Make Money Online - 8 Invaluable Wordpress Plugins!

Wordpress is eight of the most popular, free solutions for managing your website’s content and i am a devoted fanboy. However, whilst Wordpress in its default, out-of-the-box form can provide a lovely platform for your website, with a little tinkering you can increase the functionality of your site massively. And what’s the easiest way of tinkering? Plugins! Special files that you basically slot-in to your Wordpress installation to get new features. Here are 8 plugins that I consider absolutely invaluable…

WP Shortstat

WP-Shortstat by Jeff Minard is a Wordpress-friendly implementation of Shaun Inman’s delightfully simple “Shortstat” web-site statistics application. If you are an OS X user, you can even download the WP-Shortstat Widget which allows you to keep an eye on your web-site statistics without leaving your desktop! If you like Shortstat, consider upgrading to Shaun Inman’s more fully-featured stats package, mint.

Get Custom

Often i am asked by newcomers to Wordpress, “how do I attach a thumbnail to a post?”. Wordpress doesn’t provide such functionality by default, but it does provide the means. In Wordpress you can attach an infinite amount of meta-data to posts using the “Custom Fields” area - for example, to tell Wordpress to use a certain thumbnail on a post. Get Custom by Scott Reilly allows you to easily retrieve any post’s meta data.

WP Cache Inspect

Wordpress 2 has a cache built into the method, which is great. What isn’t so great however, is that often times it caches things when you don’t need it to - for example when you are redesigning parts of your site & no matter how plenty of times you refresh the page, you can’t see the changes you made! WP Cache Inspect by Peter Westwood allows you to easily clear your cache whenever you feel like it.

Markdown

Markdown by John Gruber prevents you from having to write out clunky HTML to style your blog posts, & it's a massive time-saver. Using a simple, intuitive syntax using asterisks, brackets etc instead of continually opening & closing HTML tags, you can generate links, bold text, italic text & more - effortlessly. Markdown was originally a Perl script but has been converted for use with Wordpress by Michel Fortin.

WP Pagenavi

The default installation of Wordpress handles large archives by adding a “back” & “forward” link to navigate through the pages. WP Pagenavi by Lester Chan allows you to add simple page number links whenever you have an archive that spans across several pages - much better for seeing where you are in the archive!

Akismet

Just Say No to blog comment spam. If you've a high-traffic blog, most likely you will get hundreds of comment spam messages a day. Akismet means you never have to see any of them. Akismet comes complete with all new Wordpress installations, but it isn’t turned on by default - do the world a favour and turn it on (any blog spam Akismet catches gets recorded onto a central database - by letting Akismet catch spam, you help it become more efficient, which helps everyone).

WP Related Entries

WP Related Entries by Alexander Malov is a smart little plugin that displays a list of posts that are related to the post you are currently reading. It’s an entirely automatic process that tries to compare the content of posts across your archives, which means it can be a little temperamental. However, 95% of the time it adds a lovely way of showing other articles your readers might be interested in, and encouraging people to dive in to your archived posts.