20+ Brand New and Incredibly Useful WordPress Plugins

With more than 7000+ plugins, WordPress is the most extendable Content Management System available; in fact, “WordPress is infinitely extensible” as Matt Mullenweg says. In this post, we’ll examine twenty-one really useful plugins to take your blog to the next level.

1. Drag To Share

“Drag to share is the newest trend in social sharing. Just drag an image and drop it into any social website to share the whole page in real time. Most notably, this effect is being used by Mashable. The plugin was developed with the source files created by Dan Wellman. Read more here ”

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2. Paginator

“Paginator is a pagination technique based on the idea of scrolling.”

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3. TypeKit Plugin for WordPress

“This is a convenient way for WordPress users to use the Typekit font service in WordPress web sites. This will enable users to quickly change the fonts on their sites. Further this plugin provides the ability to designate where TypeKit will be used in their site.”

Want to learn more about TypeKit? Watch our screencast.

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4. Custom Coming Soon Page

The “Custom Coming Soon Pages” WordPress plugin allows you to display a “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction” page to normal visitors or regular members of your WordPress site, while the site administrators continue to see the fully functional website.

This will enable you to perform upgrades, fix nasty bugs or preview jazzy enhancements to your design live on your WordPress based website or blog without letting your users and normal visitors see crappy error messages or changes to the design until you really want them to.”

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5. Custom Class Selector

“The Custom Class Selector plugin allows users to style their post content using custom classes made available by the active theme. Theme developers can make custom style classes available within the visual editor by adding a simple function to the functions.php file included with their theme.”

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6. PHP-Widgetify

“Like a normal text widget, this allows you to easily post text and HTML, but now you can execute PHP too! This makes merging with other themes easier.”

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7. Pretty Comments

“Add some formatting capabilities to the comments textareas.”

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8. Custom Login Page

“With the Custom Login Page, you can change the background image of your login page, the background image/colo of your login form div, the main logo image of your login page, and add custom CSS – all through a simple interface. Remember to view the Help tab at the top of the settings page for the plugin.”

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9. eCSStender for WordPress

“This plugin uses the eCSStender javascript Library. This library is a parser that takes your CSS after the browser.

The library re-interprets the css using the plugins and adds new abilities to the browsers. You can for example add CSS3 Selectors support to IE6.

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10. Freebie Images: Free Stock Images Plugin

“Spice up your blog with high quality free stock photos & images created by professional photographers and illustrators: Easy to use search interface with advanced filtering and Drag & Drop functionality.”

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11. SecurePress Website Security Analyzer

“SecurePress is a “Live” patent pending security system for WordPress.
With the introduction of SecurePress, WordPress owners now have a clear choice in website protection. No more piece-meal security patches and plugins. The SecurePress widget installs enough free features to get you started towards securing your site. The ability to see and record your attacks is an excellent starting point. The free reports and statistics available within the dashboard help you to better understand the level and magnitude of these attacks. The free price tag is another excellent reason to download! When you’re ready, and after familiarizing yourself with the dashboard, you may want to upgrade to the full version to enable the vast blocking capabilities of SecurePress Pro and turn this application into a monster security shield.”

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12. Prev-Next Keyboard Navigation

“Prev-Next Keyboard Navigation adds JavaScript to allow moving through postings on index and archive pages using the J/K keys to skip to the next or previous post.”

Features

1. Scrolls the current post to the top
2. View next post with “J”, previous post with “K”
3. After the last post on a page, continues to the next page

Photo by John Khan

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13. oEmbed Provider

“The oEmbed provider plugin makes WordPress an oEmbed provider, compliant with the XML and JSON specification at http://www.oembed.com.

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.”

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14. My WordPress Secure

“This plugin is very simple: it removes the WP-Version from the head of the document – thus, avoiding bad-intentioned people from knowing what version of WordPress you’re currently running. “

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15. Private Messages For WordPress

“This plugin allows users of your blog to send private messages (PM) to each other. The number of PMs can be controlled via the plugin’s option page.”

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16. Simple WordPress Framework for Plugins Development

“Simple WordPress Framework is a Plugin to help you create new Plugins. Even though this is the first version (Beta), it is fully functional. It was designed using the standards and requirements specified in the WordPress Plugin API Manual and follows the correct programming structure, functions and procedures that are required to build a plugin in WordPress. In every PHP file, you will find notes and urls referring to the WordPress API articles that are relevant.”

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17. No IE6

“You can install this plugin to inform your users that they are running an old browser.

This is using the jReject jQuery plugin. The WordPress plugin simply uses hooks to insert the jQuery plugin into your theme.”

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18. S3Vault

“S3Vault is a WordPress Plugin to protect your Amazon S3 files by generating expiration links. You can post your S3 files for download, or play videos inline without worrying about others sharing your S3 file links.”

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19. Envato Marketplace Items

“The Envato Marketplace Items plugin retrieves items from an Envato Marketplace and API set of your choice, then caches and shows the results as a gallery of 80px square thumbnails.”

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20. WordPress Admin Bar Improved

“This Plugin replicates all of the menu links in your normal admin area at the top of your main site for logged in users (i.e. you). You can go right to the “Write Post” or manage options pages in one click from anywhere on your blog. No more having to go to your dashboard first. You can even have it replace your admin area menus if you want.”

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21. Excerpt Tools

“If you require a specific excerpt length for each post, this is the right plugin for you. It adds an excerpt box to pages and shows a customizable jQuery character counter with the ability to limit the amount of characters.”

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