WordPress Plugins – Five most useful wordpress plugins for your website

The best thing about wordpress is the ease of installing plugins to it. Plugins provide additional capability and features to your wordpress installation. There are so many plugins available freely that one may get confused as to what may be required immediately after a fresh installation of wordpress. Here, I list the five best plugins which I use on my website and find them to be quite handy.

1. WordPress Popular Posts
   Did you notice the popular posts section on the left sidebar of my website? No wonder, almost every other blog site has it too. How do we end up to get the popular posts displayed on our sidebar? Simple, just install the wordpress popular posts plugin. It is one of the most useful and simplest of all plugins that I have come across. It is sufficient to paste

   < ?php get_mostpopular(); ? >

   into your pages wherever you may wish to display the popular posts of your blog. Blog posts are rated based on both comments and views which can be controlled from the settings tab of your wordpress dashboard. You can also set the maximum number of entries to be displayed under it.

2. Recent Posts
   The second most useful plugin without doubt is the recent posts plugin which helps to display the most recent posts of your blog. This is important because when you make a fresh post, there may not be sufficient views or comments to list your latest post under the popular posts section. To handle such scenarios the recent posts plugin is necessary. It is quite simple to use and requires the following

   < ?php php mdv_recent_comments(); ? >

   to be pasted into your pages wherever you may wish to display the list of recent posts in your blog. You can pass arguments to it to restrict the entries under recent posts.

3. WP-reCAPTCHA
   This plugin helps to prevent spam in your comments by stopping spambots from messing around with your website. This plugin adds a neat box to your comment form with two different words in a distorted manner that the user shall need to fill in before submitting his comment. It requires an unique public and private key for each domain that you may control. The other advantages of using it can be read from http://www.blaenkdenum.com/wp-recaptcha/
4. Contact Form
   The contact form plugin supports creating multiple contact forms for your website in a simple manner. The contact forms can be created under the settings tab of your wordpress dashboard and included in your ‘Contact’ pages. This is quite a useful plugin that I shall recommend to everyone.
5. User Photo
   The user photo plugin provides capability to wordpress to associate a photo with every user profile. All registered users can upload pictures and it can be customized easily to be displayed beside posts and comments. The plugin allows users to upload a picture and also creates a thumbnail for it. You can use it’s simple API to display the picture wherever you may wish to on your posts and beside comments.

These are the five plugins that I setup immediately after installing wordpress for my website. Hope you will find this post helpful. What were you looking for immediately after installing wordpress? Don’t tell me you wanted an auto-bot plugin to write your first post!

Comments

1. Norman says:

   February 24, 2009 at 12:16 pm

   You should check out these 5 fancy wordpress plugins too:
   http://normankosmal.com/wordpress/?p=32
   You will probably like them.
2. Essential WordPress Plugins - ChrisSimpson.info says:

   March 1, 2009 at 2:02 pm

   [...] WordPress Plugins – Five most useful WordPress Plugins for your website [...]
3. this is in my top ten list says:

   March 17, 2009 at 12:14 am

   this is in my top ten list…
4. Josh K says:

   March 19, 2009 at 6:02 pm

   Good piece.
5. Dr.Physics says:

   March 19, 2009 at 10:58 pm

   Great post!! I just have to copy it
6. mirlme says:

   March 21, 2009 at 6:25 am

   i love those plugins!
   it nice and great
   thanks!
7. Useful says:

   March 21, 2009 at 5:30 pm

   The best thing about wordpress is the ease of installing plugins to it.

• Adding JQuery to WordPress - For your customized WordPress theme
• Emacs - Playing music in your text editor
• Configuring Linksys WAG200G (Wireless ADSL Router) with BSNL broadband
• How to install wordpress for your website?
• Emacs vs Vi - A single page reference to commands
• Mixing JQuery Lightbox with Innerfade - Your own JQuery Slideshow album
• Shell script to count number of lines of all files within a directory
• How to swap two variables without a temp variable?
• WordPress Plugins - Five most useful wordpress plugins for your website