This is my first post in first series about wordpress plugins.

In this post I am covering few things to remember while using wordpress plugins and different ways to upload a wordpress plugin. Actual plugin listing will start from tomorrow.

Some things to remember about wordpress plugins…

• Best thing about wordpress is, power it offers via countless plugins developed for it. But please keep in my mind that every plugin adds some overhead to wordpress. So if you use too many plugins, they will end up slowing your blog to the extent that your visitor gets irritated.
• There are things which can be often accomplished by other ways. Like there is a plugin which allow you to post your updates to twitter from wordpress dashboard. Try to use alternative like twitter desktop clients, Firefox extension, etc. This way you can trim your plugin list really well.
• Whenever possible try to download and use plugins from official wordpress plugin repository. That way wordpress plugins automatic update feature can discover when a update to your plugin becomes available.
• While deactivating a plugin, if you are sure that you will never use it again then better delete files/folders associated with it.
• If you are using any caching plugins, then either deactivate it or flush your cache entirely after you activates a plugin which is supposed to alter your blogs front-end.
• Never activate/deactivate too many plugins at once, specially if you are using them for the first time. A plugin may not break your blog directly, but it may conflict with other plugins.
• There are many plugins which do almost same job. Never test them all at once. They are more prone to conflicting with each other.

Ways to upload Wordpress plugins…

Yes, there are many ways to upload a wordpress plugin and you should choose the best to save your time.

Official Way…

• The most conventional way is to download plugin file(s) to your disk.
• Then unzip them if they are in compressed format.
• Finally upload them to wordpress plugin directory using a FTP client.

More details are here.

Online FTP Client…

Another better way is to use online FTP client like net2ftp. Some webhosts offers custom FTP scripts. The only advantage of this approach is that you can upload compressed file(s) directly. Such scripts automatically uncompress them after uploading. This saves some work and bandwidth. Also transfer time is considerably less.

Using Shell…

This is my favorite way. But to use this shell access must be supported by your webhost. Dreamhost offers this feature. Detail on enabling shell access on Dreamhost are here.

Once you have shell access, you terminal on Linux/Mac or putty on windows to login via shell. Then…

• Change your current working directory to wordpress plugins folder. (cd command)
• Use wget command to download plugin file. syntax: $wget <plugin_file_url>
• If downloaded file is in zip format, use unzip command.

This save most bandwidth and good for slow dial up users since no data is downloaded to their hard-drive. Also in this case, as your webhost is downloading plugin directly, the speed is amazing.

Warning: Use this only if you are familiar with Linux/Unix and also comfortable with command-line interface. One wrong command can wipe out your entire blog. Of course, there are complex ways to recover your blogs from such mistakes but more about it later sometime.

Using Plugin:

There are many wordpress plugins which can help you upload/manage other plugins. More about them in next article, to be published tomorrow.

As I promised yesterday, in today’s post I will explore few wordpress plugins which will make uploading/managing other plugins/themes easier. Using these plugins will make FTP clients useless as far as wordpress is concerned.

Again as with all popular demand, there are many plugins which can do this FTP thing for you but I like only two of them as listed below.

1. OneClick Installer Updater:

This plugin has simplest interface with minimum options. I guess best for new wordpress users. I like following features most…

• It allows you to upload plugins/themes directly in compressed zip format.
• It allow you to upgrade all plugins at once.
• Firefox integration allows you to directly add plugins/themes using context-menu command from any webpage.
• You can delete unwanted themes directly from Design page at dashboard.

Link: OneClick Installer Plugin by Anirudh Sanjeev & Janis Elsts

2. WP Easy Uploade

This is designed exclusively for uploading on to wordpress. It provides more options but when I tried to use it, I noticed I always ended up selecting what OneClick installer does automatically, like option to uncompress and delete a zip file uploading. Things I like about this plugin…

• Allows you to upload anything to wordpress. Good if you often upload files like videos, etc via FTP to your wordpress upload folders.
• You can completely control location of uploads by specifying any path under wordpress root directory. Manual paths are automatically created if they don’t exist.
• This plugin is available in many languages. Currently, Turkish, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Indonesian, and Spanish translations are available.
• Interface looks much cleaner and attractive despite more number of options.

This plugin adds an Upload Files option under Mange tab.

This plugin can be better if it can remember options last time selected or allow a user to set default options.

Link: WP Easy Uploader by Chris Jean

There may be more plugins like this but these two are really good. Also those who always sticks with new wordpress version may not need these as wordpress 2.7 may have thse features builtin.

I strongly recommend using one of the above plugins since you will be encountering many new plugins in coming days here.

Wordpress is one of the best platform for blogging because of it’s many handy features. One of them is Wordpress plugins.

There are various wordpress plugins which you can use on your blog to enhance your wordpress blog. Instead of covering all the plugins, I quickly cover two under-rated but must have wordpress plugin.

No self ping Wordpress plugin

When we interlink our posts in wordpress, new post send a ping to old post, which shows under trackback comments. Though I personally not like the idea of showing own article in Trackback comments and making no difference between related posts. No self ping wordpress plugin , disable the pinging your own blog posts.

Download plugin

Maxblog press ping optimizer

The power of blog is its pinging system. When we write a post , it ping all the servers listed in your Settings > Writing. Though one major flow in Wordpress is when you edit your old blog posts, it also ping the servers, this create ping spam. Some time excessive pinging leads to ban your website on those ping service.  One other problem is with wordpress schedule. When you create and schedule your blog posts, wordpress again ping the server at the time when you hit the schedule button. This is a major problem for bloggers who use Wordpress time stamp (schedule) features.

Ping optimizer plugin, stop pinging ping servers when you edit/update or schedule a blog post. It will ping the server only when a new  post is published.

Download plugin

Do share with us any such plugin which you think is under-rated and should be a part of any wordpress blog?

[Editor's Note: This post is submitted by our guest blogger Harsh Agrawal . Harsh blogs about Wordpress tutorials and Wordpress plugins on his blog @ Themepremium.

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

After going through wordpress plugin basics and plugins which help you uploading/managing other plugins, its time to move to something really important. I don’t know what is your priority but as a blogger I care most about my readers. Its more important than SEO or other traffic tactics to me which I will discuss in subsequent posts in the series.

So here I am listing plugins which will take your wordpress blogs’ commenting system to the next level, and thus will make it easy for you and your visitors to collaborate.

1. Subscribe to comments plugin

This plugin will add a subscription option to comment form on your blog posts. When a user checks this option, he will be automatically informed via email whenever you or someone else post a reply or other comments on that post.

Also that email sent will contain option to unsubscribe as well as manage subscription for your blog posts.

May not sound important to a blogger this plugin attracts visitor as they don’t have to monitor you blog posts manually. As a reader, when I visit a blog, if I find this subscription option there, I most likely to comment on that blog.

This plugin is in fact so great that next wordpress version is most likely to incorporate in it.

Link: Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith

2. Comment Editing Feature Plugin

This plugin allow your users to edit comment post by them. Many times, readers of this blog requested this feature here and so I am adding it today.

You can control time period till editing option will be open. I think this is really nice plugins which can help comments to be more meaningful.

Link: WP Ajax Edit Comments by Ronald Huereca

3. Wordpress Threaded Comments

This plugins is good for posts which invites lots of comments. This let your visitors reply to a particular comment like it happens on forums.

I used this plugin in past but I don’t use it anymore because sometimes it makes it hard to find recent comment on a post which have hundreds of comments.

Link: Wordpress Threaded Comments by ????

4. Better comment manager

If you really care about answering comments on your blog, then this will make this task easy.

It will add a tab “Better comment manager” to your blogs dashboard which allow you to replay to all your comments on different posts from a single page. It will also add option for threaded reply in case you are using Threaded Comments plugins as described above.

Link: Better comment manager by Keith Dsouza

5. Paged Comments

This plugin is good for posts which attracts hundreds of comments. Those comment make your post page so long that if you have something important in footer, visitor needs to scroll a lot for that.

Link: Paged Comments by Keyvan Minoukadeh

Apart form these there are softwares which notifies you whenever a comment is posted on your blog, But they all are so primitive and make use of some sort of hacks or polling techniques which increases load on your blog. So I am waiting for Wordpress 2.7 which will have comments API. With comments API one can really expect some nice desktop softwares to mange comments.

Thats all for the day! Tomorrow I will post about visitor centric plugins tomorrow.

Today I will post about plugins which will help your blog spread via social networking/bookmarking services. I personally think socializing aspect is more important than direct SEO, which I will discuss in tomorrows post.

Social plugins allow your blog visitor to spread a word about your blog posts. As this is what they say mouth-to-mouth publicity, its impact will be greater. Also links spreads naturally ranks good compared to evil SEO tactics.

So here is list of social plugins…

1. Sociable Plugin

This plugin automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Facebook, etc. You can choose any number of social sites from almost 100 networking sites.

You can also choose on which types of pages social sites icons to be shown. I selected full-posts & static pages. There is an option to put this buttons in RSS feed too. There are few advance options like “open in new window”.

You can see live example of this plugin on this blogs’ posts. There is a “share and enjoy” section after post content which is courtesy this plugin.

Link: Sociable by Joost de Valk

2. ShareThis Plugin

This plugin provides a simple way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.

It can be good alternative for above plugin with added option to track sharing stats.

I really have no good reason for not using this plugin. So check both and use one which you like more.

Link: ShareThis Plugin by Alex King & ShareThis

3. WP Conditional Digg This Badge plugin

There are many Digg plugins thanks to popularity of Digg. But one I like is WP Conditional Digg This Badge plugin. This plugin check if a post have enough Digg (default 10 Diggs) before showing Digg This button. I think this approach is nice as your is most likely to Digg a post with higher Diggs beforehand. Also this avoid showing Digg This button on each post which some visitors find annoying.

If you do not want to clutter your post pages at all then stick to one of above two plugins. They both support sharing via Digg.

Link:WP Conditional Digg This Badge by Brian Rock

4. Twitter Tools

This plugin allows you to automatically post a tweet to your twitter account whenever a new post is published. if you like twitter then you can use other options like sidebar widget included in plugin to show recent twitter updates in sidebar.

If you just want to use auto tweets for new post part, better use twitterfeed service.

Many top bloggers use dedicated twitter accounts for their blog posts. Even I will soon start this for Devils Workshop, as suggested by Rajat Arora

Link: Twitter Tools by Alex King

5. WP_LinkTools

You can use this plugin to add your newly published post to del.icio.us automatically. There are few more options which I really don’t find useful. I use tweetmarks service to achieve similar goals.

But using this plugin have one advantage. You can use post categories, tags, title as tags for del.icio.us links.

Link: WP_LinkTools by DCoda Ltd

If you use a really good plugin which you think must be included in this list, please let us know via comments.

Thanks. I will post more about SEO plugins tomorrow…

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is one of the hottest topic on web. There are thousands of spam sites/books dedicated on this topic to just mint your money. They do well because of one reason – everybody want traffic for their site, but nobody want to work hard for that!

So let me make this clear right now. Today I am posting about few wordpress plugins & tips, which will really improve your blogs search engine ranking but in most natural way. So do not expect any overnight burst in traffic.

1. ALL in One SEO Pack Plugin

This is best and only plugin enough to do search engine optimization for your blog. This automatically take care of three important things about a blog. Discussing each point in details is beyond the scope of this post. Options listed in bracket must be enabled to optimize that point.

• Automatically optimizes post/page titles. (Rewrite Titles options)
• Generates META tags automatically. (Use Categories for META keywords & Autogenerate Descriptions options)
• Avoids duplicate content. (Use noindex for Categories/Archives/Tag options)

Link: All in One SEO Pack Plugin by hallsofmontezuma & uberdose

2. Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin

This plugin is not actually optimizing anything directly. It creates a sitemap of your blog and submit to it search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

If you are hearing word sitemap for the first time, then think it as a protocol/language which websites use to communicate with search engines. Sitemaps tell search engine about your sites content structure, importance of each link, timestamp for each link among other info.

Two biggest advantages this plugin offers:

• You can submit only post/”page” URLs as part of sitemap. This option help you avoid category/archive pages which potentially content duplicate contents.
• It automatically pings search engine whenever you post a new article. This way search engine add recently posted articlea to their indices within few hours. Gone are the days when search engine index update used to happen once in a month! This is good as search engines prefer fresh content.

You can also link to your sitemap explicitly if you want to. Here is sitemap for Devils Workshop.

There are many options, this plugin provides. Go through them once, for forever.

Link: Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin by Arne Brachhold

3. Permalink Migration Plugin

If your blog URLs have something like ?p=123 or post/123 in them, then its time to change your permalink structure. Not only above URL format is worst example of SEO practice but also is bad from user perspective. Wouldn’t it be nice if a URL gives hint about content in advance?

Permalink options can be found under settings section of wordpress Dashboard. Use a structure which makes use of post names in URLs.

Now thing plugin comes handy when you want to change your permalinks structure for your old blog. Any change in permalinks makes your old blog URLs inaccessible. Many user finds a better custom structure after they start blogging and fear of URL-breaking prevent them from making changes to it.

Link: Permalink Migration Plugin by Dean Lee

4. Redirection Plugin

This plugin allow you to create manual URL redirects within wordpress. This is good for merging many posts or redirecting users from a outdated post to new one.

Wordpress allow you to edit permalinks for individual posts. You may like to do this to include a keyword which you may not be able to stuff into post titles. When any such changes happen to already published posts, this plugin automatically create a redirection entry for old post.

Moreover, if you use date-based URLs then changing a posts date will result in change in its URL. Again this plugin transparently adds a redirection rule automatically when something like this happens.

Personally I rely on this plugin a lot for post containing hacks & bugs. These kind of posts becomes outdated as bugs get fixed with time. But then again, when new bugs pops out, it help me redirect users from old outdated bug posts to fresh bug posts automatically.

Link: Redirection Plugin by John Godley

This is all wordpress plugins can do for SEO. I personally think SEO is not an overnight job. I published some posts on SEO in past in case you like to check them out.

After spending more than 2 years in blogging, all I can say that, DONT let SEO tactics affect your writing style. In the end, its your readers who will read your blog. I never mind sacrificing few keywords if they can improve my posts flow.

Rest, suggest via comments if I am missing something.

Also let me know if you like to read more about wordpress plugins in a particular category.

[Update: I mistakenly linked to a differnet plugin for #3 candidate. Please note the updated link. Sorry for inconvinience.]

Spam is a thing which every high-traffic (even some medium or low-traffic) blogs, forums, websites etc. have to face. In this post, we will discuss some of the best plugins for WordPress which can deal with spam. No, not those based on Captchas or making your users solve math problems, rather we will discuss on some of the new and innovative plugins which work differently, but do the same thing, that of taking out the spam from your blog.

Akismet

By Matt Mullenweg | Download

Akismet is the default plugin bundled with your WordPress software. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback is posted on your blog, Akismet performs hundreds of tests on it and gives a thumbs up or thumbs down.

WP Spam Free

By Scott Allen | Download

Most of the spambots cannot process javascript and cookies. This plugin takes the advantage of this and uses a dynamic combination of javascript and cookies to separate spambots from humans, preventing 99%+ of automated spam.

Bad Behavior

By error, MarkJaquith, Firas, skeltoac | Download

Bad Behavior analyzes the HTTP headers, IP address, and other meta data sent by the visitor and determines if it is a human or a bot. After all, spammers don’t code their bots very well and if they could code very well, they probably wouldn’t be spammers.

WP Captcha Free

By iDope | Download

WP CAPTCHA Free blocks spam on your blog by validating a hash based on time (and some other parameters) using AJAX when the comment is posted. Comments posted via bots will not have a correct hash and will be rejected.

WP Clickcha

By iDope | Download | Demo

Clickcha replaces your post comment button with an image based CAPTCHA that requires the user to click the image in a particular area to solve the puzzle. Clicking the image also submits the comment.

WP Hashcash

By ecb29, donncha | Download

This plugin verifies the users by a piece of javascript code that indicates that the visitor is a real human being, not a spambot. If the javascript check fails, there are three options – it can either put the comment into moderation (default), put the comment in the akismet queue, or delete it.

Conclusion

There are many plugins which can prevent spam from your blog, though neither of them can provide 100% protection from spam. In this post I have tried my best to highlight the main and best plugins that can prevent spam from your blog. If you feel that any other plugin should have been listed here, feel free to discuss it in the comment’s section below!

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Today in our wordpress plugin series, we will explore plugins related to feeds. Feed is the reason, I love blogs over static websites.

If you are seriously into blogging, then one thing which matters most is feed readers. Many bloggers, including me, display their FeedBurner subscribers count proudly at prominent places on their site.

So here is list of plugins which will improve your feed count as well interaction with feed subscribers.

1. WWSGD Plugin

This plugin which uses name of one of the top web celebrity Seth Godin, allows you to display a subscription reminder message above or below blog post.

You can control position & content of message. Also you can customize if message is to be displayed always for only or few initial page views.

Link: What Would Seth Godin Do by Richard K Miller

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin

If you use FeedBurner and love its subscriber count chicklet, then this plugin is must for you.

Wordpress have lots of feed formats and most probably you had burnt only one of them with FeedBurner. Now if a user access your wordpress feeds via other URLs then their subscription will not be counted towards FeedBurner count.

This plugin will take care of this. You just give it your FeedBurner URLs and it will redirect all wordpress custom feed requests to your FeedBurner feed.

Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin is now officially maintained by FeedBurner.

Link: FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin by Steve Smith & FeedBurner

3. Full Text Feeds

There was a bug in wordpress which used to cut your feeds in the middle of the post. This behavior used to annoy blogger who like to publish full text feeds.

I am not sure if this bug is fixed in latest version of wordpress as I have modified wordpress core feed files completely when applying firefox full feed hack.

Anyway, if you see partial feeds even after choosing option to display full feeds, you can use this plugin to overcome wordpress bug.

Link: Full Text Feed Plugin by Ronald Heft, Jr.

4. URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin

URL Absolutifier changes all relative URLs in posts to absolute URL, to make the entries work in feed readers that don’t work with relative URLs.

I used a relative URL trick for higher earnings from AdSense product referrals long time back. If you are not sure about your usage of relative URLs then I will strongly recommend you should activate this plugin and then just forget it. I really feel this should be default behavior of wordpress.

Link: URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang

5: Feed Footer Plugin

This plugin allow you to customize footer text of each post in feed completely. I use this to show referral ads in my feeds. Please do not try AdSense or any JavaScript code in Feed Footer. It will not work as feed readers ignores JavaScript.

This plugin is really basic, but I don’t mind taking some efforts for some extra bucks.

Link: Feed Footer Plugin by Sherief Mursyidi

6. Similar Posts for Feeds Plugin

Many time, by giving full text feeds, blogger feel they are loosing page-views as a reader may never check their blog.

I use backlinking to my old posts whenever possible to bring readers back to the blog. But often such links go unnoticed or you may not find old post to link back if you are writing on a new topic.

Then its always good idea to display few related posts at the bottom which often attracts clicks. Of course too many links may annoy your reader. So do not show something like 20 related post!

Link: Similar Posts by Rob Marsh

7. Feed Widget Plugin

This plugin will add a WordPress widget, which will display links to various relevant feeds for your WordPress blog. It will always at least display links to the two standard feeds: All Entries and All Comments. It will also display links to category feeds, post feeds or search feeds, depending on the current page being viewed.

I used this long time back. But now this blog have three top level feeds, so I guess using this plugin here will result in too many options. I will definitely add this plugin to my orkutfeeds blog.

Link: Feed Widget Plugin by Ketsugi

8. RSS Footer

This is very simple plugin. It allows you to insert any message including HTML code into the feeds. You can also choose if added message is to be displayed at top or bottom of the post.

You can use this plugin for advertising instead of above Feed footer plugin. Main difference is, RSS Footer adds same footer at the end of every post, while above Feed footer allows you to add different footer for each post.

One plus point with RSS footer is, it allows addition of link back to your original post, which is good SEO as explained by Daniel Scocco.

Link: RSS Footer Plugin by Joost de Valk

That’s it for the day! Tomorrow I will post more about plugins which will improve navigation of your wordpress blog.

Between if you like this post subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates.

Today I am listing wordpress plugins for easier administration and maintenance. Main goal is to automate tasks like database backup, upgrading, etc.

1. Database Backup Plugin

This is most important plugin you must use. It performs complete wordpress database backup and optionally send it to email address given, on daily or weekly basis.

Technically if you have your wordpress database backup with you, you can recover your blog from any disaster.

Link: WordPress Database Backup plugin by Austin Matzko

2. Automatic Upgrade Plugin

This plugin allows you to automatically upgrade wordpress installation following official instructions listed here. It performs tasks: backing-up database, plugin deactivation, downloading latest wordpress version, upgrading files/database, etc all automatically. If anything goes wrong, it lets you roll back all the changes.

I use subversion installation of wordpress so upgrading is really simplest task for me. But it requires knowledge of Linux and SVN, also shell access to your webhosting server.

If you don’t know anything about subversion, then best way is to use this plugin to upgrade wordpress.

Link: Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin by keithdsouza, ronalfy

3. Wordpress Security Scan

Many people think open-source is insecure. But I think security is something you should take care of yourselves. Of course wordpress is much robust and in my opinion best open source script ever made. This plugin, scans your wordpress installation for any misconfiguration or holes through which your blog can be compromised.

It generates report and also help you out correctly configure your blog from security point of view. This plugin is in very active development and continuously adding more security checks with each version being released.

Link: WP Security Scan by Michael Torbert

4. Akismet Spam Protection

This could have been listed in comments plugin but I use it in general for fighting against spam. This uses wordpress community feedback about commentator to decide if a comment, pingback or trackback is spam or not. I think this is better way to fight against spam, compared to image verification you can alternatively put on your blog.

This plugin really makes moderating comments, etc really easy. It blocks almost all spam. Akismet can be used with contact form too.

This plugin comes with your wordpress by default, so activate if you haven’t done that yet.

Link: Akismet Spam Protection by Matt Mullenweg

5. Broken Link Checker Plugin

As name suggests, this plugin checks periodically all your posts for broken links. It then generates summary of all broken links which you can either manually replace by correct link or remove at all.

A broken link is really bad for your reputation as a blogger. Imagine a first time visitor to your old post finding link it contains broken. Do you think he will come to your blog again?

Link: Broken Link Checker Plugin by Janis Elsts

6. Download Manager Plugin

Wordpress as a CMS offers no way to track file download statistics. If you distribute various types of downloadable files on your blog, then you might be very well interested in tracking number of downloads they receive among other statistical data.

This plugins adds a very nice download manager functionality to your wordpress blog.

Link: WP Download Manager Plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan

Apart from this, I strongly recommend using one-click installer plugin. It improved a lot recently, and it will really make trying and managing different plugins really easy.

Feedback Please…

So here I am done with my first series writing experiment. I would love to here your feedback/suggestions so that I can improve next series. I am yet to finalise a topic for it but I would love to hear about that.

I will post a summary post for entire series tomorrow. If you have any really nice plugin to share, please let me know via comments.

This is last post in my first wordpress plugin series. Rather than making your list larger by suggesting more plugins, in this post I will write summary of things which changed after this series experiment.

First and most important, now this blog allows its commentators to edit their comments as suggested by Johnson & other readers. I will also enable paged navigation for archive pages soon, as suggested by Pavan.

Also while preparing for this series, I revisited broken link checker plugin. I stopped using it few months back after it broke itself with a wordpress version upgrade in past. I am using it now again.

Now after giving away list of my favorite plugins, I request wordpress bloggers here to share their favorite plugins.

Apart from this, personally I enjoyed this series writing experiment. It turned out to be more time-consuming than what I had expected. Thats why other topic got less attention in last week.

I will give some extra time in advance for my next series so this won’t happen in future again. Meanwhile, I would love to know what you like to read in next series. Few topics that are confusing me are AdSense, Ad Networks, Gmail, SEO tipc, Blogging tipc, Security (Hacking), etc.

Waiting for your feedback,

-Rahul Bansal