I bet you’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of lists of the “best”, “useful”, “must have” etc. WordPress plugins. But have you ever come across strange, odd, even funny plugins? I have, and thus decided to share these findings with you. Some of the plugins described below might be actually fruitful and some are completely useless, but all of them are rather curious.
W-P
This nice plugin has one goal - to check your posts and change all “worpdress”, “WordPres”, “worldpress” etc. to a proper “WordPress”. If you have a problem of misspelling this is a great helper. You can also add your own commonly misspelled words and use the plugin to change the abbreviations to the full words.
CA-Weekday WordPress Plugin
Nice little thing that will change the boring day names like Monday and Tuesday to funny names like Rest Day, Back to Work Day, Still Back to Work Day and so on.
The TimeZoneCalculator WordPress Plugin
This plugin might actually be useful for a travelling blogger as it calculates and displays dates and time across different time zones.
Give a Beer
This is the widget that lets your visitors to give you a virtual beer. Funny little thing for beer lovers.
Fun Facts
I find this plugin to very interesting and entertaining. It adds a sidebar widget that displays interesting, weird and curious random fun facts.
My Worst Posts
Everyone shows their best posts that are most commented, this widget on the contrary shows the less commented posts. Who knows, maybe someone would like to comment? 
I’ve come across a number of strange translating plugins. They might be useful if you’d like to make your reader decrypt your posts or if you want to target the post to someone who knows the language or just have some fun with your content.
Pig Latin
Translates all your messages into Pig Latin.
Fun Filters hack
Translates posts and comments into Elmer Fudd, Pig Latin or any other silly language.
Text Filter Suite WordPress Plugin
If you are a fan of pirates, pirate stories and everything connected to them you’ll love this plugin. It converts your posts into “pirate talk”.
Well, do you have some strange or funny WordPress plugins to share?
Posts Tagged ‘WordPress Plugins’
Curious WordPress Plugins
June 30th, 2009Two WordPress plugins you should pay attention to
May 12th, 2009
I’ve been searching the web for something interesting and useful for you and came across these two incredible plugins.
TDO Mini Forms
There are few ways to run the blog when you are out of time or ideas. The best way is to ask your readers to write gust posts for you. And here is where TDO Mini Forms plugin will be of the great help for you. This marvellous plugin will create nicely customizable forms that allow your users to submit posts. The submitted posts are directed to “draft” where you can edit, delete or publish them. You also have an opportunity to ban curtain users and IP’s from using the form. I think this nice plugin makes guest posting more convenient for both sides.
The Organize Series plugin
Well, I think you’ve already guessed what this plugin is for. The series of posts are extremely popular among readers, thus if you plan to write the series on some particular theme this plugin will be very useful. It organizes your articles and blog posts you’ve written as a part of a series making it easy for your readers to find some specific post and see what series you’ve written.
What tasks would you like to have a plugin for?
We already discussed some ways to use WordPress as Content Management System and how easy it is to maintain your site and update your content if your website is powered by WordPress. So, if you plan to launch a website built with WordPress here are the best plugins to help you.
* Cforms II. Every website should have a contact form of some kind. Here is the best contact form plugin ever. Being extremely configurable it gives you an opportunity to create a contact form of any kind, besides there is an awesome built in spam protection.
* Search Everything. This small plugin allows your visitors to search your entire site easily and smoothly.
* Subscribe2 - very nice newsletter plugin that allows you to create newsletters and manage your subscribers with your WordPress Dashboard and gives you an opportunity to email subscribers when a blog entry is posted.
* Event Calendar 3. This is the best plugin among hundreds of event plugins you can find. It creates events as blog posts thus giving you an opportunity to integrate them into your website easily.
* XSPF_Player. This is a nice mp3 player that gives you a great opportunity to manage playlists, artists links and covers. Pretty cool plugin for music addicts.
* pageMash. Very good plugin that helps you put your pages in order easily without editing every page individually.
What else would you add to your website powered by WordPress?
Twitter tools for WordPress
April 28th, 2009
Twitter seems to become a must have for every blogger nowadays. Not only it is a popular social network but also a very good promotion tool. So, here are some useful twitter tools for WordPress for you.
WordTwit
This WordPress Plugin utilizes Twitter’s API to automatically push your newly published post to your Twitter account as a tweet. This plugin also converts the links into tiny URLs. It’s a good additional way to let your readers know you’ve got a new post published.
The Twitter Updater
WordPress plugin that sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account automatically when you publish or edit a post. You can specify the text of the update and turn it off/on.
WP Twitip ID
This little plugin adds a field to your comment form for your commentators to put their twitter username
Twitter Tools
The plugin integrates your blog with your Twitter account. This nice plugin allows you to pull tweets into your blog and create new tweets on your blog posts.
Twitt-Twoo
This simple plugin gives you an opportunity to update your Twittr status right from your WordPress blog sidebar. The quick and easy status updates even do not require a page reload.
Twitter Feed
Another plugin that posts your weblog updates to your Twitter account.
TweetBacks
Very popular plugin that displays what people are saying about your blog posts on Twitter.
TickTweet
This small plugin allows you to show tweets that contain some particular keyword.
Twitturls
Displays the most popular tweets.
Commentwitter
Allows to send your comments as tweets.
What are the Twitter tools you use at your WordPress blogs?
The best image gallery WordPress Plugins
April 21st, 2009
Running a blog for a while you’ll eventually feel the need of an image gallery, even if your blog is not a personal page but a business oriented one for instance. Creating an image gallery at your weblog is extremely easy, the gallery feature is integrated into WordPress since version 2.5. But if you want your gallery to be something more unique and beautiful you better use plugins, they can make your blog look more attractive and the galleries they create look more pleasant as well. I picked the best of the image gallery WordPress Plugins for you to choose from:
PhotoXhibit
This plugin allows you to upload pictures and create albums as well as use photos from your Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug accounts. Among the main features are the styles editor that allows you to customize each gallery’s appearance, independent gallery creator and the ability to create and upload albums with one thumbnail or two thumbnails of different sizes.
NextGen Gallery Plugin
This is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin with a Flash slideshow option. Among the great number of awesome features are sortable albums, zip file uploads, AJAX thumbnail generator, Lightbox Effects, watermark function and much more.
Lazyest Gallery Plugin
Very good plugin, features include comments on images and folders, automatic thumbnail and slide creation, galleries and sub-galleries, adding captions and much more.
Lightbox Gallery Plugin
This famous plugin gives your galleries a lightbox view and displays the associated metadata with the pictures.
Cleaner WordPress Gallery Plugin
This awesome plugin gives you complete control over your image galleries. It creates valid XHTML code and uses the images that you need to be resized. CSS styling gives you control over the display of your pictures.
FlippingBook Gallery Plugin
Another awesome plugin for working with images in weblogs. All you need to do is download photos, the plugin will create a photo gallery out of them. The Flash gallery created resembles a real book, you’ll have to turn its pages to look through the photos.
These were 6 awesome WordPress plugins for creating image galleries I consider to be the best. Do you know more?
Interact with your blog readers
April 9th, 2009
When you launch a blog you without doubt want to be popular, one of the ways to make your blog more interesting for your readers is to make it more interactive. There are many ways to do this. You can actually build a social network with plugin for WPMU called buddypress. But Wordpress MU requires dedicated hosting and it’s not that affordable for all the bloggers.
You can easily put some social media aspects to your blog with plugins.
Encourage your visitors to comment providing a backlink to their website, make your blog comments DoFollow. The DoFollow plugin removes a “nofollow” attribute from the link to a commenter’s website which WordPress automatically puts there.
A good way to interact with your readers is a WP-Polls plugin. This little plugin adds AJAX polls to your sidebar or blog posts. WP-Polls gives your users an opportunity to be active contributors, besides they are more likely to leave a comment after they vote.
There is another great plugin to encourage your visitors to comment and leave their feedback - Show Top Commentators. This plugin displays names of the most active commentators, the number of comments they made and a text link to their website, thus the commentators are more likely to come back to your blog and leave more feedback.
Are there any other tools you use to interact with your blog visitors?
Plugins to back up your WordPress blog.
March 26th, 2009
We put a lot of our time and effort in our blogs, if you’ve been running one for a while you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Your blog becomes your primer interest, your biggest passion and the first thing you think about in the morning. And loosing even one single letter from your work becomes really painful. That’s why the theme of my today’s post should be of the greatest interest for you. Backing up your WordPress powered blog.
Well, there actually are few WordPress plugins to help you do the task.
Wordpress Database Backup
Simple plugin that allows you to schedule automatic daily, weekly or monthly database backups, which can be emailed to you or added to your FTP. There is a drawback of this plugin - it doesn’t give you a simple way to restore your database from the backup.
WP-DB Manager
This plugin gives you a comfortable database management right from your admin panel. Being more complicated than Wordpress Database Backup WP-DB Manager has more features, ‘restore from backup’ feature is among them.
As you see, these two plugins provide back up only for your database. But what about everything else: your precious themes, plugins, images?
Well, there is the WordPress Backup plugin that manages all these valuable elements of your blog and emails the back ups to you.
All mentioned plugins nicely work together and I suggest using them all for more safety.
Are there any other tools you use to back up you blogs?
Increase traffic with WordPress Plugins
March 12th, 2009Everyone who creates a blog does it with the hope to become popular, here are some WordPress plugins that will help you increase the number of visitors.
Usually a person searching Google won’t go further than two first pages of the search results, to be successful and have more visitors you have to be at those first pages. So you need to make your weblog SEO friendly. This plugin dynamically optimizes titles for search engines and generates meta tags. Help people find your blog and improve your page ratings.
Post Ratings
Post Ratings plugin adds an AJAX rating system to your blog posts and pages. In this way you’ll get a feedback from your visitors. Seeing what posts and pages they like more you’ll be able to target your posts and make your visitors happy and your traffic increased.
There is quite a number of plugins that allow your visitors to submit your posts to social sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and others. These social bookmarking sites appear to be great in bringing traffic.
It’s easier to give your visitors what they want when you know what they like. StatPress-plugin gathers the info about your visitors, search keywords, browsers, feeds etc. Shows preferred pages, categories and posts. Seeing keywords that your visitors used to get to you via the search engines is also very fruitful. You can use all this info to understand you visitors and their likes and dislikes as a result giving them what they want and becoming popular.
These were some useful plugins I can suggest for bringing your blog more traffic. What plugins do you use?
Top 5 Must Have Wordpress Plugins
February 12th, 2009SEO Title Tag 1.0 is characteried by the following features:
- defining 404 eror pages title tag
- title tags editing for any URL
- defining custom title tag for your posts page
- search result pages
- setting category pages title tags to category description
- name
- website/phone number
- comment option
Of course there are far more Wordpress Plugins you can install and make use of. We have only showed you several useful programming tools for simplifying your Wordpress blog management.
