The Best Wordpress Plugins For Blogging Newbies
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To say that Wordpress is the best open-source blogging platform is an understatement. Not only is Wordpress the best in the business, it is also vastly popular and extremely easy to set up even for complete blogging novices.
I know that there are countless of blog posts and articles sharing their lists of the top Wordpress plugins, but that won’t stop me from coming up with my own list. I recommend a few Wordpress plugins that have proven their worth and are in some way or another, beneficial to my various blogging activities.
Allow me to introduce to the whole blogosphere, the best Wordpress plugins for blogging newbies…
Use Adsense Manager to control and arrange Google Adsense blocks on your blog. You no longer have to manually paste your Adsense codes on your theme files everytime you customize your ad’s colors and layouts. Adsense Manager makes earning money such a breeze.
Reward blog comments with a link to the commenter’s latest blog post. A must for bloggers who want to encourage discussions.
Redirects all your Wordpress feeds to your Feedburner account so that you can track all subscribers. One click (or two) and your blog’s subscribers get the latest updates through their browser, e-mail or feed reader.
Show your flickr photos on your blog with this handy plugin. You choose with photo sets to display and even the size of the photos.
This plugin allows you to manage (reply, delete, edit, etc.) your comments on your Wordpress administration panel. Eliminates the need to load your blog’s posts to reply to comments.
The coolest of all the quotes plugins! Will display random quotes and has an Ajax feature that lets you read the next quote and so on and so forth.
Outputs a list of recent comments, which can be easily configured. One useful feature of this plugin is showing the Gravatar of the commenters, making your blog look more professional.
By default, Wordpress’ search feature covers only the blog posts. Search Everything plugin allows your blog’s visitors to search posts, pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments, tags and custom fields. You can exclude certain posts and pages. A very useful plugin if you are putting up a lot of pages aside from posts.
Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
Easy to install and easy to use! This plugin will set up a customizable Contact Form on your blog. Has strong anti-spam and other security features.
Similar to Lightbox, only lighter (and classier!). Overlays an image on the current page.
For the video junkie. Display Youtube videos on your posts without copying and pasting gibberish code. Just type “httpv://…” on your post and the video will be shown.
Turn one of the most boring pages on your blog (the Archives) into a classy, unique and sophisticated collection of posts! Try it to believe it! Highly recommended.
Adds links to popular social bookmarking sites to the end of your posts. Useful if you want to promote your blog posts.
Makes it easy for your blog’s commenters to receive notification everytime a new comment is posted. Never lose sight of a hot discussion again!
TinyMCE is “a platform-independent web-based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control.” Not sure what that means at first glance, but using this plugin gives you more power and control to your writing! Highly recommended.
Upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress without downloading and installing a new one. Prevents a lot of headaches and sleepless nights!
Back up your database before lightning strikes! Just kidding. This useful plugin allows you to back up your Wordpress database which you can save to your Web server, send to your e-mail or download to your computer.
There you have it. The best Wordpress plugins for complete blogging novices. If you have any recommendations of cool Wordpress plugins, you can make a comment and I will gladly add them to my next compilation.
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December 19th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Nice list of WordPress plugins! I’m sure new users would find this useful. Although, some of the plugins you mentioned are no longer needed if you run WordPress 2.7 because they’re already built-in. Like Ozh’ Absolute Comments and the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade.
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December 19th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Thanks for the list. I will definitely use a few of these.
Have a great day!
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December 19th, 2008 at 10:22 am
@Jaypee: Thanks for the complements. Actually, I have not yet upgraded to 2.7, that’s why I didn’t know that those two plugins are no longer necessary.
The Automatic Upgrade plugin no longer works and I’m still trying to figure out how to upgrade manually.
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December 19th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
What I like most is the ALL SEO Pack Wordpress plugin. It gives you the best platform to redefine the URL of your website for search engine optimization. Next to that is the Google Sitemap. It’s really useful. I can live with those two plugins even without the others mentioned in your post.
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December 23rd, 2008 at 3:03 am
@Loy - You’re welcome! What are you waiting for? Theme and plugin compatibility issues? The upgrade is very easy just make sure that your theme and plugins are ready and compatible.
@Wholesale - You might wanna know that the All-in-One SEO plugin doesn’t work well on WP 2.7. If you plan to upgrade to 2.7, you might want to disable it first or wait til an update version is released then you upgrade WordPress.
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December 25th, 2008 at 5:54 am
That’s a great list. I’ve been trying to roll back my use of plugins that use .js includes in order to improve load times. It’s not the end of the world, but sometimes the utility doesn’t justify the performance hit.
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December 26th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Wish you all the best and hope you have a blessed holiday season! God bless!
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March 7th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Great plugins I’ve been using some of them since I moved to Wordpress. One new thing, I’m going to have that contact form. I’ve been looking for the best one since I had already decided to remove the wp-spamfree plugin which included a good built-in form.
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March 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Good article! Most of plugins are useful and important for me. Thanks.
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