First-Class Blogging: 12 Perfect Upgrades to Power Your Wordpress Site

There were a few posts here and there about different Wordpress plugins last week. I thought I'd post a quick list of some of the more useful ones I use here on my site. Each of the links takes you right to the plugin's page if you're interested in any of them.

aLinks - Allows you to tell Wordpress to automatically create links when certain words appear in your posts. You can set the URL the text is linked to, how many times that word is linked within a post, etc.

Comment Status Manager - Allows you to switch comments and pings on or off for a bunch of posts at once. So if you have a lot of old posts and don't want them to have comments on anymore, you can use this plugin and make those changes in a couple of clicks…rather than opening each previous post one-by-one.

Democracy - Easily add a poll to your site. Includes a screen in the admin area to see results and can show results to visitors on the front of the site too.

Future Calendar - I posted about this one in this blogging tip post awhile back. This one allows you to easily see what dates have future posts scheduled when you're in the "write post" screen. You can click on the a date on the calendar to make that the day your current post will be set to. Good positive feedback when you have a bunch of posts queued up.

MyBlogLog - Adds a widget for MyBlogLog to your blog. MyBlogLog is a social networking site for bloggers. It's that thing with all the pictures of people in my sidebar. Pretty cool to see who's coming by to check out your site and a good way to network with others.

PodPress - An all-in-one podcasting and "add audio to your site" plugin. I'll probably be using this one sometime in the near future.

Popularity Contest - Ranks all of your posts based on how your visitors find them and a few other criteria (which you can set). You can also add a list of the most popular posts to your sidebar, which you can see in my sidebar for an example.

Robots Meta - This one may not be necessary for some people. But if you have certain Wordpress pages that you don't want indexed on your site, you can use this plugin to help keep the search engines away from those pages. Just ad this plugin, then when you create/edit a page, you'll have the option to set the "robots" meta tags for "follow/nofollow" and "index/noindex". The search engines are "supposed" to obey those tags but since that's not always true, I wouldn't use this to hide stuff like product download pages. But those probably aren't within Wordpress anyway.

SEO Title Tag - Lets you add a customized title tag to any post/page instead of just using the post/page name. Pretty big deal from an SEO standpoint since you might not want to have your page title, post title, or blog title/name be the same as your title tag.

Subscribe to Comments - Lets web visitors sign up for notifications when new comments are made to a post. Pretty cool for getting repeat taffic, especially if you have a high-traffic site with lots of comments.

TinyMCE Advanced - Adds a bigger, badder rich text editor than the out-of-the box Wordpress installation. More buttons, more stuff you can change on the text for your posts. Might be overkill for some people though.

Top Commenters - Tallies up the most frequent commenters and adds them to a list that can be displayed in your sidebar. If people left a link when they posted, it'll show up as a link in the list. Good for encouraging comments since people get a link back to their site.

Anyone have any others I might have missed?

Just leave a comment below.

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