Ruhani Rabin - Tech, Life and Interestingness

Lazy Blogger’s guide to Super Charge WordPress with 100+ Plugins

Ruhani Rabin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:42:17 +0000

Ask yourself a question, “Are you a Lazy Blogger?”. Even if you are not, these plugins will bring you to next evolution for your WordPress blog which will change the way you do blogging.

“Why do you need these plugins?”. Because, WordPress is the best and the most expandable blogging platform in the world, the plugin architecture simply gives you the power to add engaging features, improve communication and build a strong relation between you and your blog readers. Savvy? No?

Blogging is about writing great content and if your spend all your sweet time modifying your blog by hard coding then “When will you find the time to write the great content?”. Makes you think? By the time you reach over this post, you might be so proud of yourself that you have actually 23 plugins installed on your WordPress and you begin to think like you are getting professional. Well my friend, I can tell you one thing -

“Quality matters over Quantity”

Today the mission of this post is to guide you to discover the most useful, smart and efficient plugins for WordPress. These plugins will let you concentrate more about writing your content rather than spending time over managing the blog.

Carefully hand picked and incredibly handy WordPress plugins to power up your blog are included in this list. Among some popular WordPress plugins you also will discover new, not so well known or underrated but extremely useful WordPress plugins.

Just a few Notes before continue :

Spend enough time to understand your need and purpose of your blog. An example would be a photo blog. A photo blog will require image gallery plugins etc. So sort out first what kind of blog and then add appropriate plugins.
Do not install all of the plugins, it will simply overload your WordPress configuration. If possible test it out on your local system.
Not all the plugins listed here are the very best but they do “get the things done”.
Ah I just found out someone simply stolen the content and image of this article and changed the image to claim it as their own.

‘Nuff said, lets continue…

Blog Management Plugins

Managing your blog can be tedious task. Lets see how we can simplify the process of managing your blog using these plugins.

WordPress Backup – Wordpress Backup is an essential plugin for all Wordpress blog administrators. It performs regular backups of your upload (images) current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and optionally emailed to a specified email. Don’t get caught without a recent backup of your theme or images or plugins.
You can adjust the interval between backups and the email address to which the backups are sent.
Note:
a) As the size of the zip files increase, it may not be possible to email the files due to limitations of email servers.
b) It requires some editing on PHP.INI at your server, but not all hosting service provider allows you to access that feature.
Why do you need this?
On a Rainy Day this will save your life.
WP Database Backup – Database is the crucial part of your blog system. WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. It can backup database to your server as well as it can email the database directly to your inbox. Nifty? Yup, it is pretty sweet when you can also schedule the interval between the backups.
Why do you need this?
On a Rainy Day this also will save your life.
WP Super Cache – A very popular and easy to use caching plugin which generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Yes, it is a noticeable performance improvement tool. Pretty easy to setup and configure.
Why do you need this?
This generates static files and reduce loads on the server dramatically.
Alternative would be:

W3 Total Cache – This is another alternative to the WP Super Cache plugin. Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, pearsonified.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, briansolis.com, css3.info, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, noupe.com and others. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
Benefits:
* At least 10x improvement in site performance (Grade A in YSlow, when fully configured)
* “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
* Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
* Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
* Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
* Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds
Note: This plugin is designed for very advance users.
Why do you need this?
I’ve moved from WP-Super Cache to this one for some specific performance reasons but as a general blogger you can always use WP Super Cache plugin.
Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. A great tool to use while you upgrade your blog.
Why do you need this?
Definitely you don’t want your visitors to end up on some error page while you are upgrading your blog
Plugin Manager – lets you to view, download and install plugins from wordpress.org from an AJAX’ed interface, instead of manually downloading, extracting and uploading each plugin. A real time saver you can say.
Another alternative would be:
Plugin Central – Automatically installs WordPress plugins by name and URL. Provides automatic update of multiple plugins.
Why do you need this?
It makes you life much more simpler for installing and updating plugins.
Role Manager – allows you to assign different levels of access to different contributors to your blog – for example, only allowing a user to contribute to a particular category. Comes with very detailed and exclusive options.
Why do you need this?
This one will give you the flexibility of managing multiple level of permissions on your blog. If you run a multi-author blog, this will become your Swiss army knife.
No Self Ping – Prevents your blog from sending pingbacks internally to your other posts.
Why do you need this?
Self-Pinging is simply annoying
WP-Optimize – Oh yeah, this is kinda shameless plug. I know. But Remember WP-Optimize can clean your database overhead in one simple click, cleans up your post revisions, additionally allows you to change your username and enables you to clean up your spam queue comments in a flash.
Why do you need this?
Enables you to cleanup your database overhead, easy and simple to use. Compatible with all Wordpress 2.x databases and keeps your database in a optimal condition without going through PhpMyAdmin interface. You should run it at least once every month.
WPML Multilingual CMS – Allows building complete multilingual sites with WordPress
Pretty Link – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. You can now shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to mask their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, their links on Twitter to come from their own domain, or generally increase the reach of their website by spreading these links on forums or comments on other blogs.
Sidebar-Login – has both a widget and a template tag to allow you to have a login form in the sidebar of your wordpress powered blog.
WordPress.com Stats – Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.
Feedburner Feed Replacement – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.
Adminimize – Visually compresses the administrative header so that more admin page content can be initially seen. Also moves ‘Dashboard’ onto the main administrative menu because having it sit in the tip-top black bar was ticking me off and many other changes in the edit-area. Adminimize is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide ‘unnecessary’ items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the ‘Dashboard’, with forwarding to the Manage-page. On top of that, you can also hide post meta controls on the Write page and other areas in the admin-area and Write-page, so as to simplify the editing interface. Compatible with WordPress 2.5 or later. Configure all metaboxes and other areas in the write-area. The new theme move the Tags- and Category-box to the sidebar, switch off optional metaboxes and other areas in the write-area. Scroll automatically to the Textbox, when you click the write-button. Many options for menu, submenu and all areas, metaboxes in the write-area, separated for all roles in WordPress. Screen Shots.
WordPress Mobile Edition shows mobile visitors a mobile version of the site. You have to install the theme as well
Google Analyticator makes it easy to enable Google Analytics on your blog and measure where visitors are coming from, what terms they are searching for, etc.
Another strong alternative is:
Ultimate Google Analytics – Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links.
Branded Login Screen for WordPress – Lets you use custom login screen instead of WordPress default. Branded Admin which lets you change the admin area is also available
WP Sentry is a plugin for access-restricted posting, allowing bloggers to discuss sensitive subjects without being exposed to Google or non registered users. With WP Sentry you can create user groups, specify which users or groups have access to the post. Setting any access restrictions forces the post to be listed as “private” in WordPress, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to hide a sensitive post. Users may be members of multiple groups.
Absolute Privacy for WordPress provides you with the ultimate user moderation. It’s perfect for family blogs, private communities, and personal websites. It could force users to enter first and last name during registration, let users to choose their own passwords, get emailed every time an approval is waiting (with a link for quick approval), lock out all non-logged in views from your website.
Co-Authors Plugin – When you have a blog that is being run by multiple authors, there are times that more than one person contribute to an article. Co-Authors that will let you associate multiple authors to a post in WordPress. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual).
Hide Dashboard – This plugin lets you hide dashboard features from some users. The title just say it all.
Pre-Publish Post Reminder – Always forget to insert your signature, thumbnail or maybe a category image? Or need a place to store your code where you can conveniently copy and paste into your post? Need to leave a note for co-authors? This is what this plugin is for – a handy reminder list on your Post Admin page.
Userextra On Blogs that have multiple authors, it is wise to assign authors to specific categories to avoid confusion. This plugin limits the user to publishing into the categories he/she is assigned.

Content Plugins

Empower your contents with these terrific plugins:

Customizable Post Listings – Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.
Organize Series – This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. You can associate “icons” or “logos” with the various series. This version of Organize Series Plugin requires at least WordPress 2.8 to workAnother alternative would be:In Series – Allows you to easily group a series of posts into a series.Why do you need this?
If you have multiple posts that are part of a series, this plugin will help you out by automating managing the series of posts.
Post Template allows you to create templates for posts with the same structure – perfect for reviews and series, and also useful to keep a multi-author blog consistent.
ComicPress Manager – ComicPress Manager ties in with the ComicPress theme to make managing your WordPress-hosted Webcomic easy and fast.
WP-Table Reloaded – Enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. No HTML knowledge is needed. A comfortable backend allows to easily edit table data. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML. Screen shots.
Quotes Collection – Ajax powered Random Quote sidebar widget helps you collect and display your favorite quotes on your WordPress blog.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.AlternativeMicrokid’s Related Posts allows you to manually add related posts.
Yet Another Photoblog – Convert your WordPress Blog into a full featured photoblog in virtually no time. Use the full range of WordPress functions and plugins: Benefit from the big community WordPress has to offer
Add Signature Plugin for WordPress – This plugin lets you display a custom signature at the bottom of your posts. Simply type the text you want in the options page and configure it to display on every post, or manually display it by adding the trigger text wherever you like. You can also add in author information using the included variables – login name, first name, last name, nickname, email address, website, and description/bio. It get this information from the author’s account settings. It currently supports up to three different signature templates.
Insights WordPress plugin bring a powerful new way to write your blog posts. With Insights you can very quickly (in couple of seconds) do the following: search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post, insert Flickr Images, Youtube videos, links to Wikipedia, Google Map. Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant information to your post in just a few seconds
Post By Author – This plugin will show the last X posts by the current author either at the bottom of every post, or where you manually specify in each post. Using the built-in options page, you can choose the number of posts to show, set the header text, choose to show the post dates, select the format of the date, and choose whether or not to include the current post in the list

SEO Plugins

SEO Plays a very crucial role in your Blog, so here are the plugins you need. For more SEO plugins and tools for WordPress, take a look inside the “Total solutions for WordPress SEO” post.

All in One SEO Pack – A must install. A very powerful Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
Another alternative would be:

HeadSpace2 SEO – All-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site
Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
AskApache Google 404 – Displays unbeatable information to site visitors arriving at a non-existent page (from a bad link). Major SEO with Google AJAX, Google 404 Helper, Related Posts, Recent Posts, etc..
Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.
Simple Tags – Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin This is THE perfect tool to manage perfectly your WP 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8 tags. It was written with this philosophy : best performances, more secured.
WP Greet Box – Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

Comments Plugins

3rd Party Hosted Commenting Systems

Disqus Commenting System: My personal favorite. It’s a total web comments management service integrated with many popular Social Media Platforms. Namely you can comment using your facebook login, OpenID, Twitter and others. Very handy moderation dashboard and a mature product. You will need to have an account with Disqus and you need to register your blog to it first. It also sync the comments with WordPress database so if you decided not to use it anymore, all your comments will be available to WordPress. Not to mention that this system also contains a WordPress Plugin for easier sync and manageably. All comments interface is hosted by Disqus itself.

Alternative Choice 1

IntenseDebate: Almost all the same feature as Disqus commenting system with some additional options. It has it’s own WordPress plugin as well. Created by the owner of WordPress systems. I still prefer Disqus though.

Alternative Choice 2

JS-KIT Echo: Well known JavaScript based hosted commenting platform which also integrates with WordPress, provides a good number of alternative login systems and Social Media interaction for commenting.

Verdict: Disqus Commenting System. Continue to the rest of this section if you are not interested on one stop solutions or you might like to customize the features of the comments section of your blog.

Blog Comments Plugins

Akismet Spam filter plugin (Requires a WordPress.org free account) is an absolute must for any blog, filtering out obvious spam and holding back the dubious stuff for moderation.
WP Ajax Edit Comments – The most powerful comment editing solution for WordPress. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.
Note: Handy and Useful but resource heavy.
DoFollow is a plugin which disables the default ‘nofollow’ setting on Wordpress blogs (which tells search engines to disregard any links in comments). This means that links posted in comments benefit from ‘Google juice’.
Note: Personally I’m not using it right now because I am using Disqus.
CommentLuv – This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
Note: It has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it. With a simple install you will immediately start to find new and interesting blog posts, tweets and diggs from your own blog and community. Visit ComLuv for more information.
Gurken StC is an extension of the version from Mark Jaquith (txfx.net). It supports closed-loop authentication which means that you first have to confirm your mail address, before you’re able to receive notifications about subsequent comments.
Comment Rating – Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently
Comment Redirect – This plugin redirect your first time commentators to a WordPress page of your choice. This is an excellent plugin to use if you want to thank your first time commentators. You can send them to a page where you have written some kind words for them.
Comment Relish – This plugin lets you send out email to your new commentators and welcome them/thank them. This is a great way to initiate the process of interaction. Keep the message short and sweet. Tag with it some resources that might be helpful to your users. Often times marketers attach freebies and other products which makes the new visitor, a loyal user to your website.

Image Plugins

Scissors – Enhances WordPress’ handling of images by introducing cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality.
Simple Flickr Photos – Displays Flickr photos based on your settings.
Note: This one also depends on what kind of focus you have on your blog. If you are a photographer and you host your images at Flickr then you might consider using this.
jQuery Lightbox – Image overlay plugin
Another alternative would be:
jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries – Makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox to display the fullsize images.
Yet another alternative would be:
Lightview Plus – A wordpress plugin which implements lightview of Nick Stakenburg. Lightview does the same as lightbox, but in a much nicer way and since Version 2.0 much more. Now lightview-plus plays videos from YouTube and Vimeo.
Another alternative would be:
Lightbox Plus – Permits users to view larger versions of images from the current page and display simple slide shows, all in an overlay.
Nexgen Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. You need to check out the Demo Site.
Another alternative would be:
GRAND Flash Album Gallery – Full integrated (flash skin based, slideshow) Image Gallery plugin with a powerful admin back end.

Social Media Plugins

Lets you integrate your blog and interact with many social media platforms:

WP to Twitter – The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter. If you have a Cli.gs API key, the shortened URL will also be filed in your Cli.gs account so that you can track statistics for the shortened URL. The plugin can send a default message for updating or editing posts or pages, but also allows you to write a custom Tweet for your post which says whatever you want. By default, the shortened URL from Cli.gs is appended to the end of your message, so you should keep that in mind when writing your custom Tweet. Any status update you write which is longer than the available space will automatically be truncated by the plugin. This applies to both the default messages and to your custom messages.
Twitter Widget Pro – A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username, #hashtag, and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). Requires PHP5.
Sociable – Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites to your posts, pages and RSS feed
SexyBookmarks – Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three
Twitoaster – Twitter Conversations. Automatically retrieve Twitter Replies to your Blog’s Posts. These Twitter Replies are handled like Posts Comments, using WP built-in comment system.
Twitter Goodies plugin will show your tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages
Twitter Friendly Links – The plugin creates a shorter link for every blog post, so instead of http://kovshenin.com/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/ you can use http://kovshenin.com/712. Sweet, huh?
Digg Digg Wordpress Plugin Wordpress plugin that is used to generate social vote button, which include Digg , Reddit , Dzone , Yahoo Buzz , TweetMeme (twitter) , fbShare (facebook) and Polladium buttons.
WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.
BackType Tweetcount – The BackType Tweetcount plugin shows the number of tweets your posts get and allows users to retweet.
Another cool alternative would be:
Easy Retweet – Simple and effective retweet button for your blog posts.
Tweet Blender – Similar in functionality to Twitter’s own widget but has support for multiple authors, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream. View Screen Shots.
Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all other RSS readers. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.
ShareThis – The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a simple way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send a link to your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more
Another alternative would be:
Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history
Gigya Socialize – Increase Registration and Engagement using Facebook Connect, Twitter and OpenID. Demo Site.
Facebook Connect for WordPress – Wordpress plugin that allows direct integration of Wordpress blogs with Facebook using Facebook Connect.
WordBook – Bring your WordPress blog posts into Facebook, and enabling users to comment and share those posts.
Last.Fm Records – This plugin shows CD covers on your WordPress weblog. It connects to last.fm and grabs the list of CDs you listened to recently and tries to find the cover images at last.fm
Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that automatically posts your delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes bookmarks to your blog. The exact details of how your bookmarks are posted are very customizable and are designed to meet your specific needs. Postalicious uses the pseudo-cron functionality introduced in WordPress 2.1 to schedule automatic hourly updates. If you do not have WordPress 2.1 or later installed, you will still be able to use Postalicious, but you will have to perform the updates manually
WP-Email – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

Widget/Presentation Plugins

My Link Order – Allows you to set the order in which links and link categories will appear in the sidebar.
Video Sidebar Widgets – A video sidebar widget using WordPress 2.8 Widgets API to display videos such as Vimeo, YouTube, MySpace Videos etc. Requires at least WordPress 2.8.1
About Me widget – Add an “About Me” widget to your sidebar.
Note: Not really necessary but it still depends on your choice. It’s not a good thing to clutter up your sidebar.
Advanced RSS – This plugin creates a new RSS widget. You can use this to replace the built in RSS widget or along side it. It is substantially more powerful than the built in widget in that you have complete control over how the feed is displayed via XSL templates. The plugin also includes an admin page for creating, editing and deleting the xsl templates, along with running tests to ensure your environment supports the required features. Additionally some plugin-wide options may be configured
Sidebar Photoblog – An easy to use photoblog plugin helps you to share your daily photos on your sidebar. With photo archive, nice effects and ability to show random photo.
Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin at Personal Financial Advice
Flexi Pages Widget – A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
Get Recent Comments – This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.
Another alternative would be:
WP-RecentComments – Display recent comments in your blog sidebar.
Facebook Dashboard Widget – You can display your Facebook friends status updates, posted items and/or notifications on your WordPress dashboard. Require WP 2.5 or above.
List Authors Widget – This plugin display a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets linking to the authors.php page

Banner and Advertise Plugins

AdRotate – Make making money easy with AdRotate. Add advanced banners to your website using the simplest interface available!
Easy AdSense – Easiest way to show AdSense and make money from your blog.
WP-Insert: Allows insert any type of content fragments inside your posts, can be used as a AD Manager also.
Sponsors Slideshow Widget – Widget to display a certain link category with images as slide show.
Author Advertising Plugin – Specially for multi author blogs. This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilizing one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc.

Other Plugins

PayPal Donations – Easy and simple setup and insertion of PayPal donate buttons with a shortcode or through a sidebar Widget. Donation purpose can be set for each button
Contact Form 7 – Simple, flexible but efficient contact form plugin
Another alternative would be:
cForms II allows you to create multiple and customizable contact forms across your blog, including multiple forms on the same page.
Wordpress Download Monitor – Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts.
WP-CodeBox – WP-CodeBox provides clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.
WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog
PollDaddy Polls – The PollDaddy Polls plugin allows you to create and manage polls from within your WordPress dashboard. You can create polls, choose from 20 different styles for your polls and view all results for your polls as they come in. All PollDaddy polls are fully customizable, you can set a close date for your poll, create multiple choice polls, choose whether to display the results or keep them private. You can even embed the polls you create on other websites. You can collect unlimited votes and create unlimited polls
Category Icons – Assigns icons to categories with WordPress 2.3 or higher.
TDO Mini Forms – This plugin allows you to add highly customizable forms that work with your Wordpress Theme to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit and edit posts and pages. New posts are kept in “draft” until an admin can publish them (also configurable). Likewise edits can be kept be automatically kept as revisions until an admin approves them. It can optionally use Akismet to check if submissions and contributions are spam. TDO Mini Forms can be used to create “outside-the-box” uses for Wordpress, from Contact Managers, Ad Managers, Collaborates Image Sites, Submit Links, etc.
WP-Print – Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
Another alternative would be:
Bunny’s Print CSS creates a stylesheet for printing so users printing pages from your blog can avoid endless pages of widgets, comments or other page furniture (including design elements).
Easy Popular Posts shows you your most popular posts – useful to install in a sidebar (you’ll need to put a line of PHP in the sidebar template for this).
GD Star Rating – GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings. Plugin supports use of cache plugins and dynamic loading of data using ajax
GD Press Tools – GD Press Tools is a collection of various administration, seo, maintenance, backup and security related tools. This tools can be integrated into the various WordPress admin panels, can perform maintenance operations, change some aspects of WordPress, see detailed server settings and information. Plugin can also track posts and pages views for various popularity lists. Some of the features don’t work with every version of the WordPress
RSSImport – Import and display Feeds in your blog, use PHP or the Shortcode.
Smart Archives Reloaded is an enhanced version of the Smart Archives. It’s easier to setup, there is no code editing required, it features better caching and now you don’t need to wait when publishing a new post and provides you settings page to choose how you want the archives displayed.
ProPlayer WP Plugin will help you to put videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymoition on your blog in any FLV Player. It’s highly customizable with support of 27 skins and in addition you can play mov/mp4/h264/mp3 files too. Plugins includes Rating video, Visualizer for audio files, Displaying watermark. By default JW FLV Media Player is used.
Smart Youtube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in your RSS feed. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Smart YouTube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone, produces xHTML valid code and allows you to view videos in fullscreen.
WordPress e-Commerce Plugin is e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This plugin makes it easy for you to accept payments online via Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express. You can also tweak your site to look however you want utilizing WordPress PHP template tags, shortcodes and widgets.
Breadcrumb Navigation is an excellent supplementary navigation system specially for CMS because it helps in site usability. The plugin we are going to share in this article reveals page hierarchy. It is a very good addition to the design because of usability and it also provides SEO benefits because it links to the path hence increasing bot activity in page indexing.
WP-Typography – Have you ever wished that you can have rounded quotes, show ellipses, your hyphens don’t get mixed up, yes WP-Typography takes care of that. This plugin is not required for everyone, it is just for those who care about minor details.

Conclusion

This is my current list of smart, efficient plugins; yet it’s inevitable that there are other plugins out there which I am not aware of at this moment. Do you know one or maybe few? Feel free to suggest me your favorite plugin using the comment form. I will try my best to keep this post updated with your suggestions.

Rating: 9.1/10 (23 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Servers

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:13:40 +0000

This is part 13 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Servers

Apache Tomcat – Apache Tomcat is the servlet container that is used in the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (jsp) technologies.
Apache Web Server – Web Server, the best one around.
Apache2Triad – Installs a developer preconfigured environment with Apache, PHP, mySQL with control panel/PHPMyAdmin, xMail, ftp, and a Apache Web based Control Panel, etc. Power packed with new cool things like Python/Pearl mods, ASP support, SSL and so much more. Highly recommended.

EasyPHP – Really nice Apache install with PHP and mySQL included and configured. If you need a heavy duty Apache web development environment look at Apache2Triad.
FileZilla – FTP Server and client. Highly recommended.
Instantrails – Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it.
Uniformserver – The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server. Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server.
MoWES -Run a webserver based on Apache, MySQL and PHP from an USB Stick or any other writable media (harddrive, flash cards etc.) without installation under Windows (98 to Vista).
Web-Dev. Server Suite – WAMP-based [Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP] web-server distribution for Windows that is fully configured and ready to run. This has every thing from a Web Application firewall to ASP.NET Host Interface. Security hardened and even includes some open source CMS software, like Joomla.
XAMPP – Apache, MySQL, PHP web development environment install. Takes care of most configs and setup issues so you don’t have to.
EFTP – FTP client/server
WAMP – Apache, PHP5 and MySQL server

Rating: 8.7/10 (7 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – System and Desktop Utilities

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:12:14 +0000

This is part 12 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

System and Desktop Utilities

nLite – Build your own custom Windows disk.
Comodo – Firewall, Anti-virus, anti-spam, malware utilities.
Ewido – Blocks spyware/adware and trojans.

Eyeline – Professional Video Surveillance Software with multiple camera support.
Filseclab – Internet personal firewall
GPG4Win – File, email encryption and other encryption utilites, like a file shredder.
Hitman Lite – Hitman Pro is a freeware tool that combines a number of powerful anti-spyware programs in one integrated solution. Hitman Pro combines Ad-Aware SE, SpyBot Search & Destroy, Spy Sweeper, Spyware Doctor, CWShredder, Spyware Blaster, NOD32, Sysclean package. Most of the included programs are freeware.
Hotspot Shield – Hotspot Shield creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your laptop and the wireless router. This impenetrable tunnel prevents snoopers and hackers from viewing your email, instant messages, credit card information or anything else you send over a wireless network. Which means you remain anonymous and protect your privacy.
Kerio Firewall – Internet personal firewall. Highly recommended.
PowerGUI – an extensible graphical administrative console and IDE for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell. (Recommended by Reader)
My Lockbox – My Lockbox is a security software enabling you to password protect any folder on your computer. The protected folder (lockbox) is hidden from any user and application of your system, including Administrator and System itself. It is impossible to access the lockbox not only from the local computer, but also from the net.
Outpost – Firewall.
PGP – A free encryption software program that is the de-facto global standard for E-mail and file privacy. Pretty Good Privacy (or PGP) offers full-strength, 128-bit encryption. PGP has constantly been upgraded over the years and now offers loads of useful features, including secure file wiping; advanced keyserver searching; and seamless integration with Qualcomm’s popular Eudora E-mail client
Password Gorilla – Password manager.
Spyware Blaster – Blocks spyware/adware. Highly recommended.
Truecrypt – Open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP , Mac OS X, and Linux. TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g.., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc).
Whisper32 – Password Manager with encryption.
WinPooch – Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source. Anti spyware and anti trojan, it gives a full protection against local or external attacks by scanning the activity of programs in real time. Associated with ClamWin antivirus, Winpooch keeps safe your computer against virus.
Zone Alarm – Internet personal firewall. Highly recommended.
Simple File Shredder – securely delete files
KeePass – password manager
LockNote – password manager
nPassword – password manager
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer – identify security misconfigurations
Spybot: Search & Destroy – anti-spyware
Windows Defender – anti-spyware
SpywareBlaster – anti-spyware
Spyware Terminator – anti-spyware
HiJack Free – system protection
HighJackThis – hijackers detector and remover
Black Box – Alternative Windows Shell. I found this to be more stable than XOBlite2. http://www.bb4win.org/news.php
Black Box Lean – Alternative Windows Shell.
Blueberry – Alternative Windows Shell in 3-D.
Clockwise3d – Alternative Windows Shell in 3-D.
Litestep – Alternative Windows Shell.
Project Looking Glass – 3D desktop. It reminds me of os x in three dimensions. Note: This is under development and requires lot’s of Java setup. I would not use this unless you want to test and develop and arn’t worried about your Windows installation.
SharpE – Alternative Windows Shell. More info and screen shots Here.
XOBLite – Alternative Windows Shell. Screenshot of my machine running XOBLite (blackbox) here
Madotate – 3D effects for Windows similar to those found in Project looking glass. This is a direct download link and is the english version.
Pitaschio – Pitaschio is the essential tool to use windows efficiently. Adds some interesting features.
RocketDock – Rocket dock is a Mac OS X like launcher complete with fisheye effect, taskbar features, and even themes well with other engines. They also have a cool icon enhancer for your desktop and file explorer with cool effects, plug-in based.
TaskSwicthXP – Task switcher (alt+tab) replacement.
Virtual Dimension – Multiple desktops in Windows. I love this app, it actually makes your desktop sessions separate and lots more cool features. Highly recommended.
VirtualWin – Virtual desktops in Windows.
Disclib – CD organizer
Dexpot – virtual desktops
DriveImage XML – create partition images
MozBackup – backup and restore bookmarks, etc.
SyncBack – system backup
Atomic Cock Sync – syncronize your clock
Citrus Alarm Clock – alarm clock
allSnap – make all windows snap
Sysinternals Tools – various system tools
StrokeIt – mouse gestures
Net Profiles – create profiles of your network settings
AveDesk – desktop enhancer
IconPhile – customize windows’s system icons
CursorXP Free – change mouse cursors
LClock – Windows Longhorn clock
Y’z Dock – application launcher
Y’z Shadow – shadow effect to the windows
Y’z Toolbar – change the toolbar icons in Explorer and Internet Explorer
Taskbar Shuffle – rearrange the programs on the taskbar by dragging
Visual Task Tips – thumbnail preview image for each task in the taskbar
Badges – put badges on any folder or file
Folderico – change icons of the folders
Folder Marker – mark your folders
Folder2MyPC – add favourite locations to My Computer
Microsoft TweakUI – system settings
BricoPacks – shell packs
ShellPacks – shell packs
Tango Shell Patcher – shell patcher
XPize – GUI enhancer
CPU-Z – cpu information
CrystalCPUID – cpu information
Central Brain Identifier – cpu information
Everest – system information
SiSoft Sandra – system information
SpeedFan – hardware monitor
Memtest86 – memory test
PowerMax – HDD test
3Dmark 06 – 3D game performance benchmark
Aquamark – performance benchmark
rthdribl – 3D benchmark
Prime 95 – cpu benchmarking
SuperPI – cpu benchmarking
CPU Rightmark – cpu overclock
Core Temp – cpu temperature
aTuner – GeForce and Radeontweaker
RivaTuner – video overclock
Nokia Monitor Test – monitor adjustmets
UDPixel – fix dead pixels
Visual Tooltips – Enhance the Windows taskbar with thumbs ans 3D effects. Check out Yod’m while you’re there for a 3D cube virtual desktop.
WinRoll – Lets you shade your windows like in Linux.
7Zip – Zip utility with File Explorer support.
CabPack – compression program
Universal Extractor – extract files from any type of archive
AB Commander Lite – File explorer replacement.
Adaware – Spyware removal tool.
AlienGuise – Theme engine like Windows Blinds, by the same guys, and brought to you from Alienware computer systems.
AntiVir – Anti-virus. I have been using this for awhile and it kicks ass. Beats the shit out of Norton and it’s free! Highly recommended.
Avast – Anti-virus applcation. Free for personal use. I have not tried this software, but it works with Kerio so it can’t be bad.
BartPE – Windows live cd. Now you can boot Windows from a CD-Rom and have full read/write access to NTFS volumes!.
Boot manager/partition manager – Partition magic like clone and boot manager.
DeepBurner – CD/DVD burner
BurnAtOnce – CD/DVD burner
Express Burn – CD/DVD burner
Zilla CD-DVD Rip’n’Burn – CD/DVD burner
ImgBurn – ISO, BIN burner
DVD Decrypter – DVD ripper
Nero CD-DVD Speed – CD/DVD info and quality test
Burn4Free – CD/DVD burner application, works oh so well! p.s. Run Adaware after installing to remove the spyware piece
CD Image – ISO ripper. Like UltraISO, create convert disk images. Supports all the main images types.
CD burner XP – CD Burner.
Console – Terminal enhancement. Ever wanted a transparent background in the command prompt window like in Linux?
Crap Cleaner – Cleans up Windows, internet cache, temp files, registry entries, etc. Also has a kick ass uninstaller that works and a startup editor. Highly recommended.
xp-AntiSpy – OS setup
jv16 Powertools – system utilities
XP SysPad – system monitoring utility
What’s Running – process guard
Registrar Lite – registry editor
WinIPConfig – replacement for “ipconfig.exe” and “route.exe”
Unlocker – file eraser
Eraser – secure file eraser
Undelete Plus – file recovery
Duplicate File Finder – find all duplicate files
Ant Renamer – file renaming
ReNamer – file renaming
Icons From File – icos extractor
Chaos MD5 – MD5 generator
HashTab – MD5, SHA1 and CRC-32 file hashes
Cygwin – Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.
Cygwin/x – Cygwin/x allows x11 (Linux apps) to run on Windows.
Daisy – Windows updater replacement that does not use IE settings.
DoISO – Create and burn ISO disk images.
Download Checker – The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to filehippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.
Explore2fs – Let’s you see and explore a Linux partition, and do file operations, from Windows. Highly recommended if you dual boot.
ExplorerXP – Windows File Explorer replacement.
FS-driver – Mount Linux Ext2/Ext3 file systems on Windows.
Floola – Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes). Floola supports all common used iPod features including artwork, podcasts and smart playlists! It’s also able to convert audio or video incompatible with the iPod so that you can copy almost any file to it. It even allows adding youtube and myspace videos just entering the page url!
Free commander – File Explorer replacement. This is one of the best file explorer replacements I have ever used. Highly Recommended.
Mucommander – File Explorer replacement. If you liked Norton Commander you will love this.
ISOrecorder – ISO burn utility! Add an option to Explorer to burn .iso file to cd. HIghly Recommended.
IZArc – Zip utility. Opens everything and has File Explorer support.
Infrarecorder – CD/CDR burner.
Launchy – Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes! Similar to Quicksilver on OS X and Katapult on Linux.
OpenVMS – Defrag and hard drive utility.
Partition Utilities – Partition resize, delete, create, etc…
Rainlendar – Very cool skinnable calendar for windows, will set events from Outlook/Exchange!
Registry Fix – Fixes the Windows registry.
Resource Hacker – Utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler and works on Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000 and WinXP operating systems.
Samurize – Another skinnable clock, system meters, weather, email, and trash indicators as well as music playback, but with so much more – like multiple machine support! Highly recommended.
Skin Calc – Cool skinnable calculator.
Spybot – Spyware removal tool.
Stickies – Post it notes for your desktop.
StickiesforWindows – Post it notes for your desktop.
Synergy – Synergy is like dual monitors, a kvm switch, and vnc on speed! If you want to operate multiple machines with one keyboard and mouse, move files between them, and have both screens at your disposal this is for you. Works between platforms also!
Sysmetrix – Very cool skinnable clock system meters with weather, email, and trash indicators as well as music playback.
Task Scheduler – Task Schedule replacement.
Tugzip – Zip/archive application. Really nice and opens most everything including rar.
UBCD4Win – UBCD4Win is a bootable CD which contains software that allows you to repair/restore/diagnostic almost any computer problem. Also see Win/Linux Version.
UltraExplorer – File Explorer replacement.
Unxutils – Linux/Unix command line tools, like grep, written natively for Windows.
VSpeech – Voice command your Windows computer.
WikidPad – wikidPad is a real-time wiki. wikidPad is not a web server, or application server, or groupware solution. wikidPad is a standalone notepad like application, albeit notepad on steroids. wikidPad is like an IDE for your thoughts.
ZScreen – ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program that allows for region/window/full-screen screenshots. It can FTP screenshots and put the URL in your clipboard in a single keystroke. It supports automatic custom naming conventions with variables. It can also interface with image editing software. It is a C#.NET 2.0 program hosted on Sourceforge.net and built by BrandonZ (inf1ni).
Zipeg – Zipeg allows you to open and explore content of zip, rar and other archives, preview files and images before you extract/unzip them. Extract only the files you want. Zip thru photo archives. See image thumbnails. Zipeg allows you to decide what do you want to extract. You can choose what to extract and where to put extracted files or just drag and drop them.
Zipgenious – Zip utility that supports all the major archive types, zip, s7, gz, etc. Skinnable.
PearPC – Run Mac OS X or Linux on Windows !
VirtualBox – VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

Rating: 9.7/10 (6 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Portable Applications Suite

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:09:50 +0000

This is part 11 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Portable Applications Suites

PortableApps – Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer via USB Flash device, iPod, or portable hard disk, and it works like a start menu. Includes Firefox, Open Office, VideoLan, to name a few.
Lupo PenSuite – Lupo PenSuite mashes up a familiar looking menu with a huge offering of applications. Taking a note from the LiberKey school of portable suite production, Lupo PenSuite throws everything at you but the kitchen sink.
Geek.Menu – Geek.Menu is a branch in the PortableApps development tree. Geek.Menu uses the same convenient installation files from PortableApps.com that the original PortableApps suite uses. The layout is similar but Geek.Menu has several key enhancements.

LiberKey – It might not have the polished menu found in the PortableApps suite, but its menu is functional and conveniently arranged by program type. And 250 programs packed under the hood.

Rating: 10.0/10 (7 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Programming

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:07:58 +0000

This is part 10 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Programming

Frhed – Hex editor.
ActiveGrid Studio – ActiveGrid Studio enables developers to rapidly build enterprise-level Web 2.0 applications with a minimum of training, time, and effort. Supports Java, PHP, Python. Database supports is the best I’ve seen in an open IDE. Has built in Python and Java environments plus a built in running Apache web server. Highly recommended.
Aptana – Development environment geared towards web development, Ajax style! Autocomplete and assistance for HTML, CSS, Java Script.

Balthisar Cascade 2.0 – CSS level 2 editor available for the Windows platform.
BlitzMax IDE – Basic programming IDE for use with the Blitz game development environment.
Boa Constructor – A visual GUI designer and IDE for Python
Code:Blocks – The IDE with all the features you need, having a consistent look, feel and operation across platforms.
Cooktop – XML editor.
Cream – A modern configuration of the powerful and famous Vim, with full GUI.
Eclipse – Eclipse java IDE for Windows. It can be extended into many other platforms.
Entice – Entice Designer is a Form Designer for DFL and a rich code editor, and is on the path to becoming an IDE. D programming language
Envelop VBasic – Visual Basic clone; compiles to exe, gui designer!
FarPy – Awesome wxPython and .Net GUI designer.
Flashdevelop – Actionscript 2 IDE with seamless swfmill and MTASC integration. FlashDevelop is the first alternative opensource IDE to feature AS3 & MXML completion, including Flex2 compiler integration (the best compiler integration after Adobe FB) and AS3 syntax checking. Highly recommended. Requires .Net.
GNUStep objective C – Objective C lib, compilers, etc.
Groovy – Groovy is an agile, dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine. Groovy includes features found in Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk, but uses syntax similar to the Java programming language.
Haste – Haskell TurboEdit – is an IDE for the functional programming language Haskell, written in Haskell.
IronPythonIDE – IronPython IDE is a GUI application written in C#. It is dedicated to the IronPython language which is a .NET implementation of the Python language. It is aimed at providing a nice, easy, full featured development environment for IronPython. Read up on or download IronPython.
IronPythonStudio – IronPython Studio is a free full IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the Python programming language. It is based on the existing IronPython example that is included in the VS SDK. IronPython Studio is based on the Visual Studio 2008 Shell runtime (royalty free) and can be installed without requiring any version of Visual Studio.
Komodo Edit – Free, feature-rich editor for JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Lazarus – Delphi/Kylix like programming environment using Pascal, compiles to exe and includes gui designer.!
NVU – HTML wysiwyg editor, supports CSS, Javascript, etc. Highly recommended.
Netbeans – IDE with the following features and language support Ajax | C/C++ | Databases | Debugger | Desktop | Editor | GUI Builder | Java EE | Java ME | Java SE | Javascript | Mobile | Profiler | Refactor | REST | Rich Client Platform | Ruby | SOA | SOAP | UML | Web | WSDL | XML.
OpenLaszlo – Flash creation, plus much more. Kind of like Macromedia Flex. For everything you need for this visit my Laszlo article.
PyScripter – A very powerful, full featured, professional Python IDE written in Delphi. Highly recommended.
Python Enthought edition – Scientific power packed Python install! This has wxWindows installed by default.
Python for Photoshop – Python Actions Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop
Python programming language! – So much power and easy to pick up! Has an included programming editor/IDE called PythonWin.exe
RadRails – Ruby On Rails IDE.
Rec – Decompiler, breaks exe files into C/C++ code.
SPE – If your a Python programmer working on Mac or Windows and your looking for a kick ass IDE Spe is for you! Highly recommended.
Scite – A free source code editor for Win32 and X.
Selenium – Web application test tool. Tests run directly in a browser, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Firefox. Supported platforms Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Languages include C#, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.
Sepy – Flash Actionscript IDE. This is really nice! Has class list, auto complete, and compiler. Highly recommended.
SharpDevelop – IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft’s .NET platform..
SimpleCSS – CSS Editor.
Spket – IDE for JavaScript, XUL/XBL and Yahoo! Widget development. It provides features like code completion, syntax highlighting and content outline that helps developers productively create efficient JavaScript code. Supports Laszlo and Silverlight. Requires Java.
TSWebeditor – HTML/PHP IDE. Has FTP, projects, and css support built in. Very nice! Highly recommended.
Vex – Vex is an editor for XML documents. The “visual” part comes from the fact that Vex hides the raw XML tags from the user, providing instead a wordprocessor-like interface. Because of this, Vex is best suited for “document-style” XML documents such as XHTML and DocBook rather than “data-style” XML documents.
WXWindows – BOA uses wxWindows backend
Webniac – HTML editor, CSS, ETC.
Xerlin – XML editor.
Xinha – HTML editor also has a Firefox extension.
ConText – Programmers text editor, supports most languages, shell scripts, plugin support.
Crimson editor – Programmers text editor. Features tabbed interface, html, php, c, python syntax highlighting, code output window, and built in FTP! Highly recommended.
Jedit – Jedit is a mature and well-designed programmer’s text editor with a big focus on Java. Has nice Jython support!
Notepad++ – Notepad replacement with tabs, plugins, no file size limit. Highlights many langauges included Python, Java, Html, etc. Highly Recommended.
AutoIt – task automation programming
SciTE4AutoIt3 – text editor for AutoIt
AutoHotkey – task automation
PHP Designer – PHP editor
PSPad – text editor
FoxEditor – text editor
Elfima Notepad – text editor
Notepad2 – text editor
Nvu – HTML editor
Alleycode – HTML editor
BlockNote – web page editor
Weaverslave – web page editor
TortoiseSVN – the best windows SVN client at your finger tips.
Visual Web Developer Express – A free edition of Visual Studio with the features of a full phase .Net web development IDE. A must have.

Rating: 10.0/10 (6 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Network and Internet

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:04:45 +0000

This is part 9 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Network

Open SSH – SSH Remote administration.
Putty – Telnet/SSH application.
RRDTool – The industry standard data logging and graphing application. Use it to write your custom monitoring shell scripts or create whole applications using its Perl, Python or PHP bindings. RRD is the acronym for Round Robin Database. It is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average).

TeraTerm – Terminal.
TightVNC – Remote desktop tool.
VNC – Remote desktop tool.
WinSCP – SCP for Windows. It’s a very good one.
UltraVNC – UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it.
Netstumbler – Network Stumbler is a neat little program that allows you to see all the available Wi-Fi access points and networks that are in range of you and your active Wi-Fi computer. Network Stumbler is for desktop and laptop machines, and Mini Stumbler is the equivalent for the Wi-Fi enabled PDA.
Hamachi – VPN client
RealVNC – remote control
Ethereal – local area network administration
The Dude – network administration
Wireshark – network administration
Angry IP Scanner – IP scanner
IP-Tools – IP scanner
Free Port Scanner – IP scanner
NetMeter – network bandwidth monitoring

Internet

FrostWire – Next Generation of the Fastest P2P Program. Recommended.
BitTorrent – BitTorrent downloading!
BitTyrant – BitTorrent protocol compatible client. Faster than traditional BitTorrent, read more on their site.
Burst – A bittorrent creation and management tool! Highly recommended.
UTorrent – Ultimate Bittorrent Application. Highly recommended.
BitComet – torrent client
BitTornado – torrent client
DC++ – Direct Connect network client
PeerGuardian – IP blocker
Miranda – chat client
MSN Messenger – chat client
Yahoo Messenger – chat client
QIP – chat client
JAJC – chat client
HydraIRC – IRC client
Talkative IRC – IRC client
IceChat – IRC client
Google Talk – VOIP client
VoipStunt – VOIP client
Gizmo – VOIP client
Wengo – VOIP client
Bid O Magic – EBay bidding/selling utility.
Chronicle Lite – Blog client that works with xmlrpc – works with Drupal and any other blogapi supporting blog.
Ekiga – Ekiga (formely known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME. Ekiga uses both the H.323 and SIP protocols. It supports many audio and video codecs, and is interoperable with other SIP compliant software and also with Microsoft NetMeeting.
EmailXT – EmailXT is an open, patent-free protocol that replaces your current email with a more secure, full-featured system. EmailXT is a relationship-based email system where unauthorized bulk emailing is no longer possible. No more spam and mass mailing viruses. You don’t need spam filters or service subscriptions any more.
FeedDemon – RSS Feed reader. Get your news and information instantly. Customize the way you read and organize feeds. Feeds are stored on NewsGator. I highly recommend this and NewsGator.
Feedreader – News aggregator that supports RSS and ATOM formats.
FireFox Tune – This will automatically tune Firefox for speed
Flock – Web browser based on Firefox with social networking utilities built in.
Digsby – All in one instant messanger and social networking client. Highly recommended.
Gaim – Chat client. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.
IM2 – Chat client. Works with Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ, IRC. Features voice\video and encrypted chat. Skinnable
Pidgin – Multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once, used to be Gaim. Supports all the major IMs
Gizmoproject – Internet Phone. Gizmo Project uses your internet connection (broadband or dial-up) to make calls to other computers.
Jap – Anonymous proxy. JAP makes it possible to surf the internet anonymously and unobservably.
Juice – If you want to listen to podcasts, this program is for you.
Kmelon – Web browser, very lightweight.
Maxthon – Web browser, similar to Firefox, but uses the Internet Explorer backend and settings.
MegaTrack – MegaTrack is an application that tracks Atlantic and eastern Pacific tropical storms. It uses the HSQLDB engine and is updated from the tropical storm data repository from the Unisys weather center.
Mozilla – Web applications like Thunderbird mail client, Firefox web browser, SeaMonkey and Sunbird Calendar. Highly recommended.
Opera – Web browser.
Pegasus Mail – Email client, very mature and feature rich.
RSS Owl – RSS news reader.
RSSBandit – News aggregator that supports RSS and ATOM formats. Requires .Net
SFLphone – The SFLphone project aims to provide a multi-platform, multi-protocol (SIP/IAX2), and multi-GUI desktop VoIP phone.
Semagic – Blog clent for Live journal. Has the best features for Lj.
Skype – Internet phone. Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. Its free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers so your not limited to call friends using the same operating system. Skype also has other services that allow the calling of actual phone number and cells, plus video options for a small price.
Snarfer – RSS with very powerful features, like search, web broswer, sharing, and embedded video playback. Highly Recommended.
Speak-freely – Voice over ip, Internet phone.
BlogDesk – Blog client, in my opinion it is the best one around. Supports Drupal, Word Press, Live Journal, and many other blog types and even FTPs files and tags them with either link or image. Too many features to list here, highly recommended application.
Windows Live Writer – Powerful Blog client from Microsoft. Supports Drupal, Word Press, Live Journal, and many other blog types and even FTPs files and tags them with either link or image.
Zoomify – Flash image gallery creation.
Avant Browser – web browser
PopTray – check for emails
Free Download Manager – download manager
FlashGet – download manager
WellGet – download manager
WGET – commandline download manager
HTTrack – offline browser
WebReaper – offline browser
Yeah Reader – RSS reader
GreatNews – Excellent RSS reader
FavBackup – Handy little stand alone application, FavBackup, can actually do the job easier and it can also backup Chrome, Opera, Safari, Flock, and Internet Explorer as well!
TweetDeck – The best multi column twitter desktop client around
Seesmic Desktop – Only other alternative to TweetDeck
Twhirl – One of the most popular Twitter Desktop Client
Destroy Twitter – Regardless what the name is, it is a very tiny and effective twitter desktop client

Rating: 10.0/10 (5 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Miscellaneous

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:01:58 +0000

This is part 8 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Miscellaneous

Doubletype – Font creation application.
Fontforge – Font creation application. Requires Cygwin.
Gourmet – Recipe Manager is a simple but powerful recipe-managing application.

SpeQ Mathematics – mathematics program
TimeTo – to better organize your work, or your entire life.
Dia – diagram creation program
Google Earth – explore the world
NASA World Wind – 3D virtual globe
Celestia – explore the space
Stellarium – planetarium
grabMotion – webcam capture
iDailyDiary – simple page-for-a-day diary
Pivot Stickfigure Animator – create stick-figure animations
Scribus – professional page layout
FreeMind – mind mapping software

Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Finance

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:59:56 +0000

This is part 7 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Finance

Grisbi – Personal accounting application.
HomeBank – HomeBank is free software. Use it to manage your personal accounts. It is designed to easy to use. Analyze your finances in detail using powerful filtering tools and graphs.

JMoney – Personal banking and accounting app.
Quasar – Nice replacement for Quickbooks.
TurboCash – Accounting personal finance software.

Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Databases

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:58:18 +0000

This is part 6 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Databases

MySQL – Most popular SQL Database.
Postgresql – SQL database. Heavy duty relational database.
SQLCC – GUI Frontend for mySQL.

GnuLedger – Open source financial solution. GnuLedger includes all of the functionality that home users need to manage their finances.
SQLite – Super fast and free file based database platform

Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)

Best Windows Freeware – Multimedia Tools

Ruhani Rabin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:56:58 +0000

This is part 5 of 14 in the series Best Windows Freeware

Multimedia Tools

Audacity – Wav editor with VST support and can export to mp3. Highly recommended.
Cdexos – CDex a CD-Ripper, thus extracting digital audio data from an Audio CD. The application supports many Audio encoders, like MPEG (MP2,MP3), VQF, AAC encoders. Highly recommended.
Ephpod – Copy iPod music to your PC.

Flac – Lossless audio compression tool. Rips tracks without the quality loss like you find in mp3 format.
Foobar2000 – Audio player.
Gungirl Sequencer – Gungirl Sequencer is an easy to use Audiosequencer. It includes a simple Filemanager and uses Drag & Drop to arrange Audiosamples.
Hydrogen – Drum and synth application like Fruityloops.
Hymn – The purpose of the Hymn Project is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. The various software provided on this web site allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions with no loss of sound quality. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes and on hardware not supported by Apple.
Jazzware – Midi sequencer
Kristal – Powerful multi-track recorder, audio sequencer and mixer – ideal for anyone wanting to get started with recording, mixing and mastering digital audio. KRISTAL Audio Engine is free for personal, educational and non-commercial use.
Media Player Classic – Media Player Classic looks like the original Windows Media Player, but with more codex support. Tons of other downloads can be found here also, audio and video…
Mixx – Dj software.
Neuromixer – Neuromixer Innovative software solutions for visual artists and musicians for live video production.
Ogg Vorbis – Ogg is like an open source version of mp3. They list many ripping, playing, and utilities on their site also for use with this format. I like it better than mp3.
QCD – MP3/Ogg player and OGG encoder plugin Screw MP3 – rip to OGG!!! Better and free! Highly recommended.
Razorlame – Audio to mp3 ripper. Uses Lame Encoder
Resolution AXS – AXS is a combination of an analog synthesizer, a sampler, two effect units and a sequencer.
Skale – This is a Freeware Music Creation Program, This means you can create your own music with this software completely for free. All you need is your creativity and a big bunch of good sound samples to create all you want.
Songbird – Desktop Web player, digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like FirefoxÂÂ®, it is built from MozillaÂÂ®, cross-platform and open source. Reminds me a bit of Amarok. Also runs on OS X and Linux. Very nice player indeed!
Traverso – Cross platform multitrack audio recording and editing suite, with an innovative and easy to master User Interface. It’s suited for both the professional and home user, who needs a robust and solid DAW.
Wavosaur – Wavosaur is a free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing, processing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files. Wavosaur has all the features to edit audio (cut, copy, paste, etc.) produce music loops, analyze, record, batch convert. Wavosaur supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing.
XMPlay – Really nice music player with plugin support. Supports all the major formats.
Zinf – Mp3/Ogg player, skinnable.
MediaPortal – MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch your video’s and DVD’s, view, schedule and record live TV and much more.
SesamTV – SesamTV is an freeware application ideal for turning your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch your video’s and DVD’s, view, schedule and record live TV and much more.
XBMC – XBMC media center is a free cross-platform media-player jukebox and entertainment hub.
Yamipod – YamiPod is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation. Take a look at the feature list to find out what it can do and feel free to suggest anything that might be missing.
AVI Maker – Makes avi video from images.
Avidemux – Video editor.
Creatoon – 2D cartoon animation application.
DVDFlick – DVD Flick aims to be a simple but at the same time powerful DVD Authoring tool. It can take a number of video files stored on your computer and turn them into a DVD that will play back on your DVD player, Media Center or Home Cinema Set. You can add additional custom audio tracks as well as subtitles of your choice. Highly recommended.
DVDShrink – DVD ripper (rips encripted discs) that compresses for burning to DVD-r/CD-r. The best DVD backup tool I could find. Highly recommended.
DVDStyler – DVDStyler is a cross-platform DVD authoring application that makes possible for video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs.
Democracy Player – Best damned video player! Play virtually any video– Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more. Video blog, YouTube, hell it does everything including BitTorrent.
Dorgem – Video/webcam capture.
Dr Divx – Officially the unofficial DivX encoding tool to create DivX media files for playback on DivX hardware and software players.
Griffith – Movie collection manager, which fetches movie info, supports cover art, etc.
Jahshaka – Video editor for Windows. Very nice.
K-Lite Codec Pack – Just about every codex you will ever need in Windows XP (Vista?). Also provides DVD (encrypted) playback in Windows Media Player. Highly recommended!
MPEG Streamclip – Video converter/editor.
Mediacoder – MediaCoder is an open source universal audio/video batch transcoder (converter), which puts together lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution.
Movica – Video editor.
MuteVJ – Mute is VJ software which aims to facilitate improvised, unique visuals.
StopMojo – StopMojo is cross-platform stop-motion animation suite designed to aid in the creation of stop-motion animations. Currently it includes a capture program supporting capture of image files from various video capture devices, overlay of previous frames (onion skinning), and export to AVI and QUICKTIME video formats.
Super – If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file SUPER © is all you need.
Synfig – Cartoon animation – industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. Highly Recommended.
TransCoder – Video/DVD ripping and conversion tools.
VeohTV – VeohTV is a free specialized video browser that turns online video into Internet Television. Watch video from thousands of web sites, in one easy-to-use full screen application. Watch streaming video from major television networks such as Fox and CBS, to independently-produced content available on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Veoh.com and MySpace. Highly recommended.
VideoLan – Movie player, plays most everything including DVD!
Videora iPhone – Convert video to iPod/iPhone format. Cues to iTunes for easy syncing. Highly recommended.
Virtualdub – Video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms.
WinMorph – Morphing app for video. Also look at Wax and Wink.
XMM – MeD’s Movie Manager is a simple to use, yet customizable, movie manager. Info is automatically retrieved from IMDb and tv.com. Technical info can also be retrieved from media files like AVI, OGM, MPEG and DVD (ifo). It’s written in Java and should therefore run on most desktop systems supporting Java.
WinAmp – audio player
1by1 – audio player
JetAudio – audio player
XMPlay – audio player
Xion – audio player
Apollo – audio player
MediaMonkey – music organizer
The GodFather – music organizer
WavePad – audio converter
Kristal Audio Engine – audio editor
Exact Audio Copy – CD ripper
Mp3 Tag Tools – tag editor
Mp3tag – tag editor
Taggin’ MP3 – tag editor
Monkey’s Audio – APE compressor/decompressor
mpTrim – mp3 editor
WavTrim – wave editor
EncSpot Basic – analyse mp3 files
MV2Player – video player
CrystalPlayer 1.95 – video player
Zoom Player – video player
GOM Player – video player
viPlay – video player
DSPlayer – video player
CamStudio – video screen recording
AviSplit – Avi splitter
Video mp3 Extractor – rip audio from video files
Free iPod Converter – convert all popular video formats to iPod video
iDump – This program will allow you transfer your songs from your iPod to a PC, iDump does come wrapped in installer but you can simply drop the .exe in the root directory on your iPod and run it from there

Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)