WordPress Categories

WordPress categories are your table of contents, at the front of a book there’s a “Contents” which showcases the main chapters of content for the book. The Categories are the hierarchy of your content.

A blog post normally has one category, though it may fit in one or two categories, or even in sub categories.

WordPress Tags

Tags are your index words, at the back of a book is an “Index”, a listing of words which you can find specific information. Just like your index in a book your WordPress tags are a link, but, a hyperlink to related information.

A blog post normally has two or three descriptive tags.

10.Header Image Rotator

By Matthew Hough

Very simple header image rotator that rotates images in your blog based on different time variables (Day / Month etc). Upon activation you have to create a folder called wp-contents/header-images/ and simply stick the images you want to rotate within that folder and configure the image rotator to what time variable you need.

9.Search Everything

By Dan Cameron

Adds Extra search functionality with little setup. I mainly use it to quickly add the searching of pages and not just posts which is the wordpress default install. You can also search attachments, drafts, comments and custom fields (metadata). A simple solution to enable you to add better search capability to WordPress.

8.Exec PHP

By Sören Weber

This plugin Allows tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files. Not much else you can say really it just one of those plugin’s a developer cannot live without.

7.Secure and accessible contact form

By Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley

A contact form that features exceptional accessibility and usability features leaving the rest of your website struggling to keep up with the high accessibility level. Its one of the best quality plugin’s you’ll come across and knowing both the authors support will be perfect too. It also includes a great anti-spam feature. I highly recommend this to the semantic and accessible designers out there.

6.WP Wetfloor

By Shirley Man

I am as guilty as the rest of you for wanting shiny reflective surfaces underneath every image I create – Though I have held back on Designbit. The effects known as wetfloor and is an unobtrusive plug-in that adds a quicktag button to your “write posts / page” and enables this beautiful effect with one click making you hungry for more.

5.WP-Email

By GaMerZ

Handy plug-in if you want a feature that allows your users to email a post/page to their friends. The forms relatively customizable and easy to use it adds a quicktag button in your “write posts / pages” for you to click or you can integrate it into your template which is my preferred method.

4.Lightbox JS

By Safirul Alredha

I love the Unobtrusive Lightbox JS and have been watching its development like a hawk and this is the easiest way of getting one onto your blog, click on my latest work pics in the side bar to see it in action. Upon activation it optionally adds a quicktag button into your “write post / page” admin and voila lovely Lightbox image overlaying effects.

3.Feedburner Feed Replacement

By Steve Smith

I love RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and my favourite feed publisher is Feedburner, it makes sense that there’s a great plugin to add it to your blog. It simply forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner and you can login to your feedburner account and manage your feeds and track your subscribers.

2.Ultimate Tag warrior

By Christine Davis

Probably not a surprise that this plug-in is so near the top of my list. Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plug-in, tags are bits of meta information that describe your posts and this plug-in manages to squeeze in loads of great options as to how you want your tags displayed. Upon activation it adds a text input underneath your normal posts text input where you can simply add your comma separated words (tags). I love tag clouds! This plug-in is also great for adding dynamic meta keywords for your posts.

1.Akismet

By Matt Mullenweg

It was easy for me to pick a winner and Akismet, that silent running angel is it. We all hate spam and this spam checker / stopper checks all your comments against a web service and comes installed with WordPress, just activate it and your away. Actually there is one more thing you need to do to activate the plug-in and that is get an API key from
http://wordpress.com/. You can also show off the number of spam comments that has been captured by Akismet by putting a little bit of code into your template.

Conclude

I just wanted to say a big thanks to all the authors of these wonderful plugins for their time and dedication. It is often the tireless support which amazes me and I want to remind that these people put all this effort in for free, a truly honourable statement to the open source community. If you have any Worpdess plugins I must know about please feel free to comment.

Backin up

WordPress finally has an easy way of backing up from one WordPress blog to another or just to backup to your PC, the simple XML backup is a massive improvement and makes backing up almost a one step process. They call it their WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, and it will backup the usual posts, comments etc, including your custom fields. What i like the most about this feature is the simple usability of the function a simple export to backup to your PC and a import to bring the backup back into WordPress.

Saving me

As I write this post my favourite WordPress change is automatically in full flow, this post has just been saved meaning I will not lose my work as often as I used to. A tiny bit of text has just informed me that this post is being saved, and then after the message displays when the post was last saved. Fabulous!

WordPress as a CMS

We are new a step further to everybody else realising that WordPress truly can be used as a CMS, a new feature that means any page or post can be used as the homepage of your blog this empowers users to be able to have endless options as to what appears on their homepage, with little coding knowledge. Before this function I used a plugin for this functionality and I always like it when my plugin reliance depreciates.

Dashboard GUI

The dashboard and the GUI has had some small changes too, mainly a few changes to the color and menu system which seem to emphasize on importance of the different sections a little more potently, you ll also notice little changes like the the old links manager has been replaced with a blogroll section, and also that the blogroll section is now a category, empowering your links with extra features as well as the option to import links from another blog.

Upload Heaven

The new uploads section is bliss, If you upload an image you can re size it display it with all kinds of options including whether you want the image t link to a page or be a thumbnail linking to a larger image all inside the GUI. Once you have a few uploads there is also a much easier to organize uploads section too.

WP Conclude

I have most definitely missed a few nice new features but the ones outlined are the obvious big changes to me, So what you waiting for get it downloaded!