10 excellent & promising WordPress Plugins, some brand new

A little while back, we posted a list of 8 and a half excellent WordPress Plugins you probably didn’t know about. It was a reaction to our community voting for more Wordpress related stuff, such as themes and plugins and tutorials and goodies. Well, the post was very popular and ever since, we have been collecting even more interesting and, above all, new and rather unknown WordPress plugins for your blog.

So here comes a list of 10 excellent and promising plugins for the popular blogging platform WordPress. Some you will not know yet, because they are brand new. They all run on WordPress 2.5 and above and are updated frequently by their authors.

Because they are so new, some still have a few minor bugs that are currently still being fixed, but they do work nicely and you can be sure that the plugin authors are working hard on improving their work. So right here, we’d like to thank all of you who are doing such a great job at this. These are all free plugins, and with this post, we also want to show you that there are some great talents out there. If you download and use the plugins they give us for free, then please give some love back by commenting on their sites, donating to those who accept donations, or leaving a comment on this post saying a quick thank you.

So here goes: 10 excellent & promising WordPress Plugins for you! There’s a link to the author/plugin page as well as a link to the download page for each free plugin. We didn’t include direct download links because this way, you can always get the newest version of the plugin from the source. So let’s get started.

1. MailPress

The MailPress Plugin page is here, or download from here directly.
MailPress is a great newsletter plugin that enables your WordPress blog to send out emails to your subscribers. It comes with fully customizable newsletter templates for posts and categories. The plugin also includes a simple, one-button sign-up form that you can place in your widgetized sidebar. From the admin area in WordPress, you can send newsletters out to your subscribers using the newsletter template – either for every new post you publish, or in an interval (every day, week, and month). There is a PHP file that you can use to create newsletter templates that match your blog design. This plugin requires a bit of coding, especially for the PHP template, but you can find a lot of information at the plugin page and even if you’re not sure how to handle PHP, you can still use this nice WordPress plugin.

2. Post Tabs

You can find the Post Tabs WordPress Plugin page here, and the download link at WordPress.

This one is a wonderful and cool tab maker and as you can see, it creates tabs for the content you like. Easy. Stylable. Customizable. Great! After installed and activated on your WordPress blog, you can use tags when you write a post to place your content in tabs. As easy as [ tab:Tab Name ], and [ tab:END ] (without the whitespaces). The first one always shows first, unless you enable the option to store the open tab in a cookie, so that when a blog reader returns, he will find the tab active that he had open the last time.

There is also an option “permalink for tabs”. If you activate it (we left it disabled), the page will reload when you click on a tab, revealing the permalink of the tab in your browser’s address bar.

The plugin options in the WordPress backend / admin offer a bit of flexibility. What you can do is change the tab border color and background color for active/hover classes.

What a few of you might miss is an option to style the content of the tab itself (not just the title). For instance, we added a light grey border to the content of this tab unit (it’s the border running around this very text). How?

The class for the tabs is postTabs_divs, and you can use it to style the tabs with CSS. Simply add this line to your theme’s style.css, and you get what we got right here:

.postTabs_divs { border:1px solid #dcdcdc; margin-top:-12px; }

The border explains itself, and the negative top margin was added so that the content div would match the position of the tab bar.

3. First Timer

The First Timer Plugin page contains the download link as well.
The First Timer WordPress Plugin checks to see if a visitor is new to your blog. If so, it displays a custom message at a position of your choice, e.g. above the WordPress loop (that is, above all posts). What you display to your first-time visitors is up to you – usually, you’ll go for an encouragement to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed.

Caution though, as this plugin doesn’t work with either WP Cache or WP Super Cache.

4. Similar Posts

The Similar Posts plugin page has a link to the download of this plugin. You also need to install the Post-Plugin Library for it to run properly.
On the search for a better “related posts” plugin after the last one we featured (in this previous post about WordPress plugins), we found this one. It is in action right now below every post on Beeex.net. What it does is simply pull related posts and display them in the manner you specify, either with an excerpt, with a URL, or quite a few more options. You can even specify how much it should weigh the post title vs. the post content when it determines which posts are related.

5. Snazzy Archives

Go to the Snazzy Archives plugin page here, it includes the download link.
Here’s a nice WordPress plugin to spice (snazz) up your blog archives. Using a page template that you can customize if you wish, you can create an archive that looks just like a calendar – the months are ordered horizontically, with the days as blocks under them. You can choose to include post images (preferrably by using WordPress custom fields), an excerpt of the post, and so on.

You can also customize the CSS file to match the archive page to your blog’s appearance.

Snazzy Archives comes with optional date collapse functions, so that by clicking on a month, for instance, it collapses all day slots for that month and shows only the date.

6. Code Autoescape

The Code Autoescape Plugin is here, where you can find the download link as well.
This fine little plugin auto-escapes code that you insert in HTML < code> tags. If you need to display code in your blog posts, this one is for you. And yes, there are a lot of code plugins out there (the author lists a few of them himself for you to compare), but this is one we find most functional, most easy, and least buggy.
Every time you want to display a code snippet (which WordPress would normally convert), thus you’re using the < code> tag, this plugin will autoescape (= tell WordPress not to convert) the contents of that tag. Let’s test it right here – the plugin is running on this blog as well:

<html>
   <title>This actually works with HTML, XHTML,
and also PHP</title>
      <body>
         <a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">
            Visit <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>, it's hot ;)
         </a>
      </body>
</html>

It works for any kind of text. If it didn’t, you would be seeing the result of the PHP call (URL and blog name), and not the call itself. Great little plugin

7. WP Comment Remix

WP Comment Remix can be found here, or go directly to the download page on Wordpress.org.
WP Comment Remix is a cool plugin for blogs that receive a large amount of comments. We took a shot at it and installed it anyhow
What it does is add two anchor links to the comments on the front end of your WordPress blog: “Reply” and “Quote”. The first button simply takes the reader down to the comment input form, and pastes a link to the comment they want to reply to in the comment box that says “@ Commentauthor name”. The “Quote” button copies the text of the comment you want to quote into the comment box and wraps it in blockquotes.

On the admin side of WordPress, this plugin adds the same buttons to the comments section and lets you reply to a comment in an AJAX popup window, all from your backend. That speeds up the process of replying to comments immensely.

You can test this comment right here on our blog (hint hint)!

Update: Unfortunately, we had to deactivate this plugin again, as it doesn’t eat WordPress 2.6 and causes a little error. It is still a great plugin and works fine with WP 2.5x, so if you haven’t updated to the newest version yet, you can still use it. We’ll keep you updated as soon as it has been updated for WP 2.6

8. Role Scoper

Go to the Role Scoper plugin here, the download link is on the page.
Role Scoper is a plugin that enables and enhances the already built-in capability of WordPress to deal with “roles”. If you’re building a CMS with WordPress, for a client maybe, who wishes to give access to the backend to his employees, this plugin is for you.
With Role Scoper, you are able to modify the roles WordPress carries until you drop. Roles are something like “Subscriber”, “Editor”, “Author”, “Administrator” etc. This WordPress plugin makes it easy to broaden or narrow the rights every role has, once you have worked yourself through the vast amount of options the plugin delivers. It’s not something for the casual personal blog with one author, but for high-end CMS solutions based on WordPress, this plugin is the best we’ve seen around in a while.

9. Brian’s Threaded Comments Optimized for SEO

Go to the plugin page, which contains a description and the download link.
This is a modified version of Brian’s Threaded Comments (original plugin here). It nests comments in threads. A link to “reply” is added to each comment, which places your reply below the comment you are replying to, and not below everyone else’s. It is debateable if you find this useful – it can be, for certain types of blogs. Sometimes, though, you will want a linear thread where the comments are ordered solely by the time they were posted, which is the original WordPress functionality. Take a look if you like, though. Justin from SEO Zombie modified the WordPress plugin and optimized it for Search Engine Optimization by dissecting it and placing the JavaScript and CSS the plugin uses in separate files. This keeps your WordPress template clean and speeds up the page load time – better SEO for your website.

10. WP Watermark

WP Watermark can be found here, the download link is on this page.
This plugin automatically watermarks all your pictures on your WordPress blog with either your logo (it can be a transparent PNG file), or with a text you choose. You can specify the position, size and font of the custom text, or of the logo image. This is a good way to protect your images against theft and copyright infrigement (well.. it’s arguable).
So if you regularly post your own images, photographs, or artwork on your blog, consider this. The plugin can even watermark your thumbnails, so its advantage is very clear. There is no need to run your image folder through a Photoshop action to give every image a watermark anymore. Use WP Watermark instead.
Upon installation, you will need to add a single line to a WordPress core file. Other than that little hurdle, it works like a charm. There are detailed instructions on the plugin page, simply follow the link above! Also, if you upgrade WordPress, you will need to repeat this step in case the old file has been replaced by the new version.

10 Useful and Promising WordPress Plugins

…for you! We hope you like them and do find them useful.

Some of these plugins are from over at the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog, run by Weblog Tools Collection. We’d like to thank Mark, Jeff, Ronald and Keith for their great blog which we encourage you to visit, and for having this great idea for a plugin competition. If you get a chance, hop over and vote for your favorite plugin. Also, thank you to all the authors of these WordPress Plugins. Keep up the great work!

That’s it, folks! We hope you enjoy our list of 10 Excellent & Promising WordPress Plugins, some Brand-New, and come back soon for more (Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed)!

~ Your Beeex Happy Team