Six More Upgrades to Supercharge Your Wordpress Blog
August 7, 2008 by Kenton Newby
Awhile back I posted this article covering some of the best wordpress plugins I use on a few of my sites. I've been playing around with a few more and figured it might be a good time for a quick update. So here are a few more great plugins you might want to take a look at for your own Wordpress blog.
I just have to say I absolutely love this plugin. The problem with replying to comments with the default Wordpress setup is that to check comments, you have to be in the admin area, but to reply to them, you have to go back out to the front end of the site. This plugin gives you a brand new screen that allows you to add replies to your comments right there from your admin screen, in addition to approving valid comments and deleting the SPAM. I've found this to be a huge timesaver…definitely worth checking out.
CommentLuv is another plugin that encourages visitors to comment on your site. When people comment, the plugin tries to grab the RSS feed for the site the person puts into the comment form, then creates a backlink to the latest post. Pretty cool stuff. I'm using it here, so feel free to leave a comment and get some link love. But be warned, they're all moderated and don't SPAM me.
IMM Glossary is a pretty cool plugin I went looking for when I saw John Reese's Traffic Secrets 2.0 video talking about "owning more of the Internet". I don't know if I took what he was saying out of context, but it seemed that in general, he was talking about having more pages out there. One way to do that is to have a glossary related to your market that helps people understand the jargon that nearly every market has. This plugin makes it easy to do that, although I guess you could also just create individual blog posts. But this is less tedious and has some cool features too.
Because sometimes you just need to lock down your site. Like when you're doing an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and wondering whether or not it's going to work. This is a pretty simple plugin. Just activate it and then it allows you to lock/unlock the site but anyone that's an admin can still get access.
TinyMCE is like a rich text editor on steroids. It adds all sorts of great features to the text editor used for creating posts and pages. You can also customize which buttons appear on each row of the editor. Good stuff!
Another huge time saver, especially if you have a bunch of blogs. Most of you probably already know about this one, but it's so good I'd be kind of a slacker if I didn't mention it. The name says it all…just activate this plugin and enjoy automated Wordpress updates in a couple of clicks. Sure beats downloading, uploading, and updating a bunch of sites one by one.
Popularity: 14% [?]
I really like the idea of the lock out plugin. I also like a plugin called KeywordLuv which makes a great combo with CommentLuv.
This is really a great post and I am glad that I included it in this weeks International Marketer Review Blog Carnival. I can be embarrassed to say that I only have CommentLuv installed and have just opened 4 tabs to download 4 of the other 5. (I already have something similar to LockOut).
Stumbled!
Check out the latest blog post from Cindy King's site: International Marketer Review Blog Carnival #12
Susan,
That lockout plugin is great when you're making edits to your site or doing an update, especially if you have a decent amount of traffic. KeywordLuv and CommentLuv are also pretty useful. Of course, if I find any other cool ones, I'll just add another post and let everyone know.
Thanks for stopping by.
Kenton
Cindy,
Glad you found those plugins useful. That's one of the great things about Wordpress is that there are so many cool add-ons out there. It's just a matter of finding them.
Kenton