Here is my comprehensive list of WordPress plugins that powers this blog. This list may be little help for blog author who have recently moved to WordPress.

After migrating from Blogger to WordPress , I started exploring the options of customizing and enhancing my WordPress blog.

Adsense-Deluxe

Well, without this it would have been much harder for me to integrate Google Adsense into this blog. Adding and managing ads that needs to be displayed in your blog is much easier with this plugin. You can tag the ads and then display anywhere with the site. This plugin also support other ad networks too. If you’re thinking of monetizing your blog then you should try this out. John has a full coverage on Adsense Deluxe plugin and how to integrate it into your blog.

Akismet

Thank you for this plugin, it has already blocked around thousand SPAM comments right from the day of WordPress installation (FYI: This is site is powered by WordPress around a month). TechCrunh reports Akismet blocks around 15000 comments per day . This plugin comes pre-installed with WordPress and make sure you activate this plugin. You may need an API key, which can be received by registering a free account in WordPress.com. Currently, I am not allowing anonymous comments but I may turn on moderation soon. I remember couple or more incidents in which Akismet got true comment as SPAM.

cforms

I believe a contact form should have been added into WordPress by default. Anyway I stumbled WPThemesPlugin.com and found about cforms . cform is a AJAX powered contact form that features multiple contact forms. This WordPress plugin is neat and clean.

Executable PHP widget

This plugin allows you to execute any PHP codes inside the Sidebar Widget. I have installed this plugin display Top Commentators and Popular Post. By default Sidebar Widget only support HTML. This plugin is required to customize the sidebar widgets display.

Feedburner Feed Replacement

The Feed management with WordPress is pretty cool and straight. But WordPress doesn’t have more sophisticated features like FeedBurner has. Anyone who powers WordPress or any other blogging platform generally prefers to burn their feeds using FeedBurner. FeedBurner provides much better reporting about your subscribers and readers. So it is mandatory that you forward all the default Feed traffic your to FeedBurner. You just configure this plugin; it will automatically forward all the default WordPress feed url traffic to FeedBurner url. Step-by-Step blog has a full instruction on configuring this FeedBurner replacement plugin.

Gregarious

Gregarious means Social, this plugin is great use to share the post across social networking sites. I heard about this from Wrong Advice blog, which complained about the problem with Google. Still I made my mind to try this out. This is extremely cool plugin. I have replaced the Social Bookmarks plugin by this and it has been ease to configure with my blog.

Hello Dolly

This is a default plugin that comes with WordPress and is written by Matt. It displays random lyrics from Louis Armstrong’s song “Hello Dolly” in WordPress admin dashboard. This is kind of cool plugin for most of the weird blog authors ;-)

Live Comment Preview

This is simple AJAX powered plugin that allows live preview of comments. Most of the themes have support for this by default. Moreover this is much easier to configure in any theme.

MyAvatars

Displaying avatars of commenter would enhance the trust of comments. I was previously running Gravatar, which was defaulted with my theme Qwilm! . I was seeing more and more blogs turned to support MyAvatar that displays avatars from MyBlogLog. Power blogger John Chow also has installed MyAvatar . Finally I to decided to use MyAvatar in my blog.

MyBlogLog Widget

Well, it’s been a passion around to track the faces of your blog readers. MyBlogLog team provided the widget plugin to display those faces in your hosted WordPress. This is quite easy to configure.

Related Posts

This plugin will search other blog posts that are related to the current post. This is a good way to generate extra page views and keep readers on your blog. The plugin allows you to configure how many related posts to display and gives you options for displaying them. This plugin uses keyword searching throughout the posts and same is in action in all post here.

Show Top Commentators

Show Top Commentator displays top commenter in the blog. It allows you to configure the frequency, block authors and more. I have installed this plugin to improve the commenter ship of this blog. I decided to put of my blog after reading Ajay’s post on Why You should Comment on my Blog . I have not yet enable DoFollow plugin but will be doing that soon. Now there is another reason to comment my blog.

Sidebar Widgets

The plugin is top featured plugins that made for WordPress. The Widget allows you to customize the look of your sidebar without having to edit any PHP files (before we had to edit sidebar.php) – you just drag and drop items you want included in the sidebar and the Widget does the rest. The WordPress theme must be Widget ready in order to use this plugin or you have Widgetize the theme manually. This plugin is required for displaying other Widget plugins.

Subscribe To Comments

This plugin will add an option to notify the commenter on follow up comments. When a new comment is made to the post, an email is sent to the subscriber notifying them. This is help commenter to keep track of their comments and post replies if required. This will improve floating healthy comments across the post.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin is the best know plugin for Tagging. This plugin allows the creation of tags for Technorati, Flickr, and Delicious etc., including your own tags page for easy searching. By using tags, not only will searches be easier but UTW also can create a tag cloud. Better way to keep your blog well maintained. Lorelle on WordPress uncovers all the possibilities that can be done with UTW in this post UTW WordPress Plugin for Dummies.

What Would Seth Godin Do

This is simple plugin that display a message to reader who are new to the blog with options for subscribing to the blog feed. This plugin would increase your blog feed subscription. This plugin was developed based on the idea given by Seth Godin on How to get traffic for your blog.

WP-PostRatings

Recently, I came across this plugin. I though this would be better option of receiving rating on the post from the reader. Well, I’m running out a trial of this plugin; depending on the user-interaction I may have to decide to have or remove this plugin. If you like this post rate this as well :)

Now I have couple of special mentions even though these plugins are use anymore. But without those plugins I would have never thought of WordPress platform and I’m thankful to them. They are New Blogger Import plugin that I used to import all the post from Blogger platform and the WordPress Suicide plugin that I used to clear up the post during the testing phase. You can read more about the use of these plugin in my post on WordPress migration.

Bottom line, all the thanks and credits goes to the respective plugin author’s. I guess and wish one day or other I will author some plugin that features in other blogs :-)

Thanks for plugin authors once again. I’m also looking for new suggestion of other plugins.

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