Depending on your needs and professional skills, the choice of an optimal weblog engine can be quite time-consuming. There are many options, and selecting the best engine, you should know exactly what you’d like to have and which level of flexibility you’d like to achieve.
Among dozens of options, WordPress remains the most popular weblog engine out there. It is simple, powerful, extensible and flexible. There are literally thousands of plugins, themes, tutorials and related articles describing the ways to optimize WordPress for publisher’s needs and achieve the best possible performance of the blog.
You know them, because you use them and because you’ve searched for them once you needed them. In this post we’d like to give you an opportunity to share your knowledge and help us to create the essential list of WordPress life-savers – plug-ins, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready to hand developing web-sites upon WordPress.
- Adsense Deluxe – offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Easily switch all AdSense ads to a new color scheme across the entire site.
- Adsense Injection – inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog. Takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let’s you pick how many to show on single post pages.
- Adsense Inline – inserts Google adsense in blog posts.
- Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin – allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. Set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then ‘n’ days. E.g. insert a 468,60 ad at the bottom of a new article for regular readers, and replace with higher paying 336�280 ad after 7 days for the search engine visitors.
- Adsense Beautifier – makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings. (May not be compliant with Adsense TOS now)
- AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar – Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
- AdRotator WordPress Plugin – rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
- Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin – displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
- AdSense Manager – is a WordPress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.
- AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System – allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
- Author Adsense WordPress Plugin – allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author’s ads to admin ads.
- Author Adsense MU Plugin – Webmasters of WordPress MU sites can generate adsense revenue from hosted blogs as this script allows you to set an admin ID and the ratio of admin ad’s to blogger’s ads.
- Google Ad Wrap – wraps posts and comments inside Section Targeting tags for better targeted ads.
- Short URL Plug-in – This WordPress plug-in allows you to shorten the long URL’s easily and it even enables you to keep track of the short URL’s so that you can know how many times each short URL has been clicked. This feature is really useful to track downloads and other links in your blog. If you wish to reset the counter you can click on the ‘clear all’ button to zero the counter. It includes pagination of links, easier setup of htaccess (permalinks) and allows administrators to pass variables to their redirects.
- YOURLS WordPress plug-in – This is a URL shorting service that lets you to shorten the long URL’s on your post and tweet them to the Twitter site automatically. You can configure the settings according to your needs such that you can set it to tweet when you have added a new post or page on your blog. It will send a Tweet with the title of the post and a shortened URL which will redirect to your post. It is very simple to install and works automatically after the initial configuration of the plug-in. It is also compatible with other URL shorting services like the Tinyurl.com, bit.ly is.gd, tr.im etc.
- WP-Chunk – This WordPress plug-in will shorten the URL’s that are present in the comments field. Most of the visitors would like to add or share some other information related to the post in the comments. In that case, they just add the URL of the page that contains the related information. This WordPress plug-in will help shorten the URL’s present in the comments field so that you do not have problem when editing the comments or your blog will look just tidy with all the short URLs.
- Pretty Link – This is another handy WordPress plug-in that allows you to shorten any web page URL’s. It will help you to track the hit count of the shortened URL’s, where each hit came from, the browser used, OS and the host. One cool feature of this plug-in is that: you can use your own domain name to shorten the URL’s.
- Shorter Links – This WordPress plug-in will generate shorter URL of the posts on your blog so that users can easily post the link on any of the web services like Twitter, friendfeed, share it etc., When you save the post to WordPress, the shorter link that is generated can be edited into more meaningful characters. You can further configure the plug-in using the provided settings.
- Adsense Deluxe – offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Easily switch all AdSense ads to a new color scheme across the entire site.
- Adsense Injection – inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog. Takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let,s you pick how many to show on single post pages.
- Adsense Inline – inserts Google adsense in blog posts.
- Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin – allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. Set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then ‘n’ days. E.g. insert a 468,60 ad at the bottom of a new article for regular readers, and replace with higher paying 336,280 ad after 7 days for the search engine visitors.
- Adsense Beautifier – makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings. (May not be compliant with Adsense TOS now)
- AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar – Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
- AdRotator WordPress Plugin – rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
- Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin – displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
- AdSense Manager – is a WordPress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.
- AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System – allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
- Author Adsense WordPress Plugin – allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author’s ads to admin ads.
- Author Adsense MU Plugin – Webmasters of WordPress MU sites can generate adsense revenue from hosted blogs as this script allows you to set an admin ID and the ratio of admin ad’s to blogger’s ads.
- Google Ad Wrap – wraps posts and comments inside Section Targeting tags for better targeted ads.