Chapter 14

Ten Popular WordPress Plugins

In This Chapter

Finding popular WordPress plugins

Using plugins to enhance your blog

In this chapter, I list ten of the most popular plugins available for your WordPress blog. This list isn’t exhaustive by any means; hundreds of excellent WordPress plugins can, and do, provide multiple ways to extend the functionality of your blog. And if these ten plugins aren’t enough for you, you can find many more at the official WordPress Plugin Directory (http://wordpress.org/plugins).

The greatest plugin of all is Akismet, which I describe in Chapter 10. Akismet is the answer to comment and trackback spam; it kills spam dead. It’s installed with WordPress. Chapter 10 contains information on how to locate, download, unpack, install, activate, and manage plugins in your WordPress blog.

AppPresser — Mobile App Framework

Developer: AppPresser

http://wordpress.org/plugins/apppresser

Introduced in January 2014, AppPresser is the very first plugin of its kind in that it allows users of the plugin to create native mobile applications using WordPress as the platform. Prior to AppPresser, if you wanted to develop a native mobile app, you needed to be an advanced programmer in languages like Objective C or Ruby. With the AppPresser plugin, if you know how to build a WordPress site, you can also build a mobile application.

AppPresser allows you to use a WordPress site as an app, including access to device features such as the camera, contacts, and more. You can create your app completely in WordPress, using themes, plugins, and all the stuff you already know.

The AppPresser core plugin is free to download from the WordPress Plugin Directory, but you can also purchase nifty extensions to create your app from their website at http://apppresser.com. Some of the extensions that are available for $48 to $79 include:

• AppCamera: A native camera extension that hooks into your iPhone or Android device camera.
• AppSwiper: An extension that allows you to load images in an organized carousel gallery that supports touch and swiping on mobile devices and tablets.
• AppGeo: An extension that hooks into the GPS location features of your mobile device or tablet.

AppPresser also has bundled packages starting at $399/year (with a renewal rate of 50 percent of that cost) for special needs like Ecommerce or Agencies. Check it out at http://apppresser.com.

What the AppPresser plugin does:

• Integrates Phonegap with WordPress, which exposes the Phonegap API.
• Allows you to use JavaScript (using the Phonegap API) to use native device features.
• Allows you to use other AppPresser plugins and themes to create an app.
• Adds a settings page with an app-only home page, menus, and theme settings.

Follow these steps to use AppPresser:

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Add AppPresser themes or extensions to create your app.
3. Build your app yourself with Phonegap, or with their build service.
4. Distribute to the iOS/Android app stores.

Jetpack

Developer: Automattic

http://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

Jetpack is not just one simple plugin; it’s a suite of plugins that connects your self-hosted website running WordPress.org with the hosted WordPress.com service — and brings you many of the features that WordPress.com users enjoy. Jetpack bundles great features such as:

• WordPress.com Stats: This simple statistics program gives you easy-to-read statistics on your site visitors, such as how many visitors you have, where they’re coming from, and what content they’re viewing on your site.
• Publicize: Connect your site to popular social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.
• Notifications: Monitor and manage your site’s activity with Notifications in the admin toolbar.
• Jetpack Comments: This feature is a comment system that integrates with social media login options like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
• Subscriptions: With this feature, your site visitors can subscribe to your blog posts and/or comments via e-mail.
• Post by Email: Publish posts to your blog directly from your e-mail account.
• Carousel: Transform your standard image galleries into slideshows and carousels.
• Likes: Give your readers a way to show their appreciation for your content.
• Sharing: Your readers can easily share your content across different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.
• Spelling and Grammar: Improve your grammar, spelling, and punctuation with this integrated proofreading service.
• VaultPress: This feature provides a real-time backup and security-scanning service for your site.
• Omnisearch: Use this single search box for everything on your WordPress-powered site.
• Gravatar Hovercards: Show a pop-up of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments.
• Contact Form: Easily insert an e-mail contact form anywhere on your WordPress site with one click of a button.
• WP.me Shortlinks: Create a short URL for easier social sharing with the WP.me service.
• Google+ Profile: Show a link to your Google+ profile in the sharing area of your posts and pages.
• Tiled Galleries: Easily create magazine-style image tile layouts for your photos.
• Widget Visibility: Easily control what pages your widgets are displayed on.
• Mobile Theme: Optimize your site for mobile devices.
• Custom CSS: Customize the appearance of your site using CSS, but without modifying your theme files.
• Shortcode Embeds: Easily embed videos and audio files with a WordPress shortcode.
• Beautiful Math: This feature uses the LaTeX markup language for complex mathematical equations within your posts — perfect for the real geeks out there.
• Extra Sidebar Widgets: Add widgets to your WordPress site like the Easy Image Widget and the RSS Widget.
• Infinite Scroll: Automatically pulls the next set of posts into the browser window when the visitor reaches the bottom of the page.
• Photon: Load images from the WordPress.com CDN (Content Delivery Network) service.
• Jetpack Single Sign On: Allow users to log in to your site using their credentials from WordPress.com.
• Monitor: Jetpack monitors your site for uptime and alerts you when your site is down.
• Mobile Push Notifications: Get updates on your mobile phone.
• Enhanced Distribution: Share your content with search engines and other services in real-time.
• JSON API: Allow applications to securely connect to your site through the cloud.
• VideoPress: Easily upload and insert videos on your site.

Because Jetpack runs and is hosted on the WordPress.com cloud server, updates to this suite of plugins happen automatically — giving you fast and ready access to the latest and greatest bundle of plugins that Automattic has to offer. In order to use Jetpack, you must have a WordPress.com account, and when you activate it on your Dashboard, it asks you to connect your site to your WordPress.com account — see Chapter 3 for information on signing up for WordPress.com.

Subscribe to Comments

Developer: Mark Jaquith

http://wordpress.org/plugins/subscribe-to-comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin adds a very nice feature to your blog by letting your visitors subscribe to individual posts you’ve made to your blog. When your readers subscribe to individual posts on your blog, they receive 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 addresses.

Facebook

Developers: Facebook and Automattic

http://wordpress.org/plugins/facebook

This plugin was developed by Facebook for WordPress with a little help from the developers at Automattic. With the importance of a social media presence today, you’ll want to make sure that all your content reaches the eyes of your friends and followers on social networks like Facebook. And that pursuit can be time-consuming. The goal of the Facebook plugin is to save you time by easily sharing your new content with your Facebook page and allowing your Facebook friends to discover that content and interact with your website seamlessly. The following great features allow you to

• Share new content from your WordPress site on your Facebook page automatically. After you connect your site to your Facebook account in the plugin settings, your new content is posted automatically to your Facebook page.
• Mention friends and favorite pages within the content of your posts and link those mentions directly to their Facebook pages.
• Include the Share, Like, and Subscribe Facebook buttons on your WordPress site, with easy customization.
• Display a recommendations box where Facebook makes additional content recommendations for your readers to discover, based on the content they’re currently browsing on your site.
• Include Facebook commenting on your site to allow your Facebook friends to comment in both places at once.
• Include an Activity Feed Box Widget that allows Facebook friends to see what their friends are doing on your site.
• Determine how well your Facebook presence is doing in promoting your content through Facebook Insights integration.

The Facebook plugin installs easily, and after you connect your Facebook account to your WordPress site through the Facebook plugin settings, you’re ready to go!

All in One SEO Pack

Developer: Michael Torbert

http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Almost everyone is concerned about search engine optimization (SEO) in blogs. Good SEO practices help the major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) easily find and cache your blog content in their search databases so that when people search for keywords, they can find your blog in the search results. All in One SEO Pack helps you fine-tune your blog to make that happen. It automatically creates optimized titles and generates HTML keywords for your individual posts. If you’re a beginner, this plugin works for you out of the box with no advanced configuration necessary. Woo-hoo! If you’re an advanced user, you can fine-tune the All in One SEO settings to your liking.

BackupBuddy

Developer: iThemes Media

http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

Starting at $75 for the personal user and $197 for its entire development suite of plugins, the folks at iThemes have hit a home run with BackupBuddy, which lets you back up your entire WordPress website in minutes. With this plugin, you can also determine a schedule of automated backups of your site on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can store those backups on your web server, e-mail backups to a designated e-mail address, FTP them to a designated FTP server, or store the backups in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, Dropbox, or the Rackspace Cloud, if you have an account there.

BackupBuddy not only backs up your WordPress data (posts, pages, comments, and so on), but it 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.

BackupBuddy 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. You simply download the backup file created by BackupBuddy from your Dashboard (choose BackupBuddy➪Backups) and install the script on a new domain, follow the steps, and within minutes, your entire site is completely restored on a new domain, or web host, with minimal effort.

This plugin is invaluable for designers and developers who work with clients to design websites with WordPress. Using BackupBuddy, you can download a backup of the site and then use the import/migration script to transfer the completed site to your client’s site within minutes — saving all the customizations you did to the theme and the plugins you installed, including the settings and data you’ve been working so hard on.

WP Super Cache

Developer: Donncha O’Caoimh

http://wordpress.org/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 website 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.

You can also read a very helpful article written by the plugin developer, Donncha O’Caoimh, on his website here: http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/.

Twitter Tools

Developer: Alex King

http://wordpress.org/plugins/twitter-tools

Social media networking is insanely popular on the web right now. One of the more popular services is Twitter (www.twitter.com). Almost everyone who has a blog also has a Twitter account (you can even follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LisaSabinWilson).

One of the nicer things that came about shortly after Twitter hit the scene was Alex King’s plugin for WordPress called Twitter Tools. This plugin lets you tweet an announcement every time you publish a new post on your blog. The announcement appears on your Twitter stream and is read by all of your Twitter followers. People can then click the link and read your article. It’s just one more nice way to use social media to promote your blog and content! There’s more to this plugin, however; it also has some pretty nifty tools that enable you to

• Publish a post on your blog with your Twitter updates from the day.
• Publish a tweet directly from your blog, so you don’t have to use another browser window or application.
• Tag your blog posts with Twitter hash tags — which are like keywords for Twitter that help other people search for and find your content within the Twitter universe.

Google XML Sitemaps

Developer: Arne Brachhold

http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator

This plugin lets you create a Google-compliant site map of your entire blog. Every time you create a new post or page, the site map is updated and submitted to several major search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. This plugin helps the search engines find and catalog new content from your site, so your new content appears in the search engines faster than it would if you didn’t have a site map.

Sucuri Sitecheck Malware Scanner

Developer: Daniel Cid and Dre Armeda

http://wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-scanner

With the rise in popularity of the WordPress software came a nefarious group of anonymous hackers trying to take advantage of the vast number of users in the WordPress community by attempting to inject malicious code and malware into themes, plugins, and insecure and outdated files within the WordPress core code.

Protect your website by using the Sucuri Sitecheck Malware Scanner — an easy-to-install-and-use plugin that enables full scan capabilities — for both malware and blacklisting — from Sucuri, right on your WordPress Dashboard. The plugin checks for malware, spam, blacklisting, and other security issues hidden inside code files. It’s the best defense you have against malicious hackers and very easy to implement — and for the peace of mind that it provides you, the free price tag is worth every penny!