The WordPress blogging platform is one of the most popular software choices for adding this powerful content tool. Its wide adoption is aided greatly by the fact that its open source architecture means that outside developers can create add-ons to extend the basic functionality.
WordPress, developed as blog software, is now, through various plugins, capable of supporting full web sites, membership site and premium content management and multi-author content sites with ease.
Below is a list of 10 plugins that can make any WordPress blog more useful for both the author and the readers.
1) Wishlist Member – This paid plugin allows you to turn a WordPress blog into a paid membership or course site. Wishlist integrates with a number of shopping carts, payment processors and email marketing tools and offers many ways to protect and deliver blog and page content based on membership levels.
2) Disqus – Disqus is a comment plugin that adds a great deal of functionality to the WordPress comment function, including the ability to see the history of blog comments from anyone leaving comments, nested comments, avatars and additional social media contact details, such as twitter mentions of your blog post.
3) Add to Any – This plugin makes it very easy for anyone to subscribe to a blog via their chosen RSS reader, such as Google Reader or Bloglines, or via email.
4) podpress – podpress was build to make it easy to add a podcast and audio player to a WordPress blog. The plugin also supports video podcasting features. Download stats, support for many file formats and the ability to manage and view feeds to services such as iTunes makes this a great plugin for anyone posting audio or video content to their blog.
5) Custom Class Selector – This plugin is a little on the techie side, but allows you to create unlimited numbers of CSS classes and then insert them on the fly to customize content styles in your blog posts. This can be very helpful if you want to create icons or styling for certain types of content, but don’t want to open up and change the theme stylesheet.
6) Author Exposed – Multi author blogs are becoming very commonplace. Sharing the load of blogging with other experts or employees is a great way to keep lots of fresh content coming. Author Exposed makes it very easy to create and show profiles for the author of an individual blog post.
7) Sociable – Sociable adds a list of sharing links to dozens of social media and bookmarking sites, like delicious, twitter and Facebook, making it very easy for readers to share your blog content on these sites.
8) Apture – The Apture plugin adds a full library of video, audio, images, text, links and references that can be added to any content. If you write about a concept, you can add a link to a YouTube video, Rueters audio or Wikipedia article that further illustrates your point. If you talk about a book you can automatically add an Amazon link and pop-up for the book. This tool allows you to draw from a library of publically available content to add deeper levels of related content.
9) Related Content – This plugin automatically searches through all of your past blog posts by tag and adds four or five posts related to your current post to the end of the post. This is a great way to get more exposure for past posts and have people dive in deeper to your content once they find something they like.
10) Facebook Fan Box or Twitter Widget – these aren’t really plugins, but tools that allow you to easily publish your Facebook Fan Page content or Twitter activity to your blog sidebar.
And don’t forget those mobile readers – use the MoFuse plugin to automatically turn your blog content into a mobile friendly version for those reading on their phones.
Image credit: magerleagues
