This post presents a roundup of 9 essential and really useful plugins that help you improve your WordPress theme making just some simple changes to the PHP code. For each plugin I’ve provided a description you can follow to quickly implement it on your pages.
I Like This
I Like This is a nice plugin that allows your visitors to like your posts simply with a click of mouse. The style is fully customizable with the layout of your WordPress theme. After activating the plugin you can use default options that display the like button below the body of your posts or customize your theme adding the button wherever you want, using the following code:
<?php if(function_exists(getILikeThis)) getILikeThis('get'); ?>Feed Subscribers Counter
Feedburner Circulation is a plugin that provides you a valid alternative to Feedburner chicklet to display the number of your RSS feed subscribers in plain text. You can add the counter into header.php, sidebar.php or footer.php using the following code:
<?php feedburner_circulation_text('feed_id');?>and modifying feed_id with the correct ID of your Feedburner feed.
Advertisements within post body
If you use AdSense or other advertising services to monetize the traffic of your site, a good way to increase your revenues is to insert sponsored links into the body of your posts. Quick Adsense allows you to do that easily, simply copy and paste the code of your Ads into the Administration Panel (Setting > Quick AdSense). So, the only thing you have to do is to add a comment in your post in order to display sponsored links where you want. Here is an example of comment:
<!--Ads1-->Pagination
WP-PageNavi enables an useful pagination feature on your posts. Here is an example:
After activating this plugin the only thing you have to do is open index.php (or search.php, archive.php, tag.php) and change the following code:
<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('« Older Entries') ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries »') ?></div>
with the following one:
<?php if(function_exists('wp_pagenavi')) { wp_pagenavi(); } ?>Then you can modify the CSS code provided within the folder of this plugin in order to customize the look of pagination with the style of your pages.
Preserve HTML code formatting
If you have a blog about web design you can need to post the source code of tutorials you publish as plain text. Preserve Code Formatting is a very useful plugin that allows you to preserve code formatting by preventing its modification by WordPress and retaining original whitespace and characters. After installing this plugin you can specify a list of tags that will have their contents preserved (for example I used <code> and <pre>) and other options. Here is the result (preserved whitespace and indented code):
#footer{font-size:12px;}
#footer ul{padding:10px;}
#footer ul li{float:left;}
#footer ul li a{display:block;}Related Posts
WordPress Related Posts is a versatile plugin that displays a list of related posts of a certain article via tags. I tried several similar plugin but this is definitively my favorite. You can customize the maximum number of posts to display, exclude categories, display comments count and excerpt for suggested post directly on your WordPress dashboard from Settings > Related Posts. After activating the plugin, to enable its features on your pages open the single.php file and add the following code after the post content:
<?php wp_related_posts();?>Comment Rating
If you want to emulate the comment rating feature of digg.com on your WordPress site, you can use Comment Rating a very powerful plugin that allows your visitor to like or dislike comments on your posts. After activating the plugin, it will appears on each comment the following rating feature:
Highly-rated comments can be highlighted and poorly rated comments can be hidden (just like those on digg.com).
Twitter Followers
The TwitterFollowers plugin is a customizable badge that displays on the sidebar of your WordPress theme a list with your Twitter followers or with people that you are following on Twitter.
Twounter simply returns the number of followers for a twitter username in plain text. You can fetch the number of followers adding the following function into your template:
<?php echo twounter('username') ?>and changing username with your Twitter username.
Any suggestion? Please leave a comment, thanks!
You should use the “I like this” plugin. With the number of authors you are recruiting it would help to know which authors are connecting the best with your community. Especially when you have authors who copy and paste from their website to yours, for example: “Listening Habits of Highly Effective Web Designer” – That was a horrible post.
Thanks for your suggestion Steven.
I do absolutely love what you are doing with the site Antonio and the direction you are taking it. This could become something great if your Authors delivery high quality posts like you do time and time again.
For Twitter followers you can use Twitter Mosaic! :)
Thanks for the post. This will really help me in developing my blog. Looking forward for more outstanding posts.
Very useful! I am looking for it!
I like the “I Like This” plugin. Will definitely be using this on upcoming projects.
Some nice plugins there, thanks for taking the time to share!
nice collections. I am using most of these plugins.
You posted this one at the perfect time :) Looking good!
Excelent post!, very useful plugins.
What about All in One SEO plug-in?
All these are useful and helpful ! thank u :)
Thanks a lot for a useful article. I am really impressed about your web 2 style designing blog.
I see you did a menu with tags, and they are working like a stand alone blogs. Is this plagin or how can it possible to do. Thanks a lot.
Dmitry
I like the wordpress theme.Hope to share:)
Excelent post :), plz share SEO for wordpress plz
Hello, Antonio. Those plug-ins are very useful, thanks. But I’ve some problems with “Feedburner Circulation” it doesn’t work on WP 2.86. Can you help? I want to show Feedburners stats in plain text.
Looking forward
Nice plugins. I will use some of them for sure :)