We did notice that there were a few plugins that were used by most everyone, but there are a few that even we here have not heard of yet.

Chris Guthrie

Chris is an upcoming blogger and runs a host of forums, mostly centered around gaming. Here are the plugins he uses on his blog -

• Feed Footer
• Homepage Excerpts
• Sociable
• All In One SEO Pack
• Related Posts

MoneyBites

Max from MoneyBites writes little bites on how to make money online. He actively works with one of the most popular blog advertising plugins out there right now, OIO publisher, and recently started his own little startup - BlogGears.com. Here are his most used plugins -

• OBSocialBookmarker
• All In One SEO Pack
• cforms II
• Comment Luv {links to our review}
• Google XML Sitemaps
• OIO Publisher
• Subscribe to Comments
• Top Commentators Widget
• WP-Polls

Me!

Thought I’d add myself to the bunch. My blog EverybodyGoTo uses these plugins to help it purr -

• Ad Rotator
• Feed Footer
• Related Posts
• WordPress Affiliate Pro
• WP Auctions {link to our review}
• Photo Dropper

and a few more that are repeated quite often here in this post.

John Chow

A very popular blogger in his niché John Chow uses a total of 17 plugins on his blog. That’s a lot of plugins! He listed his top 5 to me -

• All In One SEO Pack
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Adsense Deluxe
• Feed Smith
• Related Posts

Daniel Scocco

Daniel authors Daily Blog Tips and a few other blogs that are part of his "Daily" brand. He quit his job in Italy to move back to Brazil and go full time onto the web! Here are the plugins he uses on his blog -

• Feed Smith
• WP-Contact Form
• Related Posts
• SGR Clean Archives
• Custom Query String
• Meta Description Tag
• Akismet
• Subscribe to Comments

Jim Kukral

Jim is an internet marketer and has a plethora or web ventures under his belt. He also regularly speaks at blogging convetions and is very well known in the blogosphere.

Here are his must have plugins -

• Feedburner Smith
• Subscribe to Comments
• Disqus

Collis Ta’eed

Collis runs Eden which in turn runs FreelanceSwitch, PSD TUTS, NET TUTS, VECTOR TUTS, Flash Den and many other sites. So if you ever wanted to know what plugins run on one of the most popular Photoshop tutorial sites out there PSDTTUTS , here they are -

Regular Plugins

• Exec-PHP
• Feed Smith
• Full Text Feed
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Gravatar {not sure which one?}
• RSS Feed Signature
• WP-Cache

Unusual Plugins - as described by Collis

• flickrRSS - We use this to create a community flickr group where people contribute images and they appear in the sidebar
• Global Translator - We use this to generate versions of the site in other languages to get extra search traffic
• Feed Wrangler - We use this to generate two versions of the RSS - one short form, one full feed
• WP-Directory - We use a modified version of WP-Directory to build our resource directory of links {I can’t link to this plugin download page because Google flags the site as harmful?! }

This list will be periodically updated with new bloggers, so Subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified when it gets updated.

If you would like to see yourself featured here, simply leave a comment with your most used plugins and we’ll include you in the list.

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A quick post to mention two new Wordpress plugins released by Mass Automation Tools.

The first one is WP Blaster. This is a Wordpress plugin which allow you to write a single blog post and then submit that post to your entire network of blogs at once. Coupled with the Synonymizer plugin, this could prove to be an efficient and time-saving tool.

The second one is Virtual Silo. You probably are familiar with Sitemaps and Silos and things are moving fast: “Sitemaps are Out and Virtual Silos are In”. “Sitemaps are Out and Virtual Silos are In”.As you know Virtual Silos have become an essential SEO component as they can have a direct impact on the page rank and authority of your blogs.

A ‘Silo’ is a way to organize your website or blog’s internal linking structure to direct and control the flow of PageRank and authority throughout the site.

It organizes your pages so they follow a natural LSI-type progression from the broad topic home page, to a niche topic category page, and finally to the specific topic post page.

The importance and authority of each page is increased by the related page linking to it.

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The RSS footer plugin is very simple in nature, which just adds to its overall charm. The author, Joost de Valk, has released many WordPress plugins.

After you upload and activate the plugin an options menu will be available under your "Settings" or "Options" {pre wp 2.5} tab.

Simply enter the content you wish to show in your RSS feed, specify whether you want to have it show after or before your content and to include a link back to your post or not. Click update and you’re done.

The changes should propagate the next time you publish a post, you can also force it show up in your RSS feed right away by re syncing from your Feedburner dashboard.

A lot of bloggers in the past have used plugins like this to hold competitions on their blogs, where they show exclusive content in their RSS feed only. This is a great way to increase your RSS readership.

Are you using this plugin? Leave us your experiences with it in the comments!

Plugin Details

Download: RSS footer

Author: Joost de Valk

Screenshot:

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So in comes Seesmic to help bloggers get their blogs more interactive, and commentators as well, with their plugin that lets any self hosted WordPress blog allow readers to leave a video comment .

If you would like to see it in action just have a look at any post in Techcrunch , like this one . They were one of the first to use the plugin on their blog.

Installation is pretty simple, the usual upload and activate {as if there was any other way to do it?}. If you want people to post a video reply without creating a Seesmic account visit the

• "Settings " > "Seesmic Comments " configuration page
• and check the "Allow anonymous video comments " item

The other cool thing is that you can actually post a video as well, right from your "Write " > "Post " area, as an author !

You can moderate your video comments just like any other comment that may be held for moderation. So far the only issues with most themes seem to be -

• The default tag id < textarea id="comment" > must be included. It should already be included in most standard themes.
• <?php wp_head(); ?> must be included in your header template in between the HEAD tags. Otherwise the JavaScript includes will not be defined correctly and you will not be able to record or play videos.

Other than that I think you should be good.

Plugin Details

Author: Seesmic

Download: Seesmic Video Plugin

Screencast: View the video here

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The Count Per Day plugin shows you the amount of time your posts have been read. It breaks it down by posts and shows you how many reads you have had in a month, day and the previous week. Which is all good information to know right in your dashboard, rather than logging in to your stats program.

I tested it on one of my test blogs and here are a few screengrabs of the dashboard -

Naturally if you have more reads than you will have more numbers there. The plugin gives you its own options page where you have a few settings to play with.

I don’t really know what the "Online time:" is for, if you have any clue do let me know in the comments. You can choose to count your own visits too, though I would not suggest that. The "Auto-counter" looks handy as no template change is needed. Plus you can add a whole range of bots to ignore in the counts of your blog posts.

You can choose to display the counts in your post pages with the code snippet provided on the Installation Page of the plugin download. If you want more control on how they are shown then the steps to do so are on the Other Notes page.

A very handy plugin especially since it doesn’t rely on a third party to give you results, so you can be sure that the stats you see are pretty much genuine.

Plugin Details

Download: Count Per Day

Author: Tom Braider

Screenshot:

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Using images in your posts is one of the most effective ways to make your blog more interactive . As I surf various blogs I see a lot of bloggers using images to portray what they are saying in their posts. Images can also help you expand your topic and think up new things to say.

I thought up at least half a dozen posts on the top of my head just with seeing what this plugin can do.

As far as features are concerned, I don’t think there is anything on the market today that remotely matches this plugin. I’m just going to quote the features from the plugin page as the author has said it better than I can.

• Sortable Albums
• You can add a watermark image or text
• JavaScript Effects: Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
• Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
• Full integrated flash slideshow
• Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
• Translated in more than 15 languages
• You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
• Tag support for images
• Sort images feature

Installation is the same drill, except for one little thing. The slideshow functionality in the plugin requires a certain Flash widget which you can read more about on the "Installation " page of the plugin. But other than that it’s smooth sailing after activation.

If you are a photoblogger, or just like to be visual in your posts and want to show your images in a better light, I highly recommend this plugin to you. Mind you, some of the features may take getting used to as the breadth of them itself can be confusing at first.

But I’m sure you will find it will help you in your blogging as you get used to it. So far the plugin has been downloaded over 180,000 times, which is pretty amazing.

Plugin Details

Download: NextGen Gallery

Author: Alex Rabe

Screenshots:

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The WP Auctions plugin enables you to set up auctions on your WordPress powered blog. Some of the features include -

• Host your own auctions. End them, delete them, edit them as you please.
• Mange the bids in your admin panel.
• Your auctions get their own RSS feed.
• Various currency options.
• Get notified by email when bids are placed.
• Delete fake bids

The plugin comes in two versions, free and Gold. The Gold is currently sold for $24.99 and has many more options than the free version. For instance -

• Upload multiple images for each auction
• Sell items only on ‘Buy It Now’ basis
• Sell items with a ‘Buy It Now’ option
• 5 free color styles
• List view
• Free upgrades for new features, as they are added.

One of the best parts about the plugin is that the stand alone website for the plugin has a "Live Auctions " page. This page parses the RSS feeds of the auctions being held by anyone who registers their feed with us. The auctions are then listed automatically for visitors to view. Upon clicking the auction link the visitor is taken to the respective blog to place their bid. So you get free traffic plus the chance to monetize it.

We do have one conflicting issue with a few themes that may run the mootools JavaScript functions, as it seems to share some similar properties. This is only found on a tiny percentage of themes. Simply disabling the mootools JS will help the plugin work effortlessly.

The plugin requires WordPress 2.2 and up.

Plugin Details

Download: WP Auctions Free , WP Auctions Gold {$24.99}

Author: Weborithm

Screeshot: {Popup Preview}

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The plugin basically attempts to parse the feed of the comment author, should they have a blog, by looking in the standard location for the feed and pulling the latest entry made by the author. If no default feed is found it will attempt to parse the users page for a feed link and parse that instead.

Anyone leaving a comment has the option to use the service, or not, by simply clicking on a checkbox below the comment textarea.

These kinds of plugins are great for building a dedicated user base , who will come back to leave comments for the link back, as it flows traffic to them from other commenters and readers. Naturally, the more comments you get the more popular your blog starts to become.

So go ahead and leave a comment with us, and get a link back to your last blog post.

Things you should know -

• If your blog is set to hold comments for moderation, if a link is contained, then you should change it to hold them for moderation if only 2 or more links are present.
• It doesn’t affect load times on your blog.
• It works with most other comment plugins - of course exceptions will always be there.

The plugin comes with it’s own "Settings" or "Options" page where you can edit stuff like the text to show and even add some CSS styling. This plugin has been growing in popularity and seems to attract more comments wherever it has been installed.

Plugin Details

Download: CommentLuv

Author: Andy Bailey

Screenshot:

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The author, Oliver Schaal, has just released it and it already looks like it’s popular, judging by the number of downloads since the 16ht of May.

You can see it in action on our blog itself, in the footer area.

The options are limited, so far -

• You can set the title of the widget
• The number of images you would like it to show
• Whether you want the latest images to show up or randomly

I only wish he took the time to explain what he means by this in his installation notes -

use the function getattached images(maximages, [latest|random]) in your template.

and how exactly do we do that? Should it be encased in brackets, as PHP code, just like that? You see what I mean!

When you click on an image from the gallery you are taken to see the image in its own post page. This may vary with each blog as the template files might be different and may not show the same results you see here.

I would like to make some feature suggestions to the plugin developer -

• Having a sideways "scroll" mechanism would be a nice feature addition
• Ability to set height and width of thumbnails
• Showing a mini thumbnail gallery for the sidebar

That’s about all I can think of right now. If you have any suggestions leave a comment, I’m sure the author would like every feedback he gets.

Plugin Details

Download: Gallery Widget

Author: Oliver Schaal

Screenshot:

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I would say the Collapsible Elements plugin has more of a novelty approach but some of you may disagree and actually find it quite useful. I can think of at least a couple of instances on my own blog where I could have used it. As with most plugins you need to keep in mind to use with moderation. Remember, people don’t like to "think" too much on the web. So, don’t over do it.

After installing the plugin in the normal manner, you can go about inserting your collapsible elements on your posts. For that -

• Once you begin writing your post and wish to mark an area of your post, or an image, as a collapsible element simply go to "Code" or "HTML" view and look for a specially designated "XCOLLAPSE" button.
• Replace the sentence “REPLACE WITH LINK ELEMENT HERE…” with your own words. Then replace the sentence “REPLACE WITH COLLAPSIBLE ELEMENT HERE…” with anything you want to have "collapsed" i.e hidden till the link is clicked.

View the author’s link below for an example of how this works.

Clicking the generated link will show the collapsed content and clicking it again will hide it. The only thing messy about this is the use of tables in the code, but if you do it once the second time around should not seem too daunting for you. If you like you can change the containers in the source code of the plugin {for advanced users only}.

Also, you can customize the look of every element differently with the use of inline CSS. Again, this could get messy if you don’t know what you are doing. But if you are comfortable with it, go ahead.

Overall I think the plugin has its uses. I would not use it extensively though as the extra markup it generates can have negative effects on load time. Especially if you use the feature heavily. But it’s great for those times when you wish you had a feature like this available.

Plugin Details

Download: Collapsible Elements

Author: DeUCeD

Screenshots:

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