Matt’s Journal

The Best Wordpress Plugins You Don’t Know About

There are thousands of lists of what bloggers deem to be the best plugins for the Wordpress blogging platform. My aim here today is to throw you a few that you haven’t heard of but may be interested in using. So here goes…

1. DoFollow

DoFollow is a plugin designed to spread joy amongst bloggers by spreading the link love to your readers. 99% of you have the Askimet SPAM plugin installed, so why not reward the people who do comment on your blog buy allowing Googlebot and his friends to crawl to their sites also?

2. Tiger Style Administration

You’ve been blogging for years using Wordpress and you still cant work out why the team haven’t made the Admin interface a little easier on the eye. This new style from Ordered List replaces the bog-standard layout with one that is not only a lot sexier but it actually makes the navigation easier to master.

3. WP-Postratings

You can see this plugin doing it’s thing on this very post. It adds a tasty looking ratings bar for you to give your feedback on an authors post.

4. WP-Slimstat

WP-Slimstat allows you to report on your blogs traffic from the comfort of your Admin Panel. Slimstat boasts:

• Liquid layout: optimized for 1024×768 and 800×600
• Metatags to show stats on your blog
• Fully localizable
• Improved browser and platform detection
• Tracks Wordpress search form
• Shows visitors and unique IPs, not just hits
• Uses of a local ip-to-country database

5. Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. It basically makes your blog more visible to the world and means you are indexed by all the major online search players.

That wraps it up for now, expect an updated one when Wordpress 2.3 has more compatible plugins.