11 Hawt WordPress Plugins I've Fallen In Love With

As part of building out that whole agency thing, I’ve had to do some digging for clients on interesting WordPress plugins. In doing that I’ve found a bunch of interesting plugins that I had never used before, so here are 11 of the best (my girlfriend asked “why 11″, and I answered “cause it’s better than 10″… yeah, I iz wittay).

1. Featured Content Gallery: If you’re not familiar with it, it’s what sites like b5′s Bizzia use to do the whole content rotator thing. It can be a touch cumbersome if you don’t already have a “Featured” category setup, but not overly so. Just read the setup instructions one.at.a.time.
2. Preview Theme: If you’re ever wanting to edit one theme while having another viewable to the public, this is perfect. Not a huge innovation, as there are other ways to do this, but for idjuts like me it’s just dead simplestest!
3. Quick Subscribe: There are probably more fully featured, better ways of doing this, but for an easy, “in WordPress” way to alert readers to new posts this one’s just dead easy. If you have a better one, let me know in the comments!
4. Shockingly Simple Favicon: Favicons in WP can sometimes be a pain. This removes that pain.
5. Thank Me Later: One of the best tools to increase readers coming back is to email them a thank you for leaving a comment. Problem being that you either have to make it automated (and look like an automated-tool-using-idiot when they get a “personal” email 1 second after commenting) or slog through them one at a time. Enter Thank Me Later, which has a random delay on it, and a bunch of other settings, to make the email (and its timing) more personal and less automated… while still letting you be an automated-tool-using-douchebag ;-)
6. Tweetmeme: One of my favourite plugins of all  time, Tweetmeme lets users RT posts from within your post, and then tracks those RTs. If only this integrated into the next plugin I’d be in heaven…
7. Twitter Blog: I actually went looking for something like this, and this is the best I could find. If there’s something better out there,  let me know. But basically what this does is tweets out when you post (duh), but then tracks replies to those tweets and then integrates them (if you’re lucky/good) into the comment stream for your blog. More comments, more interaction, more juicyness! Again, there’s probably something better out there (ideally that used bit.ly and others’ reverse-APIs to actually track ALL responses… and REALLY ideally integrated into tweetmeme… but yeah, this is hawt)
8. Wordbook: Updates your Facebook wall/news feed/etc when you blog. Tends to result in, well, more traffic.
9. wp-AuthorComment: Lets you style comments by the blog’s author differently. So you could change colours, indentation, background, whatever. Dead simple, but very cool.
10. WP Greet Box: Okay, I’ll straight up say this plugin is a bit overkill in how many services it lists, but anyways… Basically it looks at a user’s referrer, and then displays a custom message, with a pretty graphic, based on where they’re coming from. It’ll also do more advanced things for search engines like show related content. Someone comes from Twitter? Encourage them to subscribe to your Twitter feed. From Digg? To Friend you. From Fox News? To get a clue. Setup’s easy, but having to change the default message that encourages each site’s users to “subscribe  to my feed” is a bit tiresome.
11. Youtube Profile Field: Again, there are probably better plugins for this, but this allows you to integrate with your youtube account, have shortcodes for most recent videos or a video feed (for insertion in a page), etc. It’s a touch clunky around setup, but once it’s working you can just leave it be.

So there you have it. When my girlfriend saw the title of this post she took exception to me saying I fell in love with plugins. I had to reassure her that if she was a WordPress plugin I’d have a list  of 12 plugins. Her response? “You’d only need 1 of them to make you happy”. Rowr.

If you have better suggestions for any of these features, or cool plugins “outside the norm” you think I should try with clients, let me know :) I’ll happily beta test hawt new features. I did the same for the “hawt even in beta” GravityForms!