spam and which aren’t to save you the trouble of checking each website out yourself.

Backend Functions

1. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – An essential plugin for keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. WordPress Automatic Upgrade takes you through a step-by-step process whenever a new WordPress version comes out, preventing a lot of unnecessary hassle of upgrading.
2. WP-Super Cache – If you receive heavy traffic on your blog, WP-Super Cache is a must. This plugin caches files, preventing WordPress from needing to load full versions of every post. This saves a lot of server load and can help pages load faster for your users. If you expect a lot of traffic from sites like Digg, you’ll want this plugin.
3. WordPress Database Backup – Even though it’s nice to hope that our data is safe, you’ll still want to make backups. WordPress Database Backup can e-mail backups of your WordPress database to you as often as every hour to make sure you don’t lose anything important. I all but forgot about this plugin, but if I look in my e-mail inbox, I see neat backups created every week for the last 10 months. I’ve restored my blog once with a backup, and it worked great. This is hands down the best of the database plugins out there.
4. WP-Security Scan – This plugin looks over your WordPress blog for any glaring security holes and informs you how to fix them. A must-have plugin to help prevent any hacking of your blog.
5. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Optimizes WordPress’s pinging feature by preventing ping spamming.
6. Maintenance Mode – Creates a temporary page informing readers that your blog is down for maintenance. This is useful in preventing readers from seeing an ugly and unfinished blog.
7. Theme Test Drive – Allows administrators to test a new theme out without the visitors having to view it. Essential for working out those last few kinks out of a theme or for simply trying one out to see if you like it before switching.

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