All in One SEO Pack
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack
Almost every Web site owner is concerned about search engine optimization (SEO). Good SEO practices help the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) easily find and cache your site content in their search databases so that when people search using keywords, they can find your site in the search results. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you fine-tune your site to make that happen; it automatically creates optimized titles and generates HTML keywords for your individual posts and pages. If you’re a beginner, this plugin works for you right out of the box with no advanced configuration. Woohoo! If you’re an advanced user, you can fine-tune the All in One SEO settings to your liking.
WP-Print
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-print
WP-Print is an easy-to-use plugin that provides a clean, printable version of your blog posts and pages. Unless your theme has a specialized stylesheet for printing, posts and pages print rather messily. WP-Print strips most of the style from your theme design (images and formatting, for example) and outputs a clean print of your article with black text on a white background.
You can configure these options for the plugin:
Print Text Link for Post: This option configures a Print This Post link.
Print Text Link for Page: This option configures a Print This Page link.
Print Icon: Choose between two available icon designs: print.gif and printer_fam fam fam.gif. The icon you choose appears on your site.
Print Text Style Link: This drop-down list presents settings for displaying the print link on your site.
Additional printing options: You can specify whether comments, links, images, video, and disclaimer or copyright text prints.
WP-Print doesn’t automatically appear on your site. You need to add a small snippet of code to your template in the area where you want the print link to appear with The Loop (see Chapter 11 for information about The Loop):
<?php if(function_exists(‘wp_print’)) { print_link(); } ?>
PluginBuddy Mobile
PluginBuddy Mobile is a premium WordPress plugin that starts at $45; however, it’s worth every penny. This plugin adds a feature set and functionality to your Web site by creating a mobile-ready version that displays correctly in many major mobile Web browsers, such as iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices.
PluginBuddy Mobile is easy to install and gives your Web site a professional mobile-ready theme within minutes. After you purchase and download the plugin, install it on your WordPress site (just like you would any WordPress plugin, as I discuss in Chapter 16). The primary features of PluginBuddy Mobile include
Mobile Theme Style Manager: Easily create and adjust your own mobile theme for the Web site you’re building with WordPress.
Custom Header Uploader: Include a header image that you designed to individualize your Web site’s mobile theme.
Mobile Support for Multiple Platforms: Assign different themes to different mobile platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and so on).
Mobile Starter Theme: Three themes help get you started; you can use them as is, or use the Mobile Theme Style Manager to customize them to suit your needs.
WordPress 3.0 Custom Navigation: Supports the Custom Menu Navigation feature built in to WordPress (which I describe in detail in Chapter 10).
Subscribe to Comments
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments
The Subscribe to Comments plugin lets your visitors subscribe to individual posts you’ve made to your blog. They receive a notification via e-mail whenever someone leaves a new comment on the post. This feature goes a long way toward keeping your readers informed and making the discussions lively and active.
The plugin includes a full-featured Subscription Manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address.
ShareThis
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this
Every social bookmarking service has its own icon. People put these icons on their sites to let their visitors know that they can share the content with each social bookmarking service. This was a good concept when only a handful of services existed, but now there are dozens.
ShareThis allows visitors to share content through e-mail and popular social bookmarking services, such as Technorati, Delicious, and Digg. After you install the plugin, go to the Options page for ShareThis (choose Settings⇒ShareThis) and set these options:
Enter the Widget Code: Obtain the code from the ShareThis Web site (you can access this on the ShareThis Web site within your account); then enter the code into this text box.
Display the Link Only on Certain Pages of Your Site: By default, the ShareThis link is added at the very end of your blog post and page. You can turn off this default option. To do so, choose No from the Automatically Add ShareThis to Your Posts and the Automatically Add ShareThis to Your Pages drop-down lists that appear on the ShareThis Options page. Then add the following ShareThis template tag to your template wherever you want it to display on your site (it can be added to any template in your WordPress theme):
<?php if (function_exists(‘sharethis_button’)) { sharethis_button(); } ?>
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
WP Super Cache
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache
WP Super Cache creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress content. Why is this useful? On a high-traffic site, having cached versions of your posts and pages can speed up the load time of your Web site considerably. A cached version simply means that the content is converted to static HTML pages (as opposed to dynamically created content pulled from your database through a series of PHP commands) that are then stored on the server. This process eases the efforts the Web server must take to display the content in your visitors’ browsers.
WP Security Scan
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan
This plugin is relatively simple to use; it scans your entire WordPress installation and looks for any security vulnerabilities that may exist and then suggests corrective actions that you can take to improve the overall security of your WordPress installation.
Backup Buddy
http://ewebscapes.com/backupbuddy/
Starting at $45 for the personal user and $197 for the entire development suite of plugins, the folks at PluginBuddy have hit a home run with Backup Buddy, which lets you back up your entire WordPress Web site in minutes.
With this plugin, you can also determine a schedule of automated backups of your site on a daily, weekly, monthly, and so on basis. You can store those backups on your Web server, e-mail backups to a designated e-mail address, or store the backups in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, if you have an account there.
Backup Buddy not only backs up your WordPress data (posts, pages, comments, and so on), but also backs up any theme and customized plugins you’ve installed (including all the settings for those plugins), and saves and backs up all WordPress settings and any widgets that you’re currently using. Backup Buddy also includes an import and migration script (importbuddy.php) that allows you to easily transfer an existing site to a new domain, or new host, within minutes.
This plugin is invaluable for designers and developers who work with clients to design Web sites with WordPress. In Chapter 8, I discuss how you can set up a development environment on your local computer to work on client sites.
WordPress.com Stats
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats
With the rise in popularity of the hosted WordPress.com service came a huge demand for the statistics that it provides in its Dashboard pages. Users of the self-hosted WordPress.org software drooled when they saw the stats available to WordPress.com users, and the cry for a similar stats plugin for WordPress.org went out across the blogosphere.
Andy Skelton answered that call with the release of the WordPress.com Stats plugin for WordPress.org users. This plugin collects all the important statistics, including the number of hits on the site per hour, day, or month; the most popular posts; the sources of the traffic on the site; and the links people click to leave the site.
You need a WordPress.com API key for this plugin to work. You can obtain an API key by creating an account on WordPress.com (http://wordpress.com); you get an API key in your Personal Profile there. Simply copy it and paste it into the API field under Plugins⇒WordPress.com after you activate the plugin. After you do that, a link appears in the Dashboard menu called Blog Stats that you can click to view your site stats within your Dashboard.
WPMU Premium
http://ewebscapes.com/wpmu-premium/
WPMU Premium isn’t just one plugin; it’s an entire collection of plugins that are geared toward and developed for users who take advantage of the multisite feature with WordPress, as well as the users who have developed a social community Web site using the BuddyPress plugin for WordPress (covered in Chapter 16).
You can find all sorts of plugins to enhance your multisite and/or BuddyPress Web site. Here are just a few:
Membership plugins that give you membership and affiliate capabilities on your network
Classified ad plugins that allow you to grow a classified ads section
Chat plugins that let you include interactive, real-time chat capabilities for your users to communicate with one another
Domain mapping plugins that let you (and your community users) use your own domain on your network of sites
Anti-spam plugins that prevent spam comments and spam sign-ups in your community
Access to the plugins at WPMU Premium isn’t free. There is a nominal fee to join, and you can choose among annual membership packages from $35 to $79 per month, which gives you access to more than 100 plugins (and more than 150 themes) along with some stellar, world-class support.