In this post I’ll be keeping an up-to-date list of all my favorite wordpress blog plugins. I have to confess I’m a bit of a plugins junky but I really feel that the plugins are one of the main reasons wordpress is such a good content management system to use for your websites.

Every time I want to do something with my wordpress blogs that can’t already be done with the base install, pretty much always I can find a free plugin to do it within minutes. If my sites were static html/php sites I would always have to pay to have a scrip made or if it existed buy an existing scrip, which of cause could end up being very expensive and very often not viable.

In time I’ll be grouping my favorite wordpress blog plugins under different categories but to start with I’m just going to list my top 10 for the moment. They are in order of preference started with my favourite. All these plugins are free.

My Favourite WordPress blog plugins

(click links to go to full descriptions & download link)

1. All in one SEO pack Search engine optimize your blog.
2. Akismet Take control of your comment Spam.
3. Google XML Sitemaps Auto create Google XML Sitemaps.
4. MaxBlogPress Ping optimizer Take control of your blogs pinging.
5. WP-DBManager The ultimate WP database management plugin.
6. Global Translator Auto translate your blog into 41 languages.
7. Do Follow Remove the no-follow attribute from comments.
8. Cforms 2 The most diverse forms creation plugin for WordPress.
9. Exec-PHP Use PHP code in your posts/pages.
10. Advanced Excerpt Take full control of WP text Excerpts.

All in one SEO pack

This is an absolute must! The plugin allows you to take total control of your title tags (the title that appears in search results) and your meta description tags and keyword tags for each and every page of your blog.

Akismet

You should already have this installed as it comes with the WordPress installation files, but if you haven’t go and install it right now! It traps spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks and stops them from appearing on your blog. It’s not perfect, but at least 90% of what it traps on my blogs is always spam and you can manually approve the comments that aren’t spam if you want anyway.

Google XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps help search engines like Google to find all your pages and index them. This plugin automatically creates and updates a XML Sitemap every time you post a new piece of content and then notifies Google, MSN and Yahoo (if you have the Yahoo API) of the new content. Once you set it up you should never have to touch it again so you should definitely install it.

MaxBlogPress Ping optimizer

The WordPress built in Blog Pinging system works but is extremely basic and does not really give you any options as to how you would like it to function nor does it provide you with anyway of knowning whether your pings are actually successful! This plugin expands the wordpress functionality in regards to pinging substantially giving you control. For me it’s a must, however you do have to subscribe to the developers  email list… Read more at my MaxBlogPress Ping optimizer post.

WP-DBManager

If you’re not keeping backups of your blogs database you are asking for a disaster to happen! I have tried several plugins for this but this one is by far the best and the only one I have seen that can fully automate the backup profess so you never have to worry about it again. With it you can Manages your WordPress database in the following ways:

You can optimize your database, repair it, back it up, restore it, delete backups, drop/empty tables and run selected queries as well as run automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of your database with backups sent to your email address totally on autopilot!

Global Translator

This is a great plugin if you would like to offer your blogs content in multiple languages and at the same time create more pages that the search engines can index and subsequently get more traffic to your blog as a result. The plugin uses the free web translation engines out there to translate your blogs content into, at the time of writing 41 different languages. Read more at my Global Translator WordPress Blog Plugin post.

Do Follow

This plugin removes the No Follow tribute on outgoing links in the name field of comments on your blog. This will increase the value of these outgoing links to the commuter’s website and as a result you will probably get more webmasters commenting on your posts. This could also increase spam so you will definitely want to moderate comments, although in truth I think you should always moderate comments anyway. There are more complex plugins for this out there but I like the functionality and simplicity of this one as it does not restrict you in anyway like others do.

Cforms II

This is probably the most complex forms creation plugin for wordpress out there but, it is by far the most flexible I’ve come across and allows you to create all different types of forms for your blog. In the words of the developer “cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.”

Exec-PHP

This plugin allows you to use PHP code in your wordpress posts and pages. If you don’t know what PHP is this plugin probably won’t be of use to you just yet, never the less it is very useful for running all kinds of scrips adding even more functionality to your blog. There are several other plugins that do this, but I haven’t tried them. I’ve heard a number of people say this one is their favorite for varies technical reasons and the truth is it works very well for me so I have had no reason to give the others a try.

Advanced Excerpt

This plugin gives you control over how many words or characters are used in excerpts on your blog (like the category pages excerpts for each post). Additionally it allows you to let HTML content also be part of the excerpts meaning that things like images and links that were in your posts can be also visible in your excerpts if you wish. You have total control as you can individually turn on and off different HTML codes depending on what you want to show.

More WordPress blog plugins to be added soon

One of the many great things about using the wordpress blogging platform is its ability to ping all the available Blog Ping Services around the web which in turn help you get your posts indexed in Google quickly.

In a rush? Go directly to the full list

BUT, there have been loads and loads of these services created other the years and many of them have now disappeared or changed their URLS, which has resulted in there being great big lists of services people are using that mostly contain URLS that do not exist! When I started checking out the blog ping services I was pinging I was shocked to learn that most of them never worked!

I have compiled my full list of working services below and have also included my original full list with those that work for me and those that do not. Additionally I have categorized those that did not work by the error messages I got from them for those that want to try them out for themselves encase any of them have now started working again (it is also possible that there was a problem my end with some of these, although they were tested on various blogs for a couple of weeks).

About My Blog Ping Service Lists

I have been building up this blog ping services URL collection for some time now, some came from the materials supplied by the free NinetyDayChallenge.net website (highly recommended for beginners trying to make money from blogging) put to together by Daniel Turner and Marc Lindsay of plrpro.com, others came from the mega list in Maria Reyes’s post (the site was hacked and the post does not exist anymore) and some are from one of my tweeter friends Penny Butler.

I was able to verify which services were working using the WordPress Maxblogpress Ping Optimizer plug-in, with is one of my favorite plugins on my Top WordPress Plugins List.

I’m continually looking for new URLs and will try and keep this post up-to-date as much as possible, if you find any sites that are not on these lists or are but from your experience need to be moved to the do work or do not work lists, please let me know in a comment so I can update the list if needed, thanks.

My Complete Successful Blog Ping Service List:

Note that from time to time I do find that some of these do not work, however most of the time they do and you always get a number that work whatever happens.

My Complete list (those that work for me and those that do not):

The Ones That Gave Me Errors:

- Error message: “parse error. not well formed”

- Error message: “transport error – could not open socket: 0 Success”

- Error message: “transport error – HTTP status code was not 200”

- Error message: “transport error – could not open socket: 110 Connection timed out”

- Error message: “El ping no es válido porque tu bitácora no figura en el directorio de bitacoras.com, pero puedes darte de alta manualmente en http://bitacoras.com. Gracias por interesarte.”

Note: This error message means that in order to ping this service you need to have sign up at the URL mentioned in the message, however unless your site content was in Spanish I don’t suppose it would be a good idea

Stopped The Rest Of The List Form Pinging!

The following sites when added to my ping list in wordpress for whatever reason always prevented the rest of the sites in the list after them from pinging. It might have been something to do with my set up, but I did try them with 2 different ping plugins as well as different blogs, so I don’t know. Additionally each one on their own did not work for me anyway.

I hope these Blog Ping Service lists are useful to you, once again if you find any more ping services that could be added to the list or you find some of the services within the not working lists do work for you, please let me know in a comment below so i can update this post. Thank you.

If blogging is all new to you, you may or may not have heard of the many blog ping service websites yet. Either way this post should explain to you all you need to know about them as well as why and how you should use them.

What is pinging all about?

Basically when your blog pings pinging services it’s notifying them of new content on your blog. After receiving the ping these sites normally list your site somewhere on theirs and as a lot of these sites are pretty big and well link to from other sites, the Google search engine generally visits them often and finds the links back your site, follows them and indexes your new pages.

Why should I use them?

I wasn’t blogging around the time these sites first came out, so I can’t comment, but It is said by many that the links you could get from these services helped your Google rankings quite a bit in the beginning, however they very quickly got over used by spammers and alike and so these days the links back to your site carry little value, i.e. they are very weak votes for your site in the eyes of Google.

Never the less, it’s still worth pinging Blog Ping Services as they do still help to get you indexed in Google fast. I’ve often started a new blog and found it index in Google within days before I’ve even started to promote it in any other way! Plus the fact it’s totally automated by your wordpress blog, so there’s nothing for you to do once you’ve set up your list of services.

How do I set up automatic pinging in my WordPress blog?

If you are using WordPress for your blogging you will find in your admin under settings/writing that at the bottom of the page you have a box which you can use to input the URLs of different blog ping services. Once you have done this your blog will automatically ping these services every time you post content. You can find my Working List Of Blog Ping Service URLs In This Post.

Taking full control of my WordPress blogs pinging

There are various plugins for WordPress you can use to enhance your blogs pinging functionalities and ultimately give you more control. The two that I have used are MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer and Smart Update Pinger, the latter has not been updated since 2006 and is very basic so I use maxblogpress ping optimizer which has a lot of great features, in fact it is one of my favorite plugins on my Top WordPress Blog Plugins List.