WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.We have tried numerous plugins. Some were too good, some crappy, some very useful and some totally annoying. After installing, editing, deleting and reinstalling we are left with the following cool plugins which provide our readers with the wonderful reading exprience.

About the Author Box

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Displays a sleek “about the author” box in the single posts page. This is very useful for team blog having too many writers.

All in One Adsense and YPN

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Inserts Adsense or YPN code in to your blog posts. Ad position can be random or pre-defined.

All in One SEO Pack

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Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

Arkayne Plugin

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First, if you have not already done so, create an Arkayne account. Second, paste the token you were given by Arkayne into the Arkayne Setup admin page. As people visit more of your pages Arkayne will build links.

Best Related Posts

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Shows related posts with thumbnails. Allows you to design your own layout using simple interface.

FaceBook Share (New)

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Adds a button which allows you to share post and also shows the number of times the post or page has been shared through out the Facebook just like tweetmeme button does for twitter.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

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Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

FollowMe

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WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter Follow me badge on your wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

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This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

GZIP Output

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Allow GZIPped output for your WordPress blog. Restores functionality removed in WordPress 2.5.

My Page Order

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My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

New User Email Setup

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A Plugin to setup the registration email sent to new users. REQUIRES PHP 5

Online Leaf

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Changing the standards of websites’ energy consumption is a big task, so we need all the help we can to spread the message.

Popularity Contest

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This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Widgets and Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog.

Post Layout

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Adds HTML or javascript code before, after or in the middle of the content of pages or posts without modify the theme.

Redirection

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Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors

SexyBookmarks

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SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. See configuration panel for more settings.

Smart Video

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Plugin to insert videos from Youku, Tudou, QQ Video and some other online video sites (mainly supporting chinese sites).

TweetMeme Retweet Button

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Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Ultimate Google Analytics

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Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

Weasel’s HTML Bios

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Disables the HTML-tag-stripping of author bios.

WordPress.com Stats

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Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

WordPress Mobile Edition

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Show your mobile visitors a site presentation designed just for them. Rich experience for iPhone, Android, etc. and clean simple formatting for less capable mobile browsers. Cache-friendly with a Carrington-based theme, and progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

WP-Cumulus

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Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

WP Greet Box

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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.

WP Super Cache

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Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.