Wordpress is fun and blogging can, at some point, turn from a weekends hobby to a full time business online. Sounds familiar? But if you do consider making your blog a business, or at least taking it to a professional level, you will need to enhance your platform with some plugins. galleries to showcase your work, easy to manage contact form, and finally, ads management — plugins make the life so much easier, adverts will be removed automatically once expired and images will automatically be resized to optimize your blog for faster loading — that means YOU save a great deal of time and can us this free time to make more content or work offline. here is a list of 100 Best plugins that you absolutely must have in order to smoothly run a creative, professionally looking Wordpress blog.

1. YouTube Videobox Widget

With Youtube Video Box Plugin you can add unlimited number of sidebar widgets to display Youtube videos in XHTML valid format.

This plugin also allows you to easily customize width and height of the videos directly in your widget panel. Optional function that enhances this plugin gives you the ability to chose colors in YouTube and enable or disable them in your widget panel. This plugin is ideal for those of you who wish to display several videos in easy-to-manage widgets, yet maintain a XHTML valid, SEO friendly website code.

Compatible with any java / ajax powered plugin, doesn’t affect the loading time and thanks to its’ lite structure, will not crash your site.

2. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

3. WP Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

4. OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID Consumer.

5. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. I featured this plugin some time ago already, but this is totally related to comments.

6. Comment Rating

Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently.

7. Clicky

While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

8. Twitter Avatars In Comments

Self explaining comment title, plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.

9. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.

10. Old Post Promoter

Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed.  Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.

11. TinyMCEComments

This plugin turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up, without the need of another separate installation. Functions that only available to writers like adding images were removed and will not show up in the toolbar.

12. CommentLuv

This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

13. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

14. Theme Options

This plugin manages theme customization. Everything is managed in the WordPress Backend. Code snippets can be activated, copied, created, deactivated, deleted, edited, and uploaded. For comments you can highlight different comments based who wrote them and where they are, also nice feature to automatically add “about author” section.

15. WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. Starting in version 1.1, WP-Paginate can also be used to paginate post comments!

16. @ Reply

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

17. IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

18. Easy Comment Uploads

This plugin allow your visitors to attach images or other file to their comments as easily as possible.

19. Quote Comments

This plugin adds a tiny link that says “Quote” on each comment on your posts. Click it, and the contents of the comment is copied to the comment area, wrapped in blockquote tags. It’s even compatible with MCEComments plugin.

20. SEO Super Comments

For each user comment plugin will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but we will create it dynamically using a WordPress plugin.

What we instantly get in this way is big jump in site’s index visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.

21. TTFTitles

The TTFTitles plugin is another dynamic text replacement plugin that lets you replace your headers with images using any TrueType font you choose. It’s mostly a rework of the Image Headlines plugin. It has been tested with WP 1.5.2 up through 2.7.

22. Tango Smileys Extended

Smileys in comments is also supported, and may be inserted using the standard emotion shorthand or through the CTI interface introduced in TSE 2.0.1b.

23. Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering

This plugin numbers your comments sequentially and hierarchically, with full support for the new comment features available in WordPress 2.7 and later — including threading, paging, and your choice of ascending or descending date order.

24. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam

An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

25. Simple Pull Quote

The Simple Pull Quote plugin lets you insert pull quotes into your blog posts to emphasize certain sentences or phrases using custom fields. Pull quotes can be styled by editing the included CSS file. It works with WP 2.7 or 2.8.

26. Live Comment Preview

Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site. Simply activate the plugin -That’s it! This plugin uses only client-side Javascript to format a preview, it does not make any Ajax requests to the server. This provides a smooth live preview as you type.

27. AJAXed Wordpress

AWP’s basic features include inline paginated posts, inline comments, threaded comments, the ability to submit comments with AJAX, pagination of your homepage, live comment preview and much more, but it does not, however, force you to use any feature, and it also allows all aspects of the plugin to be easily customized through a single Administration panel. It also has special features that will ensure compatibility with many other plugins.

28. Ajax Comment Posting

There are many comment-related plugins in Wordpress plugin directory. However, if you’d like to find just a simple comment-posting Ajax plugin, you won’t find any. That’s why I developed a simple and small (5kB) yet functional Ajax Comment Posting (ACP) plugin. Not only will it post your comment without refreshing the page, but it will also make sure that you’ve filled all the form fields correctly.

29. WP Super Edit

WP Super Edit adds a host of WYSIWYG options to the standard WP visual editor. It adds two full rows of additional features to your visual editor toolbar, including options for applying specific styles and for adding and formatting tables. It’s known to work with version 2.8 and 2.8.1.

30. Riffly Webcam Video Comments

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

31. Ozh’ Absolute Comments

Absolute Comments is a comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first.

32. NoFollow Free

This Wordpress plugin remove the “nofollow” attribute from your wordpress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FRE” to encourage your users to submit comments. The last release includes new options to replace the nofollow only when the author posted X comments before and put back the nofollow when some blacklisted words are matched. The replacement of the nofollow is also based on the users type (registered and visitor users). Every option can be customized by the options page “NOFF”.

33. Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

34. Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, with Double-Opt-In Feature. Based on version 2 of “Subscribe to Comments” from Mark Jaquith

35. WP Comment Remix

WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to Wordpress. From Reply and Quote links for commenters, to a full upgrade to the edit comments pages in the admin panel, WPCR will save you time and effort when running your blog.

36. Moderation Notify Author

WordPress doesn’t automatically notify the author of a post about waiting comments. Instead all comment moderation requests go to the admins. This plugin will notify the author of the post as well as the admin. This will allow the author to moderate the comments too.

37. WP Slimbox 2

A WordPress implementation of the stellar Slimbox2 script by Christophe Beyls (an enhanced clone of the Lightbox script) which utilizes the jQuery library to create an impressive image overlay with slide-out effects.

38.Wordpress jQuery Lightbox Plugin

Used to overlay images on the current page, a little bit different popular Lightbox plugin.

If you want to see live demo of this plugin, just scroll down the page to see sample image and click on it.

39. Carousel Gallery (jQuery)

This plugin tweaks the gallery tag in Wordpress 2.6 thusly by replacing it with a javascript carousel. The plugin uses jQuery and a jQuery plugin called jCarousel.

40. Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

41. jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries

Makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox to display the fullsize images.

42. jQuery Comment Preview

Live comment preview without page reboot. Works on jQuery.

43. Wordpress Plugin jQuery Pagebar

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

44. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

45. OpenID Comment Form

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account.

46. sCategory Permalink

Permalink option of Wordpress %category% has one great limitation – when this option is selected, Wordpress uses category with lowest ID for permalink generation. This plugin is intented to bypass Wordpress permalinks limitation and allows you to select category for permalink generation.

47. Google AJAX Translation

The Google AJAX Translation WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple, and light way to add translation to your blog.

48. Infinite scroll

Infinite scroll has been called autopagerize, unpaginate, endless pages. But essentially it is pre-fetching content from a subsequent page and adding it directly to the user’s current page. This means they never need to click “Next Page”, which dramatically increases stickiness.

49. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings.

50. Image Drop Shadow

Image Drop Shadow wordpress plugin adds stylish drop shadow to images posted on your blog using jQuery. Just install it and all your posted images will automatically have a drop shadow.

51. J Post Slider

Show your post in fancy jQuery box, rotating images, with show-up text box with post description. This Plugin will present your HOT posts, in jQuery animation show.

52. Live Blogroll

Live Blogroll will make your blogroll livelier. It will show a number of ‘recent posts’ for each link in your Blogroll using Ajax.

53. WP Wall

WP Wall is a “Wall” widget that appears in your blog’s side bar. Readers can add a quick comment about the blog as a whole, and the comment will appear in the sidebar immediately, without reloading the page.

54. PixoPoint Menu Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible regular or dropdown menu to your WordPress blog.

55. Adding Form Validation to WordPress Comments using jQuery

This tutorial will show you how to use jQuery to do some instant checking on an example comment form.

56. Snazzy Archives

Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts. Your archive page will never be boring again!

57. Shockingly Big IE6 Warning

The Shockingly Big IE6 Warning is a plugin that shows a warning message alerting the user why it is bad to use IE6, the security risk and the bad compatibility of Web Standards.

You can choose from 3 types of warning:

• TOP, a discreet top bar
• FULL, a fullscreen warning
• CRASH, the mean option

58. Wordpress Plugin – My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

59. Using jQuery to liven up your WordPress login

Nifty Wordpress login page using Thickbox jQuery plugin.

60. Plugin Central

Plugin Central is a comprehensive WordPress plugin solution. Main features are:

• Install plugins directly by typing the name of plugin or the URL to zip file!
• Multiple-plugin install feature allows you to move your plugins from one blog to another
• Displays status of plugins in need of update on the Dashboard
• Option to update all plugins at once!

61. Tweet Blender

Similar in functionality to Twitter’s own widget but has support for multiple authors, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.

62. SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF)

SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) is an Ajax powered modal contact form. It utilizes the jQuery JavaScript library and the SimpleModal jQuery plugin.

63. Accordion Image Menu

This is a different menu that uses your post images as a background. You can insert the menu wherever you want: content, php files or widget if your theme allows it.

64. Quick Search

Quick Search add AJAX Search to your site sorting results by Posts, Page and Comments. You can easly customize the popup menu style by modifying the file quick-search.css.

65. Ozh’ Better Plugin Page

Better Plugin Page brings a few valueable enhancements to the Plugin Management page: tiny icons, less clutter, quick action links. Handy for those who have 70+ plugins on their blog.

66. Advanced Spoiler

Show or hide contents(text, image etc.) with animated effects wrapped by spoiler markup tag([spoiler][/spoiler]).

67.Highlight Search Terms

Highlights search terms using jQuery when referer is a Google, Yahoo or Lycos search engine or within WordPress generated search results. This plugin is a light weight, low resource demanding.

68. µAudio Player

µAudio is a slim (450 Bytes!), fast plugin to create a flash mp3 player when mp3 links are clicked. In order to reduce clutter and file transfer, the links are unmodified until they are clicked, at which point a div with the player is faded in after the link. A second click on the link fades the player back out.

69. Wordpress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI

Beautiful tutorial, explaining how to modify and add Apple type sidebar using the Accordion plugin in jQuery UI.

70. News-Ticker

A JQuery based News Ticker Displays a sliding or fading list of post titles, rss reeds or comments and excerpts with links to post.

71. WP No External Links

Mask all external links to internal! In your own posts, comments pages, authors page… It does not change anything or write to base – just processes output.

72. Spell, Style and Grammar check with After the Deadline

Smart plugin that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.

73. Improve page load time – WP Minify

Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

74. Check for Broken Links

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. It also works for images.

75. Manage who sees the ads

Advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions.

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