WordPress provides a lot of extensions which often confuse fresh WP owners. Furthermore, a variety of plugins exist that serve identical main objective and have exactly the same capabilities. Here are some basic plugins to get you up and running, without hassle and complicated set up.

WordPress itself is pretty diverse, but it is the plugins that make WordPress so much preferred as a blogging platform. Tons of plugins are available at wordpress.org plugin repository. All of them a free to download and use.

Here are 5 plugins that are meant to provide security as well as to encourage visitor participation on your blog. You can use these to help make you blog viral by allowing your visitors to post meaningful comments as well as to share your content with their friends.

I would start with two plugins that help you eliminate spammers and protect your valuable posts from website failures.

Akismet

Akismet is a must have plugin. This comes along hooked up along with your WordPress automatically. All you need to undertake is obtain an API Key to start it. The application helps prevent your website from comment junk. Akismet probes your comments up against the Akismet online service to check out whether they appear to be spammy or not and enables you to analyze the spam it captures within your blog’s “Comments” management panel.

WP-DBManager

This plugin helps you protect your valuable content and subscriber database from unexpected malfunctions and failures.

What this particular plugin truly does is that it handles your WordPress database. It makes it possible for you to enhance database, fix database, backup database, recover database, get rid of backup database, drop/empty tables as well as perform specific queries. Can handle auto management of copying and optimizing your database as well.

PixoPoint Menu Plugin

This plugin displays the most valuable to your readers content right away, arranging it quickly and easily without hassle in the horizontal navigation bar at the top of your blog theme.

It provides an SEO friendly, accessible normal or dropdown menu for your WordPress website. You can visit the PixoPoint Menu Plugin website for more details regarding the plugin, or the PixoPoint discussion board for help about adding the menu to your theme.

Features:

  • Manage articles viewable in the menu
  • User friendly interface for adjusting the style of the menu bar
  • Animation dropdown menus

Here is how to change the look of your menu.

You may change the design of the menu through the use of a simple manager screen to produce the ideal looking menu for your personal website. This product works out of your web site, but at the back end it posts your style selections to the PixoPoint server for handling. The desired CSS information is after that delivered back to your WordPress deployment to be applied inside your menu. Once you save your layout, this CSS is stored directly into your WordPress repository. The plugin simply has to gain access to the PixoPoint server should you decide to alter the look later on.

The PixoPoint Menu Plugin may be executed into every theme structure, although the simplest way to put it up is to apply a theme exported from the PixoPoint Template Generator. Themes from the template generator incorporate perfectly together with the plugin and will not need any theme modifying. Just power up your theme, then start the plugin and the fresh menu should show up immediately. Go to the PixoPoint Template Generator to receive your individual pre-supported theme.

Gurken Subscribe to Comments

This is a plugin that allows your visitors to subscribe to comments going through a Double-Opt-In. Gurken StC is a development of the version from Mark Jaquith (txfx. net). It supports closed-loop authentication meaning that you initially need to validate your email address, before you start receiving notifications about subsequent comments.

Features:

  • All of the original Subscribe to Comments
  • Registration with Double-Opt-In
  • Multi-Language (English and German included)
  • You can define your own css file for the manager interface
  • Fixed many bugs that are still in the original plugin

SexyBookmarks

This plugin adds an eye-catching social bookmarking menu for your articles, pages, home page, or any other user page of your blog. The name of this plugin may sound a bit “challenging” for you, yet, SexyBookmarks has demonstrated to be an incredibly valuable as well as effective application in having your visitors to really post your content to varied social bookmarking online places.

The above plugins are recommended for any new or existing blog. Of course, you would want to add more plugins based on your blog’s needs and purpose. However, if you are just starting this should be a good initial list to consider.