One of my favorite things to do is to try out new plugins and I have to say, the new plugin interface in WP 2.7 is AWESOME. Absolutely Awesome. I can search and install without leaving my admin area. Something that other suites have been able to do for a while and its something that helps bring Wordpress to the forefront of Blogging platforms. That being said, if you’ve ever checked out my Plugins Used page, you’ll know, I like me some plugins (I have about 55 active plugins at the moment).

Here’s a list of my favorites…

• All in One SEO Pack – Anyone who isn’t using this plugin is shooting themselves in the foot. This plugin helps make it easy to add keywords, titles and other much needed objects to your pages and posts. Plus, its kinda cool… now you can say, “Yea, I’m doing the SEO thing. Are you?”
• Comment Email Responder – I think I’ve talked about this one before. Its a godsend! Now, you can notify your commenter via email when you reply to their comment. This does two things, one, it lets them know you’ve commented and two, it pulls them back to the site. Often times to comment again. Its been a big help in retaining readers here.
• CommentLuv – It started as a simple plugin to pull your commenter’s last post and has evolved in to a movement. Even cooler is the fact that they run contests that your commenters are automagically entered in. Its a good way to add links to your site as well and to help out your friends by Deep linking to their posts.
• Comment Timeout – Yes, I run akismet, but with the Comment Timeout plugin, I have to clear a lot less spam. You can specify a time period for your comments to close (after the last comment was made). On here, its set for a month. A month after the last comment or the post, the comments close on that post. Helps keep a lot of spam out. A lot.
• Google Sitemaps – The last one I want to talk about today is the google sitemap plugin. It simply generates a sitemap of all your pages (or just the ones you specify) and puts it in a location. You can then alert google, yahoo, ask, etc. that you have a sitemap and it will help the bots crawl. Its good for increasing your ranking and it does something that WP should do anyways.

Thats just a short list of some of the plugins I like and use, I’ll cover more next week, don’t you worry. Is there a plugin you use that you think I’d benefit from??

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