WordPress Top Plugins: Find and install the best plugins for generating and sharing content, building communities and generating revenue

By Milan Petrovic (http://dev4press.com/)

If you want to know what your readers like, then you need to allow them to quickly rate your individual posts and rank other readers' comments; GD Star Rating does exactly this. Don't be fooled by its deceptively simple outer shell. Those rating stars are backed by a massive administrative area that allows you to customize virtually every aspect of how a user rates your blog's content. For example, you can change how the stars look, how many times to allow users to vote, where to display ratings, and much, much more. In addition to being crazily customizable, GD...

By Nicolas Kuttler (http://www.nkuttler.de/)

The Tag Cloud widget that comes with WordPress is very simple. Luckily, Nicolas Kuttler took the initiative to create a wonderful replacement. Not only does Better Tag Cloud give you a new widget, it also lets you include your tag cloud in posts and pages.

By Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (http://mitcho.com/)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) helps your readers and the search engine bots to find other posts on your website that are similar to the one they are currently reading.

Once installed and activated, the YARPP plugin is virtually done. Check out one of your blog posts, and see if you like the results. Below the article will be a list of similar posts to the one you're reading. While out of the box YARPP will satisfy 80 percent of the people, you should check out the YARPP settings, as it offers a ton of configuration options...

By Andrew Charlton (http://www.geekyweekly.com/)

My Page Order, by Andrew Charlton, allows you to reorder your WordPress pages using a super simple drag-and-drop interface.

By Krischan Jodies (http://jodies.de)

The default Recent Comments widget in WordPress is shockingly incomplete; luckily, Krischan Jodies spent his personal time to build a proper Recent Comments widget. Once activated, you will need to visit Appearance | Widgets. A new Recent Comments widget will be available to drag to your sidebar. Out of the box, the plugin needs no configuration, but Krischan provided a very comprehensive configuration engine that can be accessed through Settings | Recent Comments.

The plugin, Recent Comments, also comes with a Recent Trackback widget...

By Alex—also known as Viper007Bond (http://www.viper007bond.com/)

Embedding videos has never been easier, thanks to Vipers Video Quicktags. This plugin removes the need to copy and paste "embed" code from the different video sharing sites into your posts' body. Instead, you click the icon for a specific video site, for example, YouTube. Then all you need to provide is the URL to the video. Viper's Video Quicktag goes to the URL and extracts the embed code automatically.

By Thaya Kareeson (http://omninoggin.com)

WP Greet Box allows you to display custom messages to visitors, depending on where they originated from. For example, if a reader comes to your blog from Google Reader, the default message will welcome them as a "Google Reader" and give them the ability to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. Similarly, when a visitor comes from Twitter, you can welcome the Twitter user with the option of following you on Twitter.

By Alex Rabe (http://alexrabe.de/)

Alex Rabe's NextGen Gallery is hands down the most popular plugin(by means of total downloads) available for WordPress. NextGen Gallery supports multiple photo galleries, multiple ways to display your photos, and other developers are even creating sub plugins for it! Once installed, you will be able to include your photo albums on both Pages and Posts, as a slideshow (see the following note), image list, or image gallery.

By Thaya Kareeson (http://zemanta.com)

Zemanta is an awesome plugin that helps you automatically find helpful links, photos, and other online sources that relate directly to the post you're writing. Once installed, you will see a new side-panel when you create or edit a post or page. Once you start typing in the body of your post, Zemanta will automatically scour the web looking for photos and other blog posts that cover similar items.

To use Zemanta, simply start writing a new blog post. Beneath the post, you will find a panel called "IN-TEXT LINKS". As you write, specific keywords will be listed...

By Oliver Seidel (http://deliciousdays.com)

WordPress lacks any methods for creating a form (beyond the comment form) to collect visitor questions, contact info, or any other type of communication data. CForms makes creating custom forms as easy as pointing and clicking. Forms can be embedded throughout your blog, including widgets, posts, and pages.

CForms administration

CForms is a very powerful and somewhat complex plugin, so let's take a moment to get familiar with the Administration section.

• Form Action is the somewhat hard-to-find Admin Actions. You will use this expandable menu to save your changes, delete, create, and back up your forms.

• Form Selection is how you switch...

By Chris Richardson (http://wphostreviews.com)

MapPress makes it easy to insert custom Google Maps into your blog. Once installed, you will have the option to add multiple locations by address or lat/long. You will need a Google Maps API-key, which can be obtained from http://bit.ly/gmap-api. Google requires users who customize maps to have an API key. This allows them to track usage and ensure that people are not using Google Maps outside the 'Terms and Conditions'. If you do not have a need for customizing the content on the map, then you could always bypass installing this plugin and use the embed code directly from Google Maps....

By Guillermo Rauch (http://devthought.com/)

WP-O-Matic is used to automatically create posts from an RSS or ATOM feed. This plugin is by far one of the more complicated plugins available, but insanely powerful. Imagine being able to take content from any website virtually, and automatically add it to your blog every time it is updated. With this plugin, you could hypothetically build a gigantic blog filled with tons of content, without ever manually posting.

Before you can begin, there are a few steps you need to go through to ensure that you have all of the right software available for this plugin to work. The first...

By John Godley (http://urbangiraffe.com/)

Search is significantly more important than most people credit it. The ability to find content on your site is probably the most important aspect to running a successful blog. The Defacto search built in to WordPress is nice, but far from perfect. Search Unleash introduces powerful new methods to scour through your blog's data, including full text searching and Lucene powered searching.

By Akshay Raje (http://webdlabs.com/)

WP Web Scrapper is definitely not for the weak of heart, but it is for those of you who know what a "JQuery Selector" is. If you know what a "JQuery Selector" is, then you are in for one awesome coding treat. WP WebScrapper makes grabbing parts of ANY website and including it in a post or page on your blog, a snap!

WP Web Scrapper uses CURL and phpQuery to grab and manipulate data from any public website. Because WP Web Scrapper uses phpQuery, you have the luxury to select which elements you want from the external website using jQuery Selectors. Plus you do not need to be afraid if the external website changes, as WP Web Scrapper degrades gracefully if any changes occur.

When it comes to blogging, content is king, both for your readers and for the search engine. The more unique content you spread on the internet, the better-off your blog will fare in this competitive landscape. In this chapter, we covered the following: