While working on a couple of WordPress projects these days, I’ve been on the look out for some new WordPress plugins. During my searches I’ve come across some really cool and useful plugins that you might want to check out too.
Manual Related Links
Tired of the old and sometimes irrelevant automated “Related posts”. This new WordPress plugin allows you to hand pick the links to be displayed at the end of your posts. Also works with off site links. Some might think that it’s a waste of time, other like me will see the value in giving the reader really relevant, hand-picked links.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Aaron D. Campbell.
WP htaccess Control
No need to access the FTP or the cPanel anymore to add rules to your .htaccess file. With WP htaccess Control you get to do that from the comfort of your WP Admin screen.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: António Andrade aka Dardna.
Magazine Columns
This is a cool WordPress plugin for all you “magazine-style” fans out there. Ever wanted you posts to be displayed split into 2, 3 or more columns, just like in a newspaper? By adding a shorttag – <!–column–> into your posts you’ll be able to do so. Easy to use, nice result.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Chris Bavota.
Pretty Links
“Pretty Links” is a nice little plugin that allows you to setup custom URLs on your blog to act as either short URLs or affiliate marketing links. Also features click statistics.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7.1+
Author: Blair Williams.
Template Tag Shortcodes
Justin Tadlock, author of the cool Query Posts plugin gives us yet a new useful tool for our blog. The “Template Tag Shortcodes” does exactly what the name says. It takes WordPress’ template tags that you usually use in your hardcoded templates and transforms them into shortcodes that you can also use in you blog posts and pages, in the admin screen. Really cool, and supports over 40 template tags and growing.
Download hereWP Version: 2.5+
Author: Justin Tadlock.
Post Snippets
This plugin comes in handy when dealing with post series and recurring snippets of code and text in your blog posts. Setup new snippets of HTML code via the plugin admin page, then call them in you posts through a small button that’s added to you post edit TinyMCE editor.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Johan Steen.
Important
As all of these plugins are recently released, I would advise some testing before going live. If you have access to a local server of test version of your blog, try using these plugins there first.