One of the main strengths of WordPress is its huge developer community, something that is unmatched by most of its competitors. With this great third party support comes thousands of plugins and themes. So without further ado, I’ll name out a couple WordPress plugins that every user of the blogging platform should use.

All in one SEO

WordPress has the reputation of being the best SEO optimized blogging/CMS platform out of the box. But even with that it still could use a little work. That’s where “All in one SEO” comes in. Basically it allows you to control the SEO aspect of every post, page or tag on your blog as well as override the default WordPress features.

Customizing the plugin is easy and the readme file helps with any problems you might have. There is a reason why it has well over 2 million downloads. So if you haven’t checked it out, I suggest you do so. If you are looking for something a little more advanced you can check out the Headspace2 plugin which is also popular (at the time of this writing it had over 200,000 downloads).

Broken Link Checker

I didn’t know how much I needed this plugin until I got it and since there I have installed it on all my blogs. As the name suggests, this plugin checks your blog at intervals (user defined) for links that might be broken. I cannot stress how important this plugin is for those who run political, tech or news blogs as it is extremely vital at notifying you if your links are active or leading to 404 error pages.

WP-DB-Backup

If it were not for hackers and hard drive failures, this plugin would be obsolete. But thanks to these and many other problems, database failures are prevalent. At least there are options to help keep your database safe.

WP-DB-Backup is one of those plugins which offers users the ability to backup their WordPress databases instantly or have monthly, weekly, daily or hourly backups. The backups can either be sent to a specified email address or can be downloaded instantly. While this plugin is mainly built for those who carry large amounts of traffic on their websites, I would recommend it for everyone including personal bloggers.

Beware that this only backs up the database and not information stored on the server such as download files, pictures and such. That will require another program.

Redirection

When I first started using WordPress I decided to go with the default permalink structure as I was not versed in customizing .htaccess files. That changed a few months later and by that time my blog had boasted well over 150 posts. I needed to do some major on site SEO but was stuck with the fact that if I changed the permalink structure to something more search engine (SE) friendly, visitors who came to my site from backlines would be left with a 404 page error.

Well after a little Google expedition I came across the Redirection plugin which did exactly what it sounds like, redirects old links to the new location. I was extremely happy and I didn’t lose SERPS because of my updated permalink structure.

Even if you are not in the same position I suggest you get this plugin because it is well worth it and it requires very little configuration.

NextGEN Gallery

It’s not everyday that a plugin crosses the 1 million download mark. But Alex Rabe has struck gold with his plugin. For those who are familiar with the WordPress, it is clear that while 2.7 did fix a lot of issues, the built in media library fails to say the least. It’s OK for basic media but managing gallery’s, albums and such is impossible.

That’s where NextGEN Gallery comes in by providing the best photo gallery plugin for the platform. While it still lacks in certain areas, it is light years ahead of the built-in functions of WordPress. Plus with the numerous plugins that expand its features it is quite a beast. If you would like an excellent example of the plugin in action, check out TechCrunch.com.

cformsII

It used to be the top downloaded plugin on wordpress.org until someone brought to the attention of the WordPress community that its license agreement did not match the requirements of wordpress.org. Since then it has been removed, but even with that it still continues to be an excellent plugin.

Basically cformsII allows you to create contact forms, contest forms and anything else your heart desires. Although it is not the easiest plugin to use, it’s powerful and extremely customizable as the CSS file can be edited to meet any requirement.

The only drawback to this plugin is since it’s no longer available on wordpress.org, those wishing to use it have to install and update it manually. That said I still would recommend using it but if you cannot be bothered with the hassle for the extra features, you can always check out Contact Form 7 which carries many of the features but still lacks in the customizability department.

I’m sure there are many others out there but these are the ones that I have found out to be the most useful and would recommend for every WordPress blog. But if you think I left one out, hit me up in the comments below.

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You can download the latest version of Wordpress from the official website or apply the upgrade manually in the Wordpress interface. You can take a look at in depth file changes by following this link or at the 68 tickets that have been closed here.

The update includes six tickets with a high rating and more than 50 rated as normal. While the update does not list many security fixes it is still recommended to update as soon as possible. The update will not alter the database and should not break anything including plugins or themes.

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Another thing that is really annoying in Wordpress 2.7 is the fact that you can either delete all comments on the page, selected comments or all spam comments at once. At 20 spam comments per page and thousands in total this can take a long time to flip through and delete.

The Wordpress hack is actually quite easy to perform even for webmasters who have no knowledge whatsoever regarding html and php. The file that is responsible for the amount of comments that are displayed is called edit-comments.php. It can be found in the wp-admin folder. Make sure you backup that file before you apply the changes so that you can revert back if something should go wrong.

Locate the following line in the file, it should be around line 182 in the file:

$comments_per_page = apply_filters('comments_per_page', 20, $comment_status);

The only thing that you need to do is to change the figure 20 to another figure, e.g. 100 so that it looks like this:

$comments_per_page = apply_filters('comments_per_page', 100, $comment_status);

Just save the file again and check the display of the comments in the admin interface to make sure everything is working correctly.

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Alternatively only the files wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php can be copied from the new release over the old files to update the blog. The security vulnerability is unlikely to affect a large number of Wordpress blogs though as it only only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x.

There might also be some confusion about the versioning of Wordpress. The last official Wordpress version was Wordpress 2.6.3. Wordpress 2.6.4 was skipped because of a fake malicious release that made its round. The official new release is therefor Wordpress 2.6.5.

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The reason why the Flash uploader in Wordpress was not working anymore was that Adobe disabled the feature to open a file dialog for security reasons in Flash 10 which broke the SWFUpload script Wordpress was using.

A ticket was opened and is currently discussed over at Wordpress and a fix is assigned to Milestone 2.7 of Wordpress which aims for a release in 1-2 weeks. The best solution so far for Wordpress webmasters who use the Flash based image uploader regularly is to keep using Flash 9 for now and update to Flash 10 once the fix comes out.

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Included in the seventy fixes are several performance improvements for blogs with many categories and in the admin interface of Wordpress especially on the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. I’m currently in the process of updating all my blogs and have not run into any problems yet. I usually do overwrite all files without disabling all plugins prior to this and I seldom encounter problems when updating Wordpress this way.

Most of the time it’s plugin related though. One note for all webmasters who are running Wordpress for some time now. Wordpress have added a new variable in the wp-config file called Secret Key. That variable introduces a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. I suggest to update the Wordpress blogs as soon as possible, at least by uploading the files that are security related.

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