Extending Word Press with Plug-Ins

Word Press is a very popular platform for hosting your blog. While Word Press offers a wide range of publishing features out of the box, there are numerous free plug-ins available to extend the platform. Here are several you may want to consider if you are want to get the most out of your blog:

All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO pack automatically manages your search engine optimisation by managing your titles and generating META tags. Perfect for when you have a lot of blogs and not enough time to spend optimising. Options to override the tags and titles are also available for when you do have time to optimise and tweak.

Add to Any
The Add to Any add-on provides links to over 100 services at the end of each post. This includes options such as submitting to Digg or emailing a link to your post via Gmail. This plugin goes one step further. It optimises the list of available services for each user based on their browsing history.

Google Analytics for Wordpress
This plug-in adds Google Analytics tracking to every page in your Word Press site. It can also segment and tag all outgoing links. Since it works with Adsense you can get a clear understanding of how effective your advertising is.

cForms – Contact Form
cForms is a robust form generating plug-in. It will allow you to generate numerous forms for your site including the all important contact form. The wizard makes it simple for even the least technically savvy user to generate complex forms.

Popularity Contest
This add-on keeps track of the traffic your site receives including views, trackbacks and comments. It then uses an advanced algorithm to rank the popularity of each post. This information is valuable for understanding the kind of content your users are interested in. This plug-in can also generate a list of the most popular posts that can be displayed on your site to driver readership.