Author: Rahul Bansal

6 WordPress Plugins for Better Navigation and User Experience

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 10, 2008
9 Comments on 6 WordPress Plugins for Better Navigation and User Experience

This post may seem little late in this wordpress plugins series. But if you remember we already discussed some best comment plugins, and if you really care about your users then you should check them out first.

Listed below are plugins, which will improve your blogs navigation and thus will result in higher page-views.

1. Similar Post Plugin

This plugin as name suggests, displays contextually related posts. I strongly feel one should use related post kind of plugin, replacing wordpress default next & previous post links, that many themes show on single post pages.

Most of our visitors come from search engines and related posts list can get them engaged for more time on your site compared to probably unrelated next & previous posts. Also this way your old posts may get some exposure to visitors as well as search engines.

There are plenty of plugins which offers this kind of functionality. They differ is their logic to calculate related posts, customization options, etc. I use Similar Post Plugin by Rob Marsh, which also takes care of similar posts in feed items.

Link: Similar Post Plugin by Rob Marsh

2. Sensitive Tag Cloud Plugin

If you have like hundreds of tags and you blog on many different topics, then wordpress’s default tag cloud may not be a good option to you. But tag clouds is web 2.0 way of navigating a site.

This plugin makes your tag cloud more relevant to the context of the page being displayed. Actually relevance turned out to be much lesser than I expected, but better than wordpress default tag cloud widget. I just wish this plugin get more sensitive!

Link: Sensitive Tag Cloud by René Ade

3. Breadcrumb Navigation Plugin

If breadcrumb is not familiar word, then recall some site/forum which always display on every page something like “You are here: Home >> WordPress >> Plugins”.

This is very old but still cool way to make your blog easily navigable as it gives users a way to keep track of their location within your blog. As of now I do not use this plugin, but the reason is, this blog is highly unorganized. I would love to use this plugin in future for sure.

Link: Breadcrumb Navigation Plugin by mtekk & hakre

4. Paged Navigation Plugin

This plugin affects categories, archive type pages. Many themes by default show previous and next link on such pages.

This plugin allows you to show paged navigation links like “Go to page: 2, 3, 4, .., Last” as shown in forums. This is better approach as this gives user many alternatives to browse a particular archive. Check this screenshot, to get better idea about this plugin.

Link: WP-PageNavi Plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan

5. Navigation Tree Plugin

This plugin can generate navigation trees for your posts, pages, links and categories which you can add in your blogs sidebar.

The final effect is similar to windows explorer files & folder tree on left. If you blog heavily about Windows OS, then this type of navigation can grab your users attention!

If your are still confused, what I am talking about, check these screenshots.

Link: WP-dTree plugin by ulfben

6. In-Series Plugin

This plugin is good for series writing. If you want to write a series like this, then its better to have a plugin link all posts in the series automatically. Using this plugin saves a lot of time and generated series listings are highly accurate and consistent.

Use this plugin only if you plan to write a series of articles. Its not necessary, that you write articles in a series on daily basis. You can also bundle some of your old articles into series using this plugin.

The Table of Contents you see on this post page, is because of In-Series plugin.

Link: In-Series Plugin by Travis Snoozy

That’s all for navigation! Look at these plugins as your helper. Your blogs navigation and user experience is highly dependent on your choice of theme. Also it depends on your motive. If you are blogging just for money then eventually you will end up putting so many ads on your site that it will become hard for your visitors to find real content

Tomorrow we will move to back-end of a wordpress blog. So that you can turn your self-hosted wordpress blog into self-administered blog… 😉

Tags Blogging, plugin, Plugins, Series, Windows, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Reviews

Best Regular Expression Tools for Programmers

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 10, 2008
3 Comments on Best Regular Expression Tools for Programmers

If you are a programmer, then you must have encountered regular expressions sometime back in your carrier. If you are good at regular expressions, then hats off to you. Otherwise there are some tools which can make your life easy.

There is one online and one offline tool that I often use for regular expression purpose which I like to share with you today.

1. Regular Expression Online Tool

This is my favorite and the best for PHP, Perl & JavaScript programmer. Not only its AJAX interface allow to you to try different sets of regular expression but also generate code based on programming language you select.

For PHP, it supports both PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) and POSIX library. There is no support for other languages but I that only means you may not be able to generate code for those. You can still use this to verify your regular expressions.

Link: Regular Expression Online Tool by Lars Olav Torvik

2. Regular Expression Desktop Tool

This is good for programmer who prefer desktop tools. This small Adobe Air application allow you to test different types of regular expression with help tips at each point.

If you are new to regular expression, then this is best for you as it not only help you write correct regular expressions, but also gives you many details about them at each stage.

As this is Adobe Air app, this can be used on Windows, Mac & Linux. This tool also have an online version. You can try it out here.

Link: RegExr Desktop by gSkinner

In my workflow, I often practice start with desktop tool first. I try all possibilities until I get intended results. When I am satisfied with results, I open online tool, put my regular expression there and grab codes which I can directly paste in my programs.

I code mostly in PHP & JavaScript so these tools are sufficient for me. If you have any other favorite, please share with us.

Tags Developers, Javascript, Windows

Reviews

8 WordPress Plugins for Feed Subscribers

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 9, 2008
13 Comments on 8 WordPress Plugins for Feed Subscribers

Today in our wordpress plugin series, we will explore plugins related to feeds. Feed is the reason, I love blogs over static websites.

If you are seriously into blogging, then one thing which matters most is feed readers. Many bloggers, including me, display their FeedBurner subscribers count proudly at prominent places on their site.

So here is list of plugins which will improve your feed count as well interaction with feed subscribers.

1. WWSGD Plugin

This plugin which uses name of one of the top web celebrity Seth Godin, allows you to display a subscription reminder message above or below blog post.

You can control position & content of message. Also you can customize if message is to be displayed always for only or few initial page views.

Link: What Would Seth Godin Do by Richard K Miller

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin

If you use FeedBurner and love its subscriber count chicklet, then this plugin is must for you.

WordPress have lots of feed formats and most probably you had burnt only one of them with FeedBurner. Now if a user access your wordpress feeds via other URLs then their subscription will not be counted towards FeedBurner count.

This plugin will take care of this. You just give it your FeedBurner URLs and it will redirect all wordpress custom feed requests to your FeedBurner feed.

Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin is now officially maintained by FeedBurner.

Link: FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin by Steve Smith & FeedBurner

3. Full Text Feeds

There was a bug in wordpress which used to cut your feeds in the middle of the post. This behavior used to annoy blogger who like to publish full text feeds.

I am not sure if this bug is fixed in latest version of wordpress as I have modified wordpress core feed files completely when applying firefox full feed hack.

Anyway, if you see partial feeds even after choosing option to display full feeds, you can use this plugin to overcome wordpress bug.

Link: Full Text Feed Plugin by Ronald Heft, Jr.

4. URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin

URL Absolutifier changes all relative URLs in posts to absolute URL, to make the entries work in feed readers that don’t work with relative URLs.

I used a relative URL trick for higher earnings from AdSense product referrals long time back. If you are not sure about your usage of relative URLs then I will strongly recommend you should activate this plugin and then just forget it. I really feel this should be default behavior of wordpress.

Link: URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang

5: Feed Footer Plugin

This plugin allow you to customize footer text of each post in feed completely. I use this to show referral ads in my feeds. Please do not try AdSense or any JavaScript code in Feed Footer. It will not work as feed readers ignores JavaScript.

This plugin is really basic, but I don’t mind taking some efforts for some extra bucks.

Link: Feed Footer Plugin by Sherief Mursyidi

6. Similar Posts for Feeds Plugin

Many time, by giving full text feeds, blogger feel they are loosing page-views as a reader may never check their blog.

I use backlinking to my old posts whenever possible to bring readers back to the blog. But often such links go unnoticed or you may not find old post to link back if you are writing on a new topic.

Then its always good idea to display few related posts at the bottom which often attracts clicks. Of course too many links may annoy your reader. So do not show something like 20 related post!

Link: Similar Posts by Rob Marsh

7. Feed Widget Plugin

This plugin will add a WordPress widget, which will display links to various relevant feeds for your WordPress blog. It will always at least display links to the two standard feeds: All Entries and All Comments. It will also display links to category feeds, post feeds or search feeds, depending on the current page being viewed.

I used this long time back. But now this blog have three top level feeds, so I guess using this plugin here will result in too many options. I will definitely add this plugin to my orkutfeeds blog.

Link: Feed Widget Plugin by Ketsugi

8. RSS Footer

This is very simple plugin. It allows you to insert any message including HTML code into the feeds. You can also choose if added message is to be displayed at top or bottom of the post.

You can use this plugin for advertising instead of above Feed footer plugin. Main difference is, RSS Footer adds same footer at the end of every post, while above Feed footer allows you to add different footer for each post.

One plus point with RSS footer is, it allows addition of link back to your original post, which is good SEO as explained by Daniel Scocco.

Link: RSS Footer Plugin by Joost de Valk

That’s it for the day! Tomorrow I will post more about plugins which will improve navigation of your wordpress blog.

Between if you like this post subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates. 😉

Tags Adsense, Advertising, Bing, Blogging, Firefox, Google, Javascript, plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Reviews

4 WordPress Plugins for Better SEO and Permalink Structure

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 8, 2008
9 Comments on 4 WordPress Plugins for Better SEO and Permalink Structure

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is one of the hottest topic on web. There are thousands of spam sites/books dedicated on this topic to just mint your money. They do well because of one reason – everybody want traffic for their site, but nobody want to work hard for that!

So let me make this clear right now. Today I am posting about few wordpress plugins & tips, which will really improve your blogs search engine ranking but in most natural way. So do not expect any overnight burst in traffic.

1. ALL in One SEO Pack Plugin

This is best and only plugin enough to do search engine optimization for your blog. This automatically take care of three important things about a blog. Discussing each point in details is beyond the scope of this post. Options listed in bracket must be enabled to optimize that point.

Automatically optimizes post/page titles. (Rewrite Titles options)
Generates META tags automatically. (Use Categories for META keywords & Autogenerate Descriptions options)
Avoids duplicate content. (Use noindex for Categories/Archives/Tag options)

Link: All in One SEO Pack Plugin by hallsofmontezuma & uberdose

2. Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin

This plugin is not actually optimizing anything directly. It creates a sitemap of your blog and submit to it search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

If you are hearing word sitemap for the first time, then think it as a protocol/language which websites use to communicate with search engines. Sitemaps tell search engine about your sites content structure, importance of each link, timestamp for each link among other info.

Two biggest advantages this plugin offers:

You can submit only post/”page” URLs as part of sitemap. This option help you avoid category/archive pages which potentially content duplicate contents.
It automatically pings search engine whenever you post a new article. This way search engine add recently posted articlea to their indices within few hours. Gone are the days when search engine index update used to happen once in a month! This is good as search engines prefer fresh content.

You can also link to your sitemap explicitly if you want to. Here is sitemap for Devils Workshop.

There are many options, this plugin provides. Go through them once, for forever.

Link: Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin by Arne Brachhold

3. Permalink Migration Plugin

If your blog URLs have something like ?p=123 or post/123 in them, then its time to change your permalink structure. Not only above URL format is worst example of SEO practice but also is bad from user perspective. Wouldn’t it be nice if a URL gives hint about content in advance?

Permalink options can be found under settings section of wordpress Dashboard. Use a structure which makes use of post names in URLs.

Now thing plugin comes handy when you want to change your permalinks structure for your old blog. Any change in permalinks makes your old blog URLs inaccessible. Many user finds a better custom structure after they start blogging and fear of URL-breaking prevent them from making changes to it.

Link: Permalink Migration Plugin by Dean Lee

4. Redirection Plugin

This plugin allow you to create manual URL redirects within wordpress. This is good for merging many posts or redirecting users from a outdated post to new one.

WordPress allow you to edit permalinks for individual posts. You may like to do this to include a keyword which you may not be able to stuff into post titles. When any such changes happen to already published posts, this plugin automatically create a redirection entry for old post.

Moreover, if you use date-based URLs then changing a posts date will result in change in its URL. Again this plugin transparently adds a redirection rule automatically when something like this happens.

Personally I rely on this plugin a lot for post containing hacks & bugs. These kind of posts becomes outdated as bugs get fixed with time. But then again, when new bugs pops out, it help me redirect users from old outdated bug posts to fresh bug posts automatically.

Link: Redirection Plugin by John Godley

This is all wordpress plugins can do for SEO. I personally think SEO is not an overnight job. I published some posts on SEO in past in case you like to check them out.

After spending more than 2 years in blogging, all I can say that, DONT let SEO tactics affect your writing style. In the end, its your readers who will read your blog. I never mind sacrificing few keywords if they can improve my posts flow. 🙂

Rest, suggest via comments if I am missing something.

Also let me know if you like to read more about wordpress plugins in a particular category.

[Update: I mistakenly linked to a differnet plugin for #3 candidate. Please note the updated link. Sorry for inconvinience.]

Tags Blogging, Google, plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Tutorial

Moving a WordPress blog from a subdirectory to subdomain preserving permalinks

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 8, 2008
71 Comments on Moving a WordPress blog from a subdirectory to subdomain preserving permalinks

Many bloggers like to keep their blog in either subdirectory (ex: something.com/blog) or subdomain (ex: blog.something.com). Generally personal blogs are hosted under subdirectories and blog dedicated to services hosted under subdomains.

Anyway, if one want to move his wordpress blog from a subdirectory to a subdomain or vice-versa, it is possible to do so without loosing permalinks and traffic from search engines.

Listed below are steps with case of moving our orkutfeeds service blog from http://www.orkutfeeds.com/blog to http://blog.orkutfeeds.com/. You should change things accordingly as per your configuration.

[Note: Please configure subdomain first, it you are moving to a subdomain. Please create a subdirectory first if you are moving to a subdirectory.]

1. Configuring wordpress

Login to your wordpress dashboard and go to General settings tab. You will see WordPress address(URL) & Blog address(URL) settings. Change them to target URL.

In our case it was http://www.orkutfeeds.com/blog which I changed to http://blog.orkutfeeds.com/.

Change both URL settings carefully as one character mistake may result in disaster. Don’t worry nothing will be lost, only you will need to find a wordpress expert to fix it.

So after you are sure, press Save Changes button. You will see something like URL not found error but don’t get panic. It is expected as we haven’t moved/copied our blog files to subdomain yet. If your blog is high traffic blog then you may copy your blog files first as explained in next step.

2. Moving/Copying Blog Files

Moving files:

Now this step is trickiest one and your smartness will decide how long your blog will remain down.

If you have shell access to your webserver and its Linux/Unix based server then you can use mv command to move all blog files at once. It took less than 1 second in orkutfeeds case!

ex: $mv path_to_domain_dir/blog/* path_to_subdomain_dir/

Note that, here path_to_domain_dir and path_to_subdomain_dir should be replaced by actual paths as per your server configuration.

If your blog is high traffic blog, then you may open shell first and type such command in advance. Please DO NOT hit enter before performing step 1.

Also DO NOT attempt moving files using FTP clients.

Copying files:

This is for users who do not have shell access or have Windows server. This is good for high traffic site also.

Copy all files from one location to another location via FTP. Alternatively, you can use shell command to copy files if reason for this approach is high traffic to your site.

How you do this is your choice!

Once all your blog files are available at new location and you done with configuring wordpress as mentioned in step 1, you now either waiting on an error page, wordpress login page or settings page again.

Just refresh no matter what is next to your eyes. You should see now your wordpress blog at new location. If you don’t contact me ASAP, with as much details possible.

3. Creating/Updating .htaccess file to preserve permalinks

This part is essential to maintain permalinks and SEO juice. Again this is divided in two ways depending on your goal.

Moving from a subdirectory to a subdomain:

Under root directory of your site (this is different than root directory of your blog), create (or update if already exist) a .htaccess file. You need to add only 3 lines to it as shown in following example:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*) http://blog.orkutfeeds.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

Please make 2 change to last line:

If your blogs’ subdirecotry have different name like wordpress, then replace first occurrence of blog with its name. (Ex: For wordpress, change ^blog/ to ^wordpress/)
Replace http://blog.orkutfeeds.com/ with your subdomain URL. DO NOT forget trailing slash (/).

Also delete or rename ‘blog’ subdirectory for .htaccess file to work.

Moving from a subdomain to a subdirectory:

Under subdomains root directory, create (or update if already exist) a .htaccess file. You need to add only 3 lines to it as shown in following example:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.orkutfeeds.com/blog/$1 [R=301,NC]

Please make 1 change to last line:

Replace http://www.orkutfeeds.com/blog with your new blog URL. DO NOT forget trailing slash (/).

Thats All! Now all permalinks, including links indexed by Search Engines should work fine.

Ideally, if you can perform all above steps at the same time, the whole process will go unnoticed without any downtime.

If you have any questions/suggestions please feel free to use comment form below.

If you like this post, please check our ongoing series on best WordPress Plugins.

Tags Bing, Developers, plugin, Windows, Wordpress

Tips

Download Official Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 8, 2008

Just tested newly launched Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox. For those who never heard about Entrecard, its free traffic exchange program. It allow other to place 125×125 image ad on your site which brings you Entrecard credits. You can use these Entrecard credits to advertise on other sites/blogs in Entrecard network or buy some service/hard-cash from Entrecard store.

Now coming back to this Firefox only toolbar, this really packs entire Entrecard site into one small toolbar.

List of features…

Quick Account Switching: (First button gives let you switch instantly between any account you own. If you don’t have multiple blogs listed at Entrecard, this won’t affect you.

Your Entrecard Menu: Second button gives you a report of how many credits you have, and how many drops you’ve done today. Click it, and it will drop down to give you the options of visiting your dashboard, messagebox, ad calendar, Statistics, Linked Blogs page, and the buy EC page.

Who to Browse: You can select your Inbox, Favorites, or any Entrecard Category you like to browse.

How to Browse: Let you select browsing sort order between most popular, newest, cheapest, most expensive, most advertised and random.

The Jump Buttons: Click on the single green arrow, and you will instantly be taken to an Entrecard site. Click the double green arrow, and your browser will open the next 10 Entrecard sites, as per your specifications in “How to Browse” and “What to Browse”.

One-Touch Favorites: The Entrecard Toolbar allows you to bookmark your favorites with a single click. While on any Entrecard site, a heart icon will appear in the browser. You can add someone to your favorites, or remove someone from your favorites, simply by clicking the button.

One-Click Advertising: Any site in Entrecard network you are on will display its price in the browser, and with just a single click, you can advertise on that site.

There are few more features. Check all details with screenshots at Entrecard blog.

Link: Download the Entrecard Toolbar | Download Firefox

Tags Advertising, Firefox

Analysis

5 WordPress Plugins for Social Bookmarking/Networking

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 7, 2008
17 Comments on 5 WordPress Plugins for Social Bookmarking/Networking

Today I will post about plugins which will help your blog spread via social networking/bookmarking services. I personally think socializing aspect is more important than direct SEO, which I will discuss in tomorrows post.

Social plugins allow your blog visitor to spread a word about your blog posts. As this is what they say mouth-to-mouth publicity, its impact will be greater. Also links spreads naturally ranks good compared to evil SEO tactics.

So here is list of social plugins…

1. Sociable Plugin

This plugin automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Facebook, etc. You can choose any number of social sites from almost 100 networking sites.

You can also choose on which types of pages social sites icons to be shown. I selected full-posts & static pages. There is an option to put this buttons in RSS feed too. There are few advance options like “open in new window”.

You can see live example of this plugin on this blogs’ posts. There is a “share and enjoy” section after post content which is courtesy this plugin.

Link: Sociable by Joost de Valk

2. ShareThis Plugin

This plugin provides a simple way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.

It can be good alternative for above plugin with added option to track sharing stats.

I really have no good reason for not using this plugin. So check both and use one which you like more.

Link: ShareThis Plugin by Alex King & ShareThis

3. WP Conditional Digg This Badge plugin

There are many Digg plugins thanks to popularity of Digg. But one I like is WP Conditional Digg This Badge plugin. This plugin check if a post have enough Digg (default 10 Diggs) before showing Digg This button. I think this approach is nice as your is most likely to Digg a post with higher Diggs beforehand. Also this avoid showing Digg This button on each post which some visitors find annoying.

If you do not want to clutter your post pages at all then stick to one of above two plugins. They both support sharing via Digg.

Link:WP Conditional Digg This Badge by Brian Rock

4. Twitter Tools

This plugin allows you to automatically post a tweet to your twitter account whenever a new post is published. if you like twitter then you can use other options like sidebar widget included in plugin to show recent twitter updates in sidebar.

If you just want to use auto tweets for new post part, better use twitterfeed service.

Many top bloggers use dedicated twitter accounts for their blog posts. Even I will soon start this for Devils Workshop, as suggested by Rajat Arora

Link: Twitter Tools by Alex King

5. WP_LinkTools

You can use this plugin to add your newly published post to del.icio.us automatically. There are few more options which I really don’t find useful. I use tweetmarks service to achieve similar goals.

But using this plugin have one advantage. You can use post categories, tags, title as tags for del.icio.us links.

Link: WP_LinkTools by DCoda Ltd

If you use a really good plugin which you think must be included in this list, please let us know via comments.

Thanks. I will post more about SEO plugins tomorrow… 🙂

Tags Blogging, Delicious, Firefox, plugin, Plugins, Series, Social Bookmarking, Twitter, Windows, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

News

Airtel Will Launch iPhone on 22nd August in India

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 7, 2008
4 Comments on Airtel Will Launch iPhone on 22nd August in India

A recent post from PCWorld unveiled final launch date, August 22, of Apple iPhone in India by Bharti Airtel. Thier rival Vodafone is expected to launch iPhone on August 18.

But Airtel’s launch date is more promising as it is now displayed on their iPhone pre-registration page.

There is no such update on Vodafone pre-registration page about their iPhone launch date.

Still no word about iPhones end user price by either companies is just fueling excitement about iPhone.

If you are yet to pre-register your iPhone, do it now. Thanks Deepak for tip. 🙂

Pre-registration Links: Airtel | Vodafone

Tags Apple, Blogger, iphone

Reviews

5 Essential WordPress Comment Plugins

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 6, 2008
7 Comments on 5 Essential WordPress Comment Plugins

After going through wordpress plugin basics and plugins which help you uploading/managing other plugins, its time to move to something really important. I don’t know what is your priority but as a blogger I care most about my readers. Its more important than SEO or other traffic tactics to me which I will discuss in subsequent posts in the series.

So here I am listing plugins which will take your wordpress blogs’ commenting system to the next level, and thus will make it easy for you and your visitors to collaborate.

1. Subscribe to comments plugin

This plugin will add a subscription option to comment form on your blog posts. When a user checks this option, he will be automatically informed via email whenever you or someone else post a reply or other comments on that post.

Also that email sent will contain option to unsubscribe as well as manage subscription for your blog posts.

May not sound important to a blogger this plugin attracts visitor as they don’t have to monitor you blog posts manually. As a reader, when I visit a blog, if I find this subscription option there, I most likely to comment on that blog.

This plugin is in fact so great that next wordpress version is most likely to incorporate in it.

Link: Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith

2. Comment Editing Feature Plugin

This plugin allow your users to edit comment post by them. Many times, readers of this blog requested this feature here and so I am adding it today.

You can control time period till editing option will be open. I think this is really nice plugins which can help comments to be more meaningful.

Link: WP Ajax Edit Comments by Ronald Huereca

3. WordPress Threaded Comments

This plugins is good for posts which invites lots of comments. This let your visitors reply to a particular comment like it happens on forums.

I used this plugin in past but I don’t use it anymore because sometimes it makes it hard to find recent comment on a post which have hundreds of comments.

Link: WordPress Threaded Comments by ????

4. Better comment manager

If you really care about answering comments on your blog, then this will make this task easy.

It will add a tab “Better comment manager” to your blogs dashboard which allow you to replay to all your comments on different posts from a single page. It will also add option for threaded reply in case you are using Threaded Comments plugins as described above.

Link: Better comment manager by Keith Dsouza

5. Paged Comments

This plugin is good for posts which attracts hundreds of comments. Those comment make your post page so long that if you have something important in footer, visitor needs to scroll a lot for that.

Link: Paged Comments by Keyvan Minoukadeh

Apart form these there are softwares which notifies you whenever a comment is posted on your blog, But they all are so primitive and make use of some sort of hacks or polling techniques which increases load on your blog. So I am waiting for WordPress 2.7 which will have comments API. With comments API one can really expect some nice desktop softwares to mange comments.

Thats all for the day! Tomorrow I will post about visitor centric plugins tomorrow. 🙂

Tags plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins