Spice Up Your WordPress Blog With New Plugins

WordPress functionality is greatly enhanced when plugins are added but picking the best is not always an easy task. Each plugin needs to be evaluated by you prior to adding it to your blog for one simple reason – each new installed plugin adds to load time of your blog. If you are not using it – de-activate it.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at source code of your own blog and between “head” tags you will find that most of the plugins you use that provide an output on your page – there a file or two been loaded on each view. Add too many and it will considerably increase load times. But in this post I want to discuss some brand new plugins for you to consider as functionality they provide might be well worth the load time!

I have been following posts from WordPress Plugin Competition blog (opens in new window) and what you see reviewed in this post are plugins that have been released as part of the competition.

1. Who Sees Ads? – From everything presented this one I think is an absolute winner. Author calls it the Ultimate Ad Management Plugin and on first reading I fully agree with him. Since I don’t use AdSense or YPN ads on my blog at this time it is hard for me to judge it from personal experience perspective, so my opinion is based on reading documentation and playing around with Demo.

What is this plugin? Complete Ad Management system for your blog, which provides easy integration into templates or via placeholder in specific location of your post. But it goes way beyond that by giving you the ability to specify who sees the ads. You can set advanced rules to display ads to very specific visitors such as new readers, people who come from search engines and hide them for regular readers. An extra bonus your regular visitors will surely appreciate! From the looks of it – this plugin will be an awesome replacement for AdSense-Deluxe since it has a lot more advanced functionality combined with GUI administrative options and configuration Wizard.

2. OneClick WordPress plugin. My second best pick and something I have already put to good use. An ultimate addition to anyone using WordPress and likes to play around with different new themes and plugins.

What is this plugin? OneClick allows installation and removal or new themes and plugin literally with one simple click – no more ftp-ing your files to your host and other complexity associated with new install. Once plugin installed and configured as outlined by author it gives you an extra option in dashboard – “One Click Install”. Simply use admin interface to browse for your new plugin or theme *.zip file on your computer and upload it to your host. All files are extracted and you can proceed with normal activation and configuration. Deleting un-needed is just as simple using build-in interface. Superb addition I highly recommend.

3. WordPress Menubar Plugin is more for visual enhancement but it makes this list for one reason – it makes it simple for people to add custom Navigation bar to their blog.

What is this plugin? WordPress Menubar allow you to build a custom Menubar for your blog and since it works independently from themes – it will stay with your blog even if theme is changed. But perhaps the best part of it is that it gives people ability to add that nice touch to any theme without any knowledge of CSS or HTML or people not willing to mess around with their theme’s internal code.

These are just 3 that I have personally liked and think that add some great functionality to your blog but I encourage that you visit the official blog and see others.

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