1. WP Security Scan
This plugin will scan your entire WordPress installation and will suggest you regarding security vulnerabilities like  passwords, database security, file permissions, admin security. It will also hide the version of your WordPress and remove the META tag from the core such that hacking to your WordPress installation would be hard.

2. Secure WordPress
It will help secure WordPress installation by removing miscellaneous items after the installation process which may aid hackers. It will remove error information from the login-page and also remove or change the WP-version data but leave it unchanged in the admin area. It is suggested to remove any unwanted information to the non-admin for security reasons so it will remove update information about plugins, themes and core update information. Secure WordPress will add a blank index.html to the plug-in directory such that if anyone is trying to view the contents of the directory they will be viewing a blank page instead of the contents.

3. WordPress Database Backup
This is the first plug-in to be installed soon after you complete WordPress installation. It will help you backup all your core data and other content of your choice to the destination your choose: hard disk, email or remote server. In the event of crash either by your fault or from hackers, you can restore your WordPress blog from the backup file easily. It is recommended that you use this plug-in for WordPress version 2.0.3 or later.

4. Force SSL
Having a secure SSL connection to communicate with your users is beneficial. To enable this, your site must be SSL enabled first. To implement this, you need to buy the SSL certificate. By installing this plug-in it will force your user browser to connect to your site via a SSL connection. This eliminates any third party attacks between the connection and all the data that is transmitted to and from the site will be encrypted for better security.

5. Chap Secure Login
If you are not having a secure connection like SSL to protect your password , then you can use this plug-in for encrypting passwords. It will use the Chap protocol to hide the passwords and transmit it encrypted. The only information that is transmitted unencrypted is your username. Protecting password will give full security because password leaks will enable the hacker the gain full control of your WordPress blog.

6. Anonymous WordPress Plugin
All the WordPress versions 2.3 and above have the feature to get automatic updates for plugins. During this process it will send some of your information like your blog’s URL, version number, list of installed plugins and activated plugins to Wordpress.org. This information could be of potential use for hackers. So to avoid this, installing Anonymous WordPress plug-in is a feasible option. It will strip off your blog’s URL and version number and empty the activated plugins list. This plug-in is compatible with WordPress 2.3 and above.

7. Login Encrypt
This will help encrypt the login information using the complex DES and RSA combination. It uses the JavaScript appended and encrypted the password of the user and generates a unique DES key. And by using this key, user can have secure login each time they login to your blog.

8. Admin SSL
This plug-in will work with both the private and shared SSL connections and it will force a SSL connection in every page where password can or has to be entered. It is very helpful to protect the admin area, posts and all the pages of your WordPress installation and secure the login page. This plug-in works on WordPress 2.2 to 2.7.

9. AskApache Password Protect
It will block the bots and creates a safe wall for any vulnerability your WordPress blog may have. It will protect your password as well as your WordPress directories like the wp-includes, wp-content, etc. It is like placing your WordPress blog behind a security wall.

There are plugins available for WordPress that allow you to shorten the lengthy URLs and enable you to count the number of clicks for each shorten URL. WordPress plugins are very easy to install and use. You can include a short URL for every post in your WordPress blog so that users can easily share posts with others right from your blog.

Here-in are the five handy WordPress plugins for shortening URL’s.

1. Short URL Plug-in – This WordPress plug-in allows you to shorten the long URL’s easily and it even enables you to keep track of the short URL’s so that you can know how many times each short URL has been clicked. This feature is really useful to track downloads and other links in your blog. If you wish to reset the counter you can click on the ‘clear all’ button to zero the counter. It includes pagination of links, easier setup of htaccess (permalinks) and allows administrators to pass variables to their redirects.

2. YOURLS WordPress plug-in – This is a URL shorting service that lets you to shorten the long URL’s on your post and tweet them to the Twitter site automatically. You can configure the settings according to your needs such that you can set it to tweet when you have added a new post or page on your blog. It will send a Tweet with the title of the post and a shortened URL which will redirect to your post. It is very simple to install and works automatically after the initial configuration of the plug-in. It is also compatible with other URL shorting services like the Tinyurl.com, bit.ly, is.gd, tr.im etc.

3. WP-Chunk – This WordPress plug-in will shorten the URL’s that are present in the comments field. Most of the visitors would like to add or share some other information related to the post in the comments. In that case, they just add the URL of the page that contains the related information. This WordPress plug-in will help shorten the URL’s present in the comments field so that you do not have problem when editing the comments or your blog will look just tidy with all the short URLs.

4. Pretty Link – This is another handy WordPress plug-in that allows you to shorten any web page URL’s. It will help you to track the hit count of the shortened URL’s, where each hit came from, the browser used, OS and the host. One cool feature of this plug-in is that: you can use your own domain name to shorten the URL’s.

5. Shorter Links – This WordPress plug-in will generate shorter URL of the posts on your blog so that users can easily post the link on any of the web services like Twitter, friendfeed, share it etc., When you save the post to WordPress, the shorter link that is generated can be edited into more meaningful characters. You can further configure the plug-in using the provided settings.

1. Add to Facebook
Once you install this plugin on your WordPress blog, you can see a footer link at the bottom of each blog post. By clicking on this link, user can add the current post to their Facebook mini-Feed. You can choose either a text link “Share on Facebook” or a Facebook button or both can be displayed at the bottom of the post. By clicking on the link, the user can sign in to the Facebook account it he is not already logged in and the post will be automatically added to his Mini-Feed.

2. Facebook Comments
This plug-in will import all the comments that are written on Facebook to your blog to the exact post such that you can see all the comments that are been made for a particular post directly in your WordPress blog. By this way you will not miss a single comment made on your post and it automatically updates the comments.

3. Facebook Dashboard Widget
This WordPress plug-in for Facebook allows you to see all the updates from your friends and allows you to know what your friends are doing. This is a  dashboard widget that allows you to go side by side with your friends on Facebook and your WordPress blog. Using this widget you can know the updates from your Facebook friends even if the Facebook site is blocked.

4. WP-FBConnect
This plug-in will add Facebook functionality to your WordPress blog using the Facebook Connect APIs. You have to link WordPress and your Facebook account, and once they are linked you need not have to sign in again. You can publish the comments on your blog through the newsfeed and Facebook avatars will be displayed in the comments field.

5. Gigya
All the features in this plugins are fully configurable by the WordPress administration panel. By installing this plug-in to your WordPress blog, you can have a secure signup and login for users in your site. You can update your states on various social networking sites at once and also invite all your friends on various networks to visit and join in your blog site.

6. Facebook Photos plug-in
This plug-in allows you to add photos to the posts directly from the Facebook. All that you have to do is install and activate the plug-in and link your Facebook account with the WordPress blog. After that when you edit a new post in WordPress, a new Facebook icon in the add media section will be present – by clicking on the icon you can see the photos that you have uploaded to your Facebook account. You can then insert the photos to the post as small, medium and large size and can also align the image position.

The Blackberry app will work with all new BlackBerry devices such as the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm, with BlackBerry OS 4.2.1 or newer. The Wordpress app will work on WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress version 2.5.1 or newer. For self-hosted WordPress sites, ensure you have XML-RPC enabled on dashboard under Settings -> Writing.

Point your BlackBerry browser to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install to install the Blackberry app for WordPress. Remember its a beta software, so is bound to have bugs, which means dont use it to manage your primary blog to avoid surprises. The app will frequently prompt when new versions are available, which you can easily upgrade. Support is available at the WordPress for Blackberry Forums.

bbPress is a simple forum software, easy to use, easy to administrate, and is very fast and clean. It has some powerful features and is highly customizable and WordPress bloggers will find the same WP goodiness and feel when they use bbPress.

We used bbPress for our forums earlier and here are the top 10 reasons to install bbPress. Some key highlights are pretty SEO optimized permalinks, lots of plugins and themes, open source, lots of feeds, Akismet spam control, integrated Gravatars, and lots more.

Download bbPress now and start a new forum for your site in minutes. Remember bbPress requires PHP 4.3 or greater and MySQL 4.0 or greater.

BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms it into a social network with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and activity streams. The  BuddyPress plugins can be themed to match your own style.  All of the plugins can help you create a complete social network or you can use specific plugins to add special features to your blog network. It’s 100% GPL and Open Source.

You can test drive the BuddyPress demo site, which is powered by the latest version of the BuddyPress software. You can sign up and see how BuddyPress works. I signed up too and the demo application is amazing.

Download BuddyPress. BuddyPress 1.0 requires you have a functional running WordPress MU version 2.7.1 or greater. Read this setup guide to get started.

Wordpress is already SEO optimized but there are few settings needed to be done before launching your first post. If your useful post cannot be discovered by search engines, you are actually losing lots of potential readers.

Permalinks Migration

Wordpress Permalinks are permanent links of your posts. By default wordpress permalinks are in the following format
http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=123

This is not a search engine friendly permalink. First thing after installing wordpress, you should consider changing your permalink structure. If you use permalinks which has keywords in it and are relevant to your post, chances of ranking in search engines are high.

The ideal permalinks are
/%category%/%postname%/
/%postname%.html

You can use either of them, but if you use more than one categories for a single post, I would suggest you to go for later one. You can change your permalink structure, under your wordpress admin dashboard > Settings > Permalinks

But what if you are changing your permalinks after publishing many posts? Use the Permalinks migration-plugin, and it will help your old permalinks to redirect to new ones instantly.  The redirection will be 301  permanent  redirects, so you do not loose any Google link juice.

 SEO Friendly Images

Optimize your images for Search Engines. Many bloggers avoid the importance of traffic from image search engines, like Google image search and Yahoo image search. By adding an alt tag to your images you can make it search engine friendly.

The basic rule is if you upload any image by the name 12387.jpeg with the same alt tag, it doesn’t make any sense to search engines. But if you upload an image with the title iphone-screenshot.jpg and using the same alt tag, you can rank high in the image search engine results as well.

Though manually adding alt tag is not easy for every image you upload, this can be easily accomplished by using wordpress SEO-friendly image plugin.

It automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Download SEO Friendly Images Plugin .

ALL in one SEO plugin

Recently I attended Wordcamp and got the opportunity to meet Matt Mullenweg.  In the discussion round, one of the topics was  integration of “ALL in one SEO plugin” with wordpress. Matt answered they would like it to be users choice rather then implementing it by default. The point here is “All in one SEO plugin” is one of the basic essential SEO plugin for any wordpress blogger.

All in one SEO plugin helps you to stuff appropriate keywords and optimizes your blog for the keywords you are targeting.  You can read more about the plugin or download All-in-one SEO plugin .

Broken Link Checker

Broken links become dead ends for search engine bots. Suppose you have written a post which is pointing to a website www.domain.com, and after some time website goes down; you will never realize it and such posts become dead ends  for your blog.

Broken link checker wordpress plugin comes very handy in such situations. It will show the broken link on your dashboard which you can unlink from there. Download Broken link checker for WordPress .

NoFollow Plugin

Nofollow plugin helps you to add a nofollow attribute to your external links. You can simply select to which external links you want to share your link juice. It’s always a good advice to add a nofollow attribute to bad neighborhoods, like warez websites or adult/p0rn websites. Download Nofollow WordPress Plugin .

These search engine optimization tips will help you to get more visitors from search engines, but in the end it’s “Quality of the post” which matters the most. Don’t forget to share your search engine optimization technique.

Since preview urls look like this -
http://www.domainame.com/blog/?p=12345&preview=true

I guess it was not too difficult to block ads on preview pages.

Why is it good that they blocked Adsense ads on WordPress Preview pages – No false impressions inflating cost for CPM advertisers. No accidental clicks on your own Adsense ads. Google Adsense bot visits your final published page only for better targeting. No falsely raised ad page impressions, modifying your Adsense ad statistics reports.

Rock Solid – Free Wordpress Theme
Demo: http://forthelose.org/themes/rocksolid/

Alright, firstly, let me go over a few of the features in this free theme:
Wordpress 2.6, 2.7+ Ready
Widget Ready
Gravatar Ready
IE 6 & 7 Compatible
Firefox Compatible
Safari Compatible
Opera Compatible
Netscape Compatible
Custom Post Image-Thumbails
Four (4) Different Theme Color Styles Available
Detailed Theme Options Page
ReadMe.txt for Help Installing the Theme
Fully-Layered .PSD of Each Header Color Variation + Font Used for Customization
Separate Comments and Trackbacks
Easily Editable CSS – Fully Commented
Web 2.0, Tableless Design
Best of all, it’s all FREE

Download Link:

http://rapidshare.com/files/206397019/wp_rocksolid.rar.html

Install bbPress Forums

1. Simple, Light, and Blends – The first thing that strikes you when you get a bbPress forum is its simple clean crisp look, fast loading speed and the ease with which it can blend with your site structure. There is no unnecessary flab to increase the server load and its easy to customize to match your web design.

2. Pretty permalinks urls – the permalink slug gets all the title keywords into the url, which is great for search engine optimization and will give you that extra edge for higher search engine rankings.

E.g. Most forums will give you urls like
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23238

3. Just Like Wordpress – If you run a wordpress blog, then you will feel the same experience when installing, and upgrading bbPress. The dashboard has a similar feel to wordpress (not as sleek as WP2.5 and much is left desired). In fact a major bonus is you can integrate it with wordpress easily.

4. Its Free, Open Source – Hey! its free, it costs nothing to check it out. Any tool developed by community effort will get better with time and open source is the way to go.

5. Free Themes and plugins – There is an amazing array of plugins to expand the functionality of your forums, and one click themes will change the forum design in seconds. There are plugins for most features missing in the core bbpress installation.

6. Lots of Feeds – Regular readers like feeds for everything – be it the front page topics, individual topic discussions or new comments in general. bbPress has so many feeds for every possible need, that you many need to think which feeds to downplay.

7. Akismet Spam Control – Its difficult to control spam on message boards and many forums close down because more time is spend moderating spammers than posting content. But Akismet is a powerful antispam solution which is well integrated into bbPress and helps to keep spammers away. In fact, it can automatically mark spammers as Bozos, whose posts will be visible only to themselves.

8. Integrated Gravatars – We all like avatars on forums. But if hosting avatars and moderating them is bothering you, relax – the amazing integrated Gravatars takes care of all avatar management for you, without any extra hosting needs while adding to better profiles.

9. Tag Navigation – Tags is the new way to navigate any site and bbPress gives you tag navigtion wherever you want it. Add tags to each topic and define a new way for readers to browse your forums, while search engines find new ways to index your topics.

10. Brand Automattic – Wordpress is powered by the Automattic brand, and the same guys created bbPress, so you can expect a quality product which will promise to get better with each version.

Get bbPress Forums

The future of bbPress is bright with fresh funding coming in. Its not the greatest forum product out there, with the admin interface needing improvements, my wish for features to be more automated and ajax-y and there are many desirable essential features still pending. Its not right to compare the functionality with wordpress, which is far more advanced. But bbPress is getting better with each new version, and the latest release has added some great new features.

If you are a wordpress blogger looking to expand you network for more interaction with your readers and develop user generated content, it is easy to start with and customize with the same wordpress feel, and its a great forum tool (I just told you 10 reasons why!) and we use it too. Remember it needs PHP version 4.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. Get bbPress.

If you are looking for a some other free forum solutions, some big message boards and bulletin boards use vBulletin, phpBB or Simple Machine Forum.