Facebook introduced more social interactions with their new “Like” or “Recommend” Button. This Facebook button enables the user to interact with a site or page. Additionally share it with his/her friends at their own Facebook profile.

Well, Facebook does made it pretty easy to Implement the “Like” button code on your site. The complexity comes when it is not a single page website. How about a blog Post? This is where you will need this hack to make it work!

Do not use the code provided by Facebook because that will not work on Blog posts. Here is the hacked code designed for WordPress!

Open up your single.php and look for the_content(). Paste the code you see below… either before or after the_content()..

Optional Settings:

If you like to show the faces of your friends, change the part “show_faces=false” to “show_faces=true”

If you like to show the label of the button as “Recommend“, change the part of the code “action=like” to “action=recommend”

I hope this will help you to implement the “Like” button on your WordPress Posts! Have fun and drop me a line at twitter or you can click on the “Like” button on the top of this post

Resources (Plugins for WordPress):

Thanks to my Readers

• Facebook Like plugin including support for Open Graph (XFBML)
• Facebook Like Plugin from Smoking Gunn (Features Live Preview, Thanks Stefan to introduce that).
• Alternatively … Kouguu FB Like WordPress Plugin with Configurable Admin Screen

Those who doesn’t want to do code hacking, this one is for them

• This is how to Implement in Thesis WordPress theme

And.. I’m spent…

Don’t forget to rate the post too!

_

Related Post:

1. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial
2. How to style the latest post in WordPress
3. How to add a tweet this button with auto TinyURL or Bit.ly shortening

WordPress is the most popular blogging tool and Firefox is the most amazing browser. Now what would happen if these two powerful tools work together? It will simplify the job being an active blogger. If you are a web designer who needs to install WordPress blogs daily or a blogger who loves creating new blogs then these Firefox extensions would make your work much easier. It could be simply posting comments or creating new blog posts. Nevertheless this post will introduce with top amazing Firefox extensions that works hand to hand with WordPress. This is a guest post by Raz Barr from Kuwait.

Wordpress.com Sidebar 1.9: – This add-on would enable you to access your WordPress account from the sidebar of your Browser. However this add-on won’t work for Self hosted blogs but if your blog is hosted on WordPress then it could save you lot of time.

WordPress Helper 1.1.1: – This extension is Fast and Very Easy to use. It gives you easy access to development Related pages of Wordpress codex. It also allows you to easily switch to the back-end of your Wordpress site and search for strings that are marked. Other Features of this Plug-in are the creation of website profiles, a short icon which would tell you whether a current website makes use of Wordpress or not, Notification of Wordpress Version Updates and Custom Preference settings.

Deepest Sender: – An Efficient blogging Client for FireFox. Instead of going to separate Blogging Platforms like Wordpress, LiveJournal etc, just click the button on your toolbar and start posting. You can create multiple accounts and easily switch between them with help of Deepest Sender. Other Features of Deepest sender are WYSIWYG editor, easy editing of posts, drag and drop, save drafts, Work in Offline mode etc.

Scribefire: – Scribefire is a Fully Featured blog editor which would integrate with your FireFox Browser and allows you to post easily on your blog. It also allows uploading of images and Files to your FTP, save drafts and all other blog operations directly from your FireFox Browser. You can download this add-on here.

Zemanta: – Zemanta is a great FireFox extension which would enhance your blog by recommending relevant images, tags, categories and links as you type it. Zemanta database contains more than 10000 news sources and blogs, and helps the user find relevant images at flickr, Getty, Wikipedia and social networking sites like YouTube, facebook, twitter and much more.

easyComment 1.3: – Easy Comment is a small FireFox Extension which will help you to comment on your blogs quickly. You can create multiple profiles (name/email/URL) and the easy Comment function would automatically fill the forms for you.

Zwordpress: – Zwordpress FireFox add-on would help you manage your Wordpress blog much faster with the help of keyboard shortcuts. You can manage multiple blogs with this Plugin and switch one blog to another with single click.

DashBlog: – A FireFox extension which would help you to grab videos from the web and post to your Wordpress blog quickly.

Screen grab to WordPress! 0.2: – A great FireFox add-on which would help you to take screen captures and directly upload it to your Wordpress blog.

Clipmarks 4.0.0: – Clipmarks lets you take clips from specific parts of articles or any other web page and post them directly to your Wordpress blog eliminating the need of saving them to any other place. You can also email those clips to your friends or share them on twitter or Facebook.

Well there are more tools for Firefox and WordPress, but I personally found these useful and easy to use. Why not you share some with me? Feel free to comment and share your experience.

Article Author: Raz Barr is a Web Designer at Go-gulf , a web design company from Kuwait that provides affordable web design and development solutions.

Related Post:

1. Wordpress 2.5 – The Upgrade Resources
2. Top 10 Most useful Web Developers tools for Firefox
3. How to – Add Facebook LIKE button to WordPress Posts

Ask yourself a question, “Are you a Lazy Blogger?”. Even if you are not, these plugins will bring you to next evolution for your WordPress blog which will change the way you do blogging.

“Why do you need these plugins?”. Because, WordPress is the best and the most expandable blogging platform in the world, the plugin architecture simply gives you the power to add engaging features, improve communication and build a strong relation between you and your blog readers. Savvy? No?

Blogging is about writing great content and if your spend all your sweet time modifying your blog by hard coding then “When will you find the time to write the great content?”. Makes you think? By the time you reach over this post, you might be so proud of yourself that you have actually 23 plugins installed on your WordPress and you begin to think like you are getting professional. Well my friend, I can tell you one thing -

“Quality matters over Quantity”

Today the mission of this post is to guide you to discover the most useful, smart and efficient plugins for WordPress. These plugins will let you concentrate more about writing your content rather than spending time over managing the blog.

Carefully hand picked and incredibly handy WordPress plugins to power up your blog are included in this list. Among some popular WordPress plugins you also will discover new, not so well known or underrated but extremely useful WordPress plugins.

Just a few Notes before continue :

• Spend enough time to understand your need and purpose of your blog. An example would be a photo blog. A photo blog will require image gallery plugins etc. So sort out first what kind of blog and then add appropriate plugins.
• Do not install all of the plugins, it will simply overload your WordPress configuration. If possible test it out on your local system.
• Not all the plugins listed here are the very best but they do “get the things done”.
• Ah I just found out someone simply stolen the content and image of this article and changed the image to claim it as their own.

‘Nuff said, lets continue…

Blog Management Plugins

Managing your blog can be tedious task. Lets see how we can simplify the process of managing your blog using these plugins.

1. WordPress Backup – Wordpress Backup is an essential plugin for all Wordpress blog administrators. It performs regular backups of your upload (images) current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and optionally emailed to a specified email. Don’t get caught without a recent backup of your theme or images or plugins.

   You can adjust the interval between backups and the email address to which the backups are sent.

   Note:
   a) As the size of the zip files increase, it may not be possible to email the files due to limitations of email servers.

   b) It requires some editing on PHP.INI at your server, but not all hosting service provider allows you to access that feature.

   Why do you need this?
   On a Rainy Day this will save your life.

2. WP Database Backup – Database is the crucial part of your blog system. WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. It can backup database to your server as well as it can email the database directly to your inbox. Nifty? Yup, it is pretty sweet when you can also schedule the interval between the backups.

   Why do you need this?
   On a Rainy Day this also will save your life.

3. WP Super Cache – A very popular and easy to use caching plugin which generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Yes, it is a noticeable performance improvement tool. Pretty easy to setup and configure.

   Why do you need this?
   This generates static files and reduce loads on the server dramatically.

   Alternative would be:
   

   W3 Total Cache – This is another alternative to the WP Super Cache plugin. Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, pearsonified.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, briansolis.com, css3.info, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, noupe.com and others. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

   Benefits:
   * At least 10x improvement in site performance (Grade A in YSlow, when fully configured)
   * “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
   * Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
   * Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
   * Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
   * Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

   Note: This plugin is designed for very advance users.

   Why do you need this?
   I’ve moved from WP-Super Cache to this one for some specific performance reasons but as a general blogger you can always use WP Super Cache plugin.

4. Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. A great tool to use while you upgrade your blog.

   Why do you need this?
   Definitely you don’t want your visitors to end up on some error page while you are upgrading your blog

5. Plugin Manager – lets you to view, download and install plugins from wordpress.org from an AJAX’ed interface, instead of manually downloading, extracting and uploading each plugin. A real time saver you can say.

   Another alternative would be:

   Plugin Central – Automatically installs WordPress plugins by name and URL. Provides automatic update of multiple plugins.

   Why do you need this?
   It makes you life much more simpler for installing and updating plugins.

6. Role Manager – allows you to assign different levels of access to different contributors to your blog – for example, only allowing a user to contribute to a particular category. Comes with very detailed and exclusive options.

   Why do you need this?
   This one will give you the flexibility of managing multiple level of permissions on your blog. If you run a multi-author blog, this will become your Swiss army knife.

7. No Self Ping – Prevents your blog from sending pingbacks internally to your other posts.

   Why do you need this?
   Self-Pinging is simply annoying

8. WP-Optimize – Oh yeah, this is kinda shameless plug. I know. But Remember WP-Optimize can clean your database overhead in one simple click, cleans up your post revisions, additionally allows you to change your username and enables you to clean up your spam queue comments in a flash.

   Why do you need this?
   Enables you to cleanup your database overhead, easy and simple to use. Compatible with all Wordpress 2.x databases and keeps your database in a optimal condition without going through PhpMyAdmin interface. You should run it at least once every month.

9. WPML Multilingual CMS – Allows building complete multilingual sites with WordPress
10. Pretty Link – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. You can now shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to mask their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, their links on Twitter to come from their own domain, or generally increase the reach of their website by spreading these links on forums or comments on other blogs.
11. Sidebar-Login – has both a widget and a template tag to allow you to have a login form in the sidebar of your wordpress powered blog.
12. WordPress.com Stats – Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.
13. Feedburner Feed Replacement – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.
14. Adminimize – Visually compresses the administrative header so that more admin page content can be initially seen. Also moves ‘Dashboard’ onto the main administrative menu because having it sit in the tip-top black bar was ticking me off and many other changes in the edit-area. Adminimize is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide ‘unnecessary’ items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the ‘Dashboard’, with forwarding to the Manage-page. On top of that, you can also hide post meta controls on the Write page and other areas in the admin-area and Write-page, so as to simplify the editing interface. Compatible with WordPress 2.5 or later. Configure all metaboxes and other areas in the write-area. The new theme move the Tags- and Category-box to the sidebar, switch off optional metaboxes and other areas in the write-area. Scroll automatically to the Textbox, when you click the write-button. Many options for menu, submenu and all areas, metaboxes in the write-area, separated for all roles in WordPress. Screen Shots.
15. WordPress Mobile Edition shows mobile visitors a mobile version of the site. You have to install the theme as well
16. Google Analyticator makes it easy to enable Google Analytics on your blog and measure where visitors are coming from, what terms they are searching for, etc.

    Another strong alternative is:

    Ultimate Google Analytics – Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links.

17. Branded Login Screen for WordPress – Lets you use custom login screen instead of WordPress default. Branded Admin which lets you change the admin area is also available
18. WP Sentry is a plugin for access-restricted posting, allowing bloggers to discuss sensitive subjects without being exposed to Google or non registered users. With WP Sentry you can create user groups, specify which users or groups have access to the post. Setting any access restrictions forces the post to be listed as “private” in WordPress, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to hide a sensitive post. Users may be members of multiple groups.
19. Absolute Privacy for WordPress provides you with the ultimate user moderation. It’s perfect for family blogs, private communities, and personal websites. It could force users to enter first and last name during registration, let users to choose their own passwords, get emailed every time an approval is waiting (with a link for quick approval), lock out all non-logged in views from your website.
20. Co-Authors Plugin – When you have a blog that is being run by multiple authors, there are times that more than one person contribute to an article. Co-Authors that will let you associate multiple authors to a post in WordPress. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual).
21. Hide Dashboard – This plugin lets you hide dashboard features from some users. The title just say it all.
22. Pre-Publish Post Reminder – Always forget to insert your signature, thumbnail or maybe a category image? Or need a place to store your code where you can conveniently copy and paste into your post? Need to leave a note for co-authors? This is what this plugin is for – a handy reminder list on your Post Admin page.
23. Userextra On Blogs that have multiple authors, it is wise to assign authors to specific categories to avoid confusion. This plugin limits the user to publishing into the categories he/she is assigned.

Content Plugins

Empower your contents with these terrific plugins:

1. Customizable Post Listings – Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.
2. Organize Series – This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. You can associate “icons” or “logos” with the various series. This version of Organize Series Plugin requires at least WordPress 2.8 to workAnother alternative would be:In Series – Allows you to easily group a series of posts into a series.Why do you need this?
   If you have multiple posts that are part of a series, this plugin will help you out by automating managing the series of posts.
3. Post Template allows you to create templates for posts with the same structure – perfect for reviews and series, and also useful to keep a multi-author blog consistent.
4. ComicPress Manager – ComicPress Manager ties in with the ComicPress theme to make managing your WordPress-hosted Webcomic easy and fast.
5. WP-Table Reloaded – Enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. No HTML knowledge is needed. A comfortable backend allows to easily edit table data. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML. Screen shots.
6. Quotes Collection – Ajax powered Random Quote sidebar widget helps you collect and display your favorite quotes on your WordPress blog.
7. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.AlternativeMicrokid’s Related Posts allows you to manually add related posts.
8. Yet Another Photoblog – Convert your WordPress Blog into a full featured photoblog in virtually no time. Use the full range of WordPress functions and plugins: Benefit from the big community WordPress has to offer
9. Add Signature Plugin for WordPress – This plugin lets you display a custom signature at the bottom of your posts. Simply type the text you want in the options page and configure it to display on every post, or manually display it by adding the trigger text wherever you like. You can also add in author information using the included variables – login name, first name, last name, nickname, email address, website, and description/bio. It get this information from the author’s account settings. It currently supports up to three different signature templates.
10. Insights WordPress plugin bring a powerful new way to write your blog posts. With Insights you can very quickly (in couple of seconds) do the following: search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post, insert Flickr Images, Youtube videos, links to Wikipedia, Google Map. Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant information to your post in just a few seconds
11. Post By Author – This plugin will show the last X posts by the current author either at the bottom of every post, or where you manually specify in each post. Using the built-in options page, you can choose the number of posts to show, set the header text, choose to show the post dates, select the format of the date, and choose whether or not to include the current post in the list

SEO Plugins

SEO Plays a very crucial role in your Blog, so here are the plugins you need. For more SEO plugins and tools for WordPress, take a look inside the “Total solutions for WordPress SEO” post.

1. All in One SEO Pack – A must install. A very powerful Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

   Another alternative would be:
   

   HeadSpace2 SEO – All-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site

2. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
3. AskApache Google 404 – Displays unbeatable information to site visitors arriving at a non-existent page (from a bad link). Major SEO with Google AJAX, Google 404 Helper, Related Posts, Recent Posts, etc..
4. Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.
5. Simple Tags – Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin This is THE perfect tool to manage perfectly your WP 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8 tags. It was written with this philosophy : best performances, more secured.
6. WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

Comments Plugins

3rd Party Hosted Commenting Systems

Disqus Commenting System: My personal favorite. It’s a total web comments management service integrated with many popular Social Media Platforms. Namely you can comment using your facebook login, OpenID, Twitter and others. Very handy moderation dashboard and a mature product. You will need to have an account with Disqus and you need to register your blog to it first. It also sync the comments with WordPress database so if you decided not to use it anymore, all your comments will be available to WordPress. Not to mention that this system also contains a WordPress Plugin for easier sync and manageably. All comments interface is hosted by Disqus itself.

Alternative Choice 1

IntenseDebate: Almost all the same feature as Disqus commenting system with some additional options. It has it’s own WordPress plugin as well. Created by the owner of WordPress systems. I still prefer Disqus though.

Alternative Choice 2

JS-KIT Echo: Well known JavaScript based hosted commenting platform which also integrates with WordPress, provides a good number of alternative login systems and Social Media interaction for commenting.

Verdict: Disqus Commenting System. Continue to the rest of this section if you are not interested on one stop solutions or you might like to customize the features of the comments section of your blog.

Blog Comments Plugins

1. Akismet Spam filter plugin (Requires a WordPress.org free account) is an absolute must for any blog, filtering out obvious spam and holding back the dubious stuff for moderation.
2. WP Ajax Edit Comments – The most powerful comment editing solution for WordPress. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

   Note: Handy and Useful but resource heavy.

3. DoFollow is a plugin which disables the default ‘nofollow’ setting on Wordpress blogs (which tells search engines to disregard any links in comments). This means that links posted in comments benefit from ‘Google juice’.

   Note: Personally I’m not using it right now because I am using Disqus.

4. CommentLuv – This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

   Note: It has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it. With a simple install you will immediately start to find new and interesting blog posts, tweets and diggs from your own blog and community. Visit ComLuv for more information.

5. Gurken StC is an extension of the version from Mark Jaquith (txfx.net). It supports closed-loop authentication which means that you first have to confirm your mail address, before you’re able to receive notifications about subsequent comments.
6. Comment Rating – Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently
7. Comment Redirect – This plugin redirect your first time commentators to a WordPress page of your choice. This is an excellent plugin to use if you want to thank your first time commentators. You can send them to a page where you have written some kind words for them.
8. Comment Relish – This plugin lets you send out email to your new commentators and welcome them/thank them. This is a great way to initiate the process of interaction. Keep the message short and sweet. Tag with it some resources that might be helpful to your users. Often times marketers attach freebies and other products which makes the new visitor, a loyal user to your website.

Image Plugins

1. Scissors – Enhances WordPress’ handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality.
2. Simple Flickr Photos – Displays Flickr photos based on your settings.

   Note: This one also depends on what kind of focus you have on your blog. If you are a photographer and you host your images at Flickr then you might consider using this.

3. jQuery Lightbox – Image overlay plugin

   Another alternative would be:

   jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries – Makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox to display the fullsize images.

   Yet another alternative would be:

   Lightview Plus – A wordpress plugin which implements lightview of Nick Stakenburg. Lightview does the same as lightbox, but in a much nicer way and since Version 2.0 much more. Now lightview-plus plays videos from YouTube and Vimeo.

   Another alternative would be:

   Lightbox Plus – Permits users to view larger versions of images from the current page and display simple slide shows, all in an overlay.

4. Nexgen Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. You need to check out the Demo Site.

   Another alternative would be:

   GRAND Flash Album Gallery – Full integrated (flash skin based, slideshow) Image Gallery plugin with a powerful admin back end.

Social Media Plugins

Lets you integrate your blog and interact with many social media platforms:

1. WP to Twitter – The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter. If you have a Cli.gs API key, the shortened URL will also be filed in your Cli.gs account so that you can track statistics for the shortened URL. The plugin can send a default message for updating or editing posts or pages, but also allows you to write a custom Tweet for your post which says whatever you want. By default, the shortened URL from Cli.gs is appended to the end of your message, so you should keep that in mind when writing your custom Tweet. Any status update you write which is longer than the available space will automatically be truncated by the plugin. This applies to both the default messages and to your custom messages.
2. Twitter Widget Pro – A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username, #hashtag, and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). Requires PHP5.
3. Sociable – Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites to your posts, pages and RSS feed
4. SexyBookmarks – Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three
5. Twitoaster – Twitter Conversations. Automatically retrieve Twitter Replies to your Blog’s Posts. These Twitter Replies are handled like Posts Comments, using WP built-in comment system.
6. Twitter Goodies plugin will show your tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages
7. Twitter Friendly Links – The plugin creates a shorter link for every blog post, so instead of http://kovshenin.com/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/ you can use http://kovshenin.com/712. Sweet, huh?
8. Digg Digg Wordpress Plugin Wordpress plugin that is used to generate social vote button, which include Digg , Reddit , Dzone , Yahoo Buzz , TweetMeme (twitter) , fbShare (facebook) and Polladium buttons.
9. WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.
10. BackType Tweetcount – The BackType Tweetcount plugin shows the number of tweets your posts get and allows users to retweet.

    Another cool alternative would be:

    Easy Retweet – Simple and effective retweet button for your blog posts.

11. Tweet Blender – Similar in functionality to Twitter’s own widget but has support for multiple authors, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream. View Screen Shots.
12. Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all other RSS readers. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.
13. ShareThis – The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a simple way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send a link to your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more

    Another alternative would be:

    Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history

14. Gigya Socialize – Increase Registration and Engagement using Facebook Connect, Twitter and OpenID. Demo Site.
15. Facebook Connect for WordPress – Wordpress plugin that allows direct integration of Wordpress blogs with Facebook using Facebook Connect.
16. WordBook – Bring your WordPress blog posts into Facebook, and enabling users to comment and share those posts.
17. Last.Fm Records – This plugin shows CD covers on your WordPress weblog. It connects to last.fm and grabs the list of CDs you listened to recently and tries to find the cover images at last.fm
18. Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that automatically posts your delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes bookmarks to your blog. The exact details of how your bookmarks are posted are very customizable and are designed to meet your specific needs. Postalicious uses the pseudo-cron functionality introduced in WordPress 2.1 to schedule automatic hourly updates. If you do not have WordPress 2.1 or later installed, you will still be able to use Postalicious, but you will have to perform the updates manually
19. WP-Email – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

Widget/Presentation Plugins

1. My Link Order – Allows you to set the order in which links and link categories will appear in the sidebar.
2. Video Sidebar Widgets – A video sidebar widget using WordPress 2.8 Widgets API to display videos such as Vimeo, YouTube, MySpace Videos etc. Requires at least WordPress 2.8.1
3. About Me widget – Add an “About Me” widget to your sidebar.

   Note: Not really necessary but it still depends on your choice. It’s not a good thing to clutter up your sidebar.

4. Advanced RSS – This plugin creates a new RSS widget. You can use this to replace the built in RSS widget or along side it. It is substantially more powerful than the built in widget in that you have complete control over how the feed is displayed via XSL templates. The plugin also includes an admin page for creating, editing and deleting the xsl templates, along with running tests to ensure your environment supports the required features. Additionally some plugin-wide options may be configured
5. Sidebar Photoblog – An easy to use photoblog plugin helps you to share your daily photos on your sidebar. With photo archive, nice effects and ability to show random photo.
6. Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin at Personal Financial Advice
7. Flexi Pages Widget – A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
8. Get Recent Comments – This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.

   Another alternative would be:

   WP-RecentComments – Display recent comments in your blog sidebar.

9. Facebook Dashboard Widget – You can display your Facebook friends status updates, posted items and/or notifications on your WordPress dashboard. Require WP 2.5 or above.
10. List Authors Widget – This plugin display a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets linking to the authors.php page

Banner and Advertise Plugins

1. AdRotate – Make making money easy with AdRotate. Add advanced banners to your website using the simplest interface available!
2. Easy AdSense – Easiest way to show AdSense and make money from your blog.
3. WP-Insert: Allows insert any type of content fragments inside your posts, can be used as a AD Manager also.
4. Sponsors Slideshow Widget – Widget to display a certain link category with images as slide show.
5. Author Advertising Plugin – Specially for multi author blogs. This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilizing one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc.

Other Plugins

1. PayPal Donations – Easy and simple setup and insertion of PayPal donate buttons with a shortcode or through a sidebar Widget. Donation purpose can be set for each button
2. Contact Form 7 – Simple, flexible but efficient contact form plugin

   Another alternative would be:

   cForms II allows you to create multiple and customizable contact forms across your blog, including multiple forms on the same page.

3. Wordpress Download Monitor – Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts.
4. WP-CodeBox – WP-CodeBox provides clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.
5. WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog
6. PollDaddy Polls – The PollDaddy Polls plugin allows you to create and manage polls from within your WordPress dashboard. You can create polls, choose from 20 different styles for your polls and view all results for your polls as they come in. All PollDaddy polls are fully customizable, you can set a close date for your poll, create multiple choice polls, choose whether to display the results or keep them private. You can even embed the polls you create on other websites. You can collect unlimited votes and create unlimited polls
7. Category Icons – Assigns icons to categories with WordPress 2.3 or higher.
8. TDO Mini Forms – This plugin allows you to add highly customizable forms that work with your Wordpress Theme to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit and edit posts and pages. New posts are kept in “draft” until an admin can publish them (also configurable). Likewise edits can be kept be automatically kept as revisions until an admin approves them. It can optionally use Akismet to check if submissions and contributions are spam. TDO Mini Forms can be used to create “outside-the-box” uses for Wordpress, from Contact Managers, Ad Managers, Collaborates Image Sites, Submit Links, etc.
9. WP-Print – Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

   Another alternative would be:

   Bunny’s Print CSS creates a stylesheet for printing so users printing pages from your blog can avoid endless pages of widgets, comments or other page furniture (including design elements).

10. Easy Popular Posts shows you your most popular posts – useful to install in a sidebar (you’ll need to put a line of PHP in the sidebar template for this).
11. GD Star Rating – GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings. Plugin supports use of cache plugins and dynamic loading of data using ajax
12. GD Press Tools – GD Press Tools is a collection of various administration, seo, maintenance, backup and security related tools. This tools can be integrated into the various WordPress admin panels, can perform maintenance operations, change some aspects of WordPress, see detailed server settings and information. Plugin can also track posts and pages views for various popularity lists. Some of the features don’t work with every version of the WordPress
13. RSSImport – Import and display Feeds in your blog, use PHP or the Shortcode.
14. Smart Archives Reloaded is an enhanced version of the Smart Archives. It’s easier to setup, there is no code editing required, it features better caching and now you don’t need to wait when publishing a new post and provides you settings page to choose how you want the archives displayed.
15. ProPlayer WP Plugin will help you to put videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymoition on your blog in any FLV Player. It’s highly customizable with support of 27 skins and in addition you can play mov/mp4/h264/mp3 files too. Plugins includes Rating video, Visualizer for audio files, Displaying watermark. By default JW FLV Media Player is used.
16. Smart Youtube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in your RSS feed. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Smart YouTube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone, produces xHTML valid code and allows you to view videos in fullscreen.
17. WordPress e-Commerce Plugin is e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This plugin makes it easy for you to accept payments online via Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express. You can also tweak your site to look however you want utilizing WordPress PHP template tags, shortcodes and widgets.
18. Breadcrumb Navigation is an excellent supplementary navigation system specially for CMS because it helps in site usability. The plugin we are going to share in this article reveals page hierarchy. It is a very good addition to the design because of usability and it also provides SEO benefits because it links to the path hence increasing bot activity in page indexing.
19. WP-Typography – Have you ever wished that you can have rounded quotes, show ellipses, your hyphens don’t get mixed up, yes WP-Typography takes care of that. This plugin is not required for everyone, it is just for those who care about minor details.

Conclusion

This is my current list of smart, efficient plugins; yet it’s inevitable that there are other plugins out there which I am not aware of at this moment. Do you know one or maybe few? Feel free to suggest me your favorite plugin using the comment form. I will try my best to keep this post updated with your suggestions.

Related Post:

1. Ultimate Wordpress SEO Tools and Plugins Resources from WordCampUK
2. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial
3. How to – Add Facebook LIKE button to WordPress Posts

I love Wordpress and today I’m here to present you with an ultimate list of Wordpress SEO Tools and Resources that you’ll ever need to know. This is a must read presentation and transcript for any wordpress fan. It’s written by Nick Garner and presented at wordCampUK. I’m merely sharing the awesomeness of these resources. 

wordcampUK SEO tools & plugins – Presentation Transcript

1. WORDPRESS FOR SEO. HOW WORDPRESS CAN HELP YOU RANK WITH GOOGLE JULY 19TH 2009. NICK GARNER
2. WORDPRESS IS AWESOME WE LOVE IT!
3. PRESENTATION STRUCTURE.
   1. Seo is complex, so follow a process and make it simple
   2. Get wordpress set up for SEO > plugins / analytics / testing / webmaster central
   3. Content, be useful & relevant.
   4. Links…The vote of confidence for your site.
   5. Tools and ways to see how you are moving ahead.
4. SEO IS COMPLEX WORDPRESS MAKES IT EASIER
5. WORDPRESS FOR SEO. THINK PROCESS Complex way:
   The easy way:
   1. Use Wordpress! And get the necessary plugins.
   2. Decide who your audience Is.
   3. Make the content very useful and persuasive.
   4. Structure your content so its easy for engines…
   5. Get analytics, see where you are going.
   6. Work consistently for at least 6 months.
   7. Socialise and get links into your site.
   8. Conversion optimize and get rewards from your traffic.
6. PLUGINS FOR SEO (AND ANALYTICS) MY FAVOURITES THAT SAVES ME TIME AND HASSLE
7. PLUGIN FOR SEO GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS:
   GET INDEXED MORE EASILY
   4* / 504 ratings | 1,416,701 downloads
   This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
   COMMENT: Unless you have a massive site or have indexing problems, then it’s a nice extra, but not so important.
8. PLUGIN FOR SEO REDIRECTION
   4* / 68 ratings | 159,745 downloads
   Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. Simple interface to add a redirection This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. A graphical interface to manage all your redirections
   COMMENT: If you are doing an upgrade from a different CMS, or the site has a history of disruptive changes, this plugin can be invaluable as a great way to mop up old links.
9. PLUGIN FOR SEO PERMALINK REDIRECT
   5* rating / 14,132 downloads
   This plugin fixes all sorts of weird addons to your URL’s by automatically 301 redirecting to the permalink for that post, page, category or tag page. Only use this plugin if you’re 110% sure you know what you’re doing. That way, a URL like this: http://www.example.com/page1/?q=ek Will be automatically redirected to: http://www.example.com/page1/
   COMMENT: It’s one of those ‘enable and go’ plugins that you just have on in the background. Obviously if you are using affiliate tracking links, then it’s a no no.
10. PLUGIN FOR SEO BAYESIAN RELATED LINKS
    6* rating / 1,310 downloads
    First, we make a model of browsing behavior. Then we need to figure out the parameters for this model. Bayesian methods allow us to learn the parameters with few assumptions. See Additional Information for more about the mathematical theory.
    COMMENT: Interesting idea…I’ve always spoken about how important internal linking is, so this does it automatically and is great if you want the site to ‘find its own level’.
11. PLUGIN FOR SEO AUTOMATIC SEO LINKS
    6* rating / 5,430 downloads
    Forget to put manually your links, just choose a word and a URL and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your blog. For each link, you can set: Title / Target / Rel Other features Also you can know every moment how many times a word has been changed. This plugin just changes the words in plain text, if it finds a word in a link, title, header.. it would not be replaced. In case the plugin finds more of once the same word in a post, it will only change the first one. This is to avoid black seo and inconveniences to the users.
    COMMENT: Nice idea, a bit spammy and uncontrollable. If you could switch on or off certain pages and posts, it would be very usable.
12. PLUGIN FOR SEO ALL IN ONE SEO
    4* / 462 ratings | 2,429,459 downloads
    As you see from the screengrab, it does about everything automatically. All in One SEO Pack
    COMMENT: Its almost the default plugin for anyone who cares about SEO. Its really all you need to meta tag optimisation. You can even change tags on Individual pages and posts….nice.
13. PLUGIN FOR SEO PAGINATED COMMENTS
    5* rating / 6 ratings | 4,938 downloads
    Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin ** developed with SEO in mind ** that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of search engine optimized pages. You can create pages based on size of comments (so that no page of comments is greater than a certain file size) or you can create pages based on number of comments per page (100 for example). Some features include:
    •Titles for each page of comments.
    •Description and Keywords for each pages of comments.
    •Paginate by size of all comments.
    •Paginate by a number of comments.
    •Personalize your Pretty Permalinks URI’s.
    •Control page of comments post content.
    •Handle this and more features within your WordPress
    •Dashboard with a easily menu.

    COMMENT: I once managed a blog that frequently got 500 plus comments per Post. This was the the best way to manage this massive flow of opinion. And after the plugin install, commenting rose again!

14. PLUGIN FOR SEO PAGED NAVIGATION
    5* / 60 Ratings | 289,136 downloads Add paged navigation to your category pages
    COMMENT: It chunks down those very long category pages to makes them manageable for spiders and it allows content to not get buried too quickly as is the case with the normal ‘previous > next’ footer links.
15. PLUGIN FOR SEO ENFORCE WWW PREFERENCE
    5* / 8 ratings | 10,934 downloads
    Enforce www. Preference enforces your yes-www or no-www preference as defined by your Blog URL setting in ‘Options – General.‘ If you have http://example.com/, people who visit any WordPress-served URL staring with http://www.example.com/ will be redirected to the no-www version. If you have http://www.example.com/, people who visit any WordPress-served URL staring with http://example.com/ will be redirected to the yes- www version. The plugin will also strip off any hanging redundant /index.php
    COMMENT: Easy way to avoid any possibility of content duplication through Spiders reading the www version and no-www versions of the site as separate sites
16. PLUGIN FOR SEO ROBOTS META CONFIGURATION
    5* rating / 18 Ratings | 51,891 This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:
    • Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
    • Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content.
    • Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
    • Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds.
    • Disable author and date-based archives.
    • Nofollow your login, register and admin links, because they really don’t need PageRank.
    • Enforce a trailing slash on archives.
    • Edit your .htaccess and your robots.txt from within WordPress.
    • Assign robots meta tags to individual posts & pages.
    • Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
    • Add noarchive tags to your blog (Thanks to Henryk Gerlach). COMMENT: Great plugin and really helps ‘sculpt’ your site for search engines
17. PLUGIN FOR ANALYTICS ULTIMATE GOOGLE ANALYTICS
    4.5* / 18 ratings | 52,274 downloads
    Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links.
    COMMENT: When you are ready to dig into your numbers, this plugin will Help you dig right into the data and so make useful decisions. MORE READING
18. PLUGIN FOR SEO HEADSPACE META TAG MANAGER
    4* 76 / Ratings
    HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. Visit the HeadSpace page for a video demonstration.
    COMMENT: Its all in one seo, just bigger and better (depending on your view) Its worth a download…
19. PLUGIN FOR SEO (AND ANALYTICS) BREADCRUMB NAVIGATION
    4* rating / 4 ratings | 18,645 Downloads
    This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Why you should do this is outlined in my WordPress SEO article. They could for instance look like this.
    COMMENT: It helps add link hierarchy to your site and of course its good for usability.
20. PLUGINS FOR SEO SEO FRIENDLY PERMALINKS – I know, its not a plugin This is all open to debate…but for SEO, I prefer this URL structure: Mywebsite.com/category-name/post-name-postID.html Mywebsite.com/%category%/%post_name%-%post_id%.html The other big benefit is that the URL acts as a breadcrumb trail.
21. GOOD SEO HOUSEKEEPING DONT FORGET TO REGISTER ON GOOGLE WEBMASTER CENTRAL.
22. CONTENT REMEMBER, WRITE IT FOR HUMANS AND MAKE IT ON THEME
23. CONTENT THINK LIKE A LIBRARIAN. Google is the librarian who has to put your site somewhere on its index. So make it easier for them. Get it right and be the BIG book everyone can see.
24. CONTENT THE BEST STRUCTURE H1 for site name in header H1 tag for headlines H2 for sidebar titles Try not to do multiple categories for posts Use tagging for cross referencing Paginate categories and allow engines in. Paginate front page. Block off archives because of duplication of content Meta tags: -Title tags – Description tags – Keywords And check your site through with w3c http://validator.w3.org/ | http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
25. CONTENT STRUCURE As with breadcrumbs and link hierarchy, think about hierarchy of content. The most important and generic content at the top. The more granular going down the hierarchy.
26. Links HOW WORDPRESS CAN HELP YOU RANK WITH GOOGLE
27. LINKS A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE IN YOUR SITE Google value links as they represent a vote for your site. Some links matter more than others. Relevance to your site Really matters.
28. LINKS THE SAME MODEL APPLIES TO HUMANS So make your site useful and relevant. The more sociable interesting and useful you are, the greater your prominence. In search, that means links. And Google loves a nice link!
29. LINKS SOME HOMEWORK http://collinlahay.com/ Great for really practical tips on getting links. Sphinn is a social bookmarking site for SEO’ers. The most popular content Gets voted up. There is a category for link building: http://sphinn.com/upcoming/LinkBuilding/ This site search brings up some great stuff like: Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009 Link Building Worksheets – Organize Your Campaign The 7 Golden Rules of White Hat Link Building More here http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Asphinn.com+link+building
30. TOOLS MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER
31. TOOLS MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER
    Check your links: (PRO): http://www.majesticseo.com/
    extraordinary detail on links http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ very useful for mid level use
    Firefox plugins: SEO Quake: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
    Search Status: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321
    SEO for Firefox: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html Detailed site analysis:
    SEMrush: http://www.semrush.com / Not UK centric, but shows detail on phrases your site ranks for.
    RAVEN: http://raven-seo-tools.com / All in one linkbuilding CRM. Search Engine Ranking Position Tracking (SERP tracking)
    Firefox: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/ easy tool. More: 136 free seo tools
32. FINAL THOUGHTS WORDPRESS, YOU MADE THE RIGHT DECISION
33. THE MAN FROM GOOGLE – HE SAY YES! MATT CUTTS. HEAD OF GOOGLE WEBSPAM TEAM He said that WordPress is a “great choice” for SEO because it solves “80-90% of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”.

See all of the resources here: http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampuk

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2. Wordpress 2.5 – The Upgrade Resources
3. How to Change Wordpress Permalinks without affecting Google

How to add a Tweet This button to your wordpress posts without using any plugin or widget? Well there are few sites allow you to do that. But for instance I want the control to be in my hand and it’s pretty much no point of using a plugin or widget to do this kind of job. Why? because each time a plugin/widget loads, it takes away cpu and ram resources from server. So let me show you a nifty simple way to add a cool Tweet This button to your wordpress posts including automatic creation of TinyURL/Bit.ly url for your post. The automatic TinyURL creation for wordpress post already published at WPRecipes website but it was not implemented in their Tweet This post options. Additionally I’ve added Bit.ly API usage code by my own. Bit.ly dynamic creation of urls offers statistics and usage information (free registered account). Let me show you the implementation of that in a more useful manner.

First of all in your wordpress theme directory you should have a functions.php file which contains common functions to be used inside your themes. In case you don’t have one, create a file called functions.php inside your favorite wordpress theme directory. Now open the functions.php file and add this function which will allow you to create TinyURL.com urls on demand.

Code to generate tinyurl inside your themes functions.php:

or you can add bit.ly JSON API to create dynamic bit.ly urls on the fly. Bit.ly offers tracking features for the urls generated. This is a little bit more tricky (Note: this requires an user account at http://bit.ly and a API key, Once you login to your Bit.ly account you can find it here). The sample code below (don’t forget to change the login name and api key)

Ok once you are done with the code, save and close the functions.php file and open your single.php file which is your wordpress single post view template. Now you can add the piece of code underneath the function called the_content(). Add this sample code underneath there to generate an image with the link to post to twitter and additionally append the post title and post tinyurl along with it. See below.. here is the sample of a single.php file.

Note that the above code must have the proper image file (twitter.png file in your theme directory) to display it properly. Also you can switch the function names to getTinyUrl to getBitlyUrl.

Now this is how it looks like when you click on the button and it opens twitter to post the status entry. The entire line is generated from the button itself including the tinyurl link.

As you can see above that you don’t really need any 3rd party widget or plugin to accomplish the Job because it’s pretty fast to do and you are in control of the look and feel, not to mention you can save your resources. For a live example you can use the Twitter icon from my Social media icons bar.

Alternative Reading

There is another good post about this at labnol.org. It’s the javascript based chiklet implementation of this similar topic.

Related Post:

1. How to – Add Facebook LIKE button to WordPress Posts
2. How to style the latest post in WordPress
3. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial

You will often find blogs that shows the latest post in a different color or applied different CSS tags. Basically you need to Inject some code inside wordpress post listing generation loop. The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code placed in the Loop will be repeated on each post. So we need to find the latest post and define a specific attribute to that post such as a different CSS class.

First of all open the index.php from the theme you are using. Search for the code

Now after that code to the next line add this code:

As you can see from the code above it defines $postclass as a variable and look for the latest post and assign that variable to a new name. But this is not all, you need to output that variable where your post has the CSS style assigned to it. See the example below:

Now you need to style your CSS file according to the class name you’ve assigned for the latest post

Related Post:

1. How to display the latest post from each category using WordPress query_posts
2. How to – Add Facebook LIKE button to WordPress Posts
3. How to use different header for categories and pages in WordPress

I use wordpress solutions in a day to day basis. Wordpress comes with a very extensible framework that allows you to add comprehensive and powerful functionality to your Blog system. WP-Optimize plugin is written to simplify your daily wordpress works and make it simpler. WP-Optimize is a wordpress 2.7++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks. Additionally you can rename any username to another username too. Here are the details.
Hosted at Wordpress Official Plugin Directory

How this could help you?

• Everytime you save a new post or pages, wordpress creates a revision of that post or page. If you edit a post 6 times you might have 5 copy of that post as revisions. Imagine if your post or pages are long and big. It’s a huge number of bytes thats on your MySQL overhead. Now WP-Optimize allows you to optimize and shrink your posts table by removing not necessary post revisions from the database. As example, if you have a post which is approximately 100KB data and you have 5 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 500KB. And if you have 100 posts similar to it, you have 50MB database space wasted.
• Similar to the scenario described above, there might be thousands of spams and un-approved comments in your comments table, WP-Optimize can clean and remove those in a single click
• WP-Optimize reports which database tables have overhead and wasted spaces also it allows you to shrink and get rid of those wasted spaces
• Wordpress doesn’t allow you to rename existing username which could be a security issue because your default wordpress admin username is “admin”, if you read my Wordpress Security guide article, you will know the risks involved. WP-Optimize can rename any existing username to other name

Features:

• Remove the existing wordpress post revisions
• Remove all the comments in the spam queue
• Remove all the un-approved comments
• Rename one username to another username, it’s designed to rename default “Admin” user to something else
• Apply MySql optimize commands on your database tables without phpMyAdmin.
• Display Database table statistics.

Requirements:

• It Requires wordpress version 2.7 and higher. Tested with 2.7

Installation:

• Unzip the archive into your hard drive.
• Upload the folder to your wp-content/plugins folder on your web host.
• Login to your dashboard and activate the plugin via activate option.
• The menu item is under Dashboard>WP-Optimize.

Usage:

• Select the WP-Optimize menu item under Dashboard dropdown menu
• Select the actions you want to perform
• Click on Process button

Screen Shots:

This is a primary version of the plugin so any feedback here would be highly appreciated.

Did this plugin helped you out?
Would you like to donate an amount for this Plugin?

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Since the updates of Adobe Flash player 10 there are several cases of problems. For instance Wordpress media upload and Flickr uploader stopped working. Not only that, the systems that uses SWFUpload objects are not functioning as well. This alone can cause a huge dissatisfaction among the general users, not to mention that there are a load of bug present on the flash player 10 itself. There are so much talk going around the web about the Flash player 10 issue, but Adobe decided not to look into it, they suggest the developers of the non working products to upgrade their codes. Now my point here is not to talk or rant about flash player 10 but to solve the problem by downgrading the flash player to version 9. I’m doing this on a vista machine. First of all you need to clean up and uninstall flash player 10 from your system. Here is how..

Steps to clean-up flash player 10 from your system:

• Download the flash player un-installer utility. Close all browser windows before run this utility
  Download: 300KB
• Re-boot your system and open your browsers and go to some flash based sites. It should prompt you that you do not have flash player installed in your system, yes thats what we want

Getting flash player 9:

• At the flash download page at adobe you wont be able to find the flash 9 downloads, so what is the work around it. Adobe has a flash players archive which contains older versions of flash players for the developers to test their applications. Here your can find all the archived versions of flash player (Note that the downloads are pretty big in size, 120MB++).
• Alternatively I’ve extracted the files you need to my windows skydrive account which are Flash player 9r151 for windows and the flash player uninstaller.
  1.5MB
  1.5MB
• Once you’ve downloaded the files from above, execute them to install adobe flash player 9 onto your system
• Open and test each of your browsers, go to a flash based site and check out the version running onto your browser

Thats pretty much of it. Note: All files has been tested by Kaspersky Anti-virus for the safety but you should scan before execute it.

More readings on this Issue:

• Image uploader doesn’t work with flash 10
• SWFUpload Discussion
• Flash Player 10 security is breaking the Web

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3. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial

Previously I’ve written about how to add facebook connect to your wordpress blog but that plugin requires heavy modification on the comments.php file, which is in a way pretty tough for most people to do. So I’ve taken consideration to use the WP-FacebookConnect plugin which is featured in facebook developers wiki. It requires much more simpler method to add facebook authorization connectivity to your blog. I’ve seen Chris Wallace already had a helpful and simple explanation on this. So I will just compliment his article and add some extras to you don’t need to go to so many other websites to accomplish the integration with facebook.

Basically you need these steps to complete:

1. Create your Facebook Application and get the API and secret keys
2. Download and Install the officially listed WP-FaceBook connect plugin
3. Configure the plugin and add your API and secret keys and save the options
4. Now your WP theme folder, open the comments.php file in you favorite editor and look for the comment form element and add this piece of code where you want the Facebook Connect button to appear. Here is the piece of code

5. Here is the code inside my comments.php near to the comments form
   

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

   <form action="<?php echo get_settings('siteurl'); ?>/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform">     <?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>   <p>Logged in as <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-admin/profile.php"><?php echo $user_identity; ?></a>. <a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url(get_permalink()); ?>" title="Log out of this account">Log out &raquo;</a>     <?php else : ?> <?php do_action('fbc_display_login_button'); ?>   <p>     <?php     echo "<small>Note: <acronym title="Facebook is a Social Networking Engine">Facebook</acronym> users doesn't require to fill up name, e-mail, website or captcha code</small><br>";     echo "Already a Member? <br>";     echo '<a href="'.get_option('siteurl').'/wp-login.php'.'"><b>Login..</b></a> or<br/>';     ?>

6. Yes it’s as simple as that, but in-case it doesn’t work on IE or any CSS problems you can check this official faq

WP-SuperCache Fix for Wp-FacebookConnect

Now those who are using WP-SuperCache, here is the solution for you guys. Basically you need to do some .htaccess mod re-write and a small plugin for WP-SuperCache.

There are two places that WP Super Cache looks at for filtering user cookies (taken from AllFaceBook). The first (which I assume is the case for most users) is in the .htaccess file in your document root. If this is how your site is configured, you’ll need to find the following code in your .htaccess file:

All you need to do at that point is replace the two RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} lines with the following:

Now create a file fbconnect.php (It can be any name with an extension .php). Copy paste the following code inside the file and save it.

Replace "YOURAPIKEY" with your actual API key and save it in the folder /wp-content/wp-plugins/wp-super-cache/plugins/. Upload that to your server and you should be good to go!

Thank you very much Nick ONeil from AllFacebook.com & Chris Wallace. There are actually few other tutorials about integrating the facebook connect, feel free to browse them too.

• InsideFacebook
• Dentedreality

CSS Customization

The css that comes with WP-FacebookConnect is of really NO use, Chris Wallace already written a nice CSS override to the article so I am taking it from him for sharing purpose. The CSS file you need to modify is inside the plugin folder (fbconnect.css).

Also let me know whether this helped you out or not or are you facing any specific problems?

Related Post:

1. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial
2. Facebook Connect Social Widget Comments Box for your website
3. Easy steps to Facebook Connect Comment Box [How to]

I run a Web 2.0 technology review site called Tech2all.com. Recently I’ve re-written a theme based on Maginoo for Tech2all.com. How does it look like? Take a moment to visit Tech2all.com for a live preview. I’ve build up more feature and and functionality inside it and decided to release this special edition of the theme to the public. It’s a 3 column theme contains enough space for you for your contents to fit in 2 sidebars similar to smashing magazine website. It’s designed for 1024×768 px or  higher resolution display.

Features:

• Vibrant and readable font faces
  
• 2 layer of navigations pages listed at very top and categories with dropdown listed down underneath the Header image
  
• Ad unit areas 336×280px and header ad 468×80px
• Quote and Reply with selected comment, Wordpress 2.7 threaded comment support
   
• Author reply highlighted in comment
• Separated comments and trackbacks
• JQuery Tabbed sidebar, Popular posts tab require Alex Kings popularity contest plug-in
  
• Simple and effective archive page template
  
• 2 Sidebars simple and similar to smashing magazine sidebars
   

• Wordpress 2.7 or higher
• Alex Kings popularity contest plug-in. Note that you will need a custom modified version of the plug-in by Wessley Roche to make it work under Wordpress 2.7. I’ve included the modified version of the plug-in along with the download.

Download:

Installing:

1. Unzip to a temporary folder to your hard-disk
2. Upload the t2a_v2 folder to your wordpress themes folder
3. Upload the plugin from the plugins folder to your wordpress plugins folder and activate it through your wordpress administration
4. Activate the theme from your wordpress administration

Customization:

• Logo: Use the logo.psd at the images_src folder, edit in photoshop cs2 or cs3, Save as background-sitename.jpg slice and upload it at the images folder replacing the original one
• Adsense Link units: Open header.php and change the google adsense code to your google adsense code
• Banners: Open headerbanner.php and banners.php and modify those to your needs
• Paged navigation: Install WP-Page Navi plug-in by lester Chan to enable paged navigation.
• Feedburner: Open header.php go to line 87 and change the subscribe via email link to your link.

This is a free theme unless stated otherwise. Feel free to suggest me for improvement and share your thoughts.

Update:

Just a quick update, This Theme is the NEW RE-MAKE Maginoo WordPress theme, Sorry I left you guys for the Design Inspiration. Note that, The Maginoo theme is not completely featured with wordpress 2.7x new features

Related Post:

1. How to use different header for categories and pages in WordPress
2. Wordpress 2.5 – The Upgrade Resources
3. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial