5 New and Notable WordPress Plugins

Guest post by Loir. The stream of new and excellent WordPress plugins is never-ending, with dozens of new plugins being released each week and countless talented plugin authors working on new creations constantly, there are simply too many plugins out there to try them all, even though sites such as Weblog Tools Collection can help.

With that in mind, here’s a list of relatively new plugins for WordPress that may be worth trying. By no means is this a complete list, even with its short time frame of being released in September, but they are definitely some of the more exciting plugins to have been released for the world’s most popular blogging platform.

1. Google Scrbe
Google Scribe is the new product from Google Labs designed to help make your typing faster by auto completing your words and sentences with Google’s prediction technology. Though not perfect, it’s become very popular in some circles and has spawned a simple but effective WordPress plugin that lets you use Google Scribe as you type out your posts.  You may also want to check out another Google Scribe plugin that adds the feature to your site’s comment box, letting your visitors take advantage of it.

2. Ozh’ Spam Magnet Checker
Ever wonder which of your posts are generating the most spam? Prolific WordPress plugin developer Ozh has released his Spam Magnet Checker, which tells you exactly which posts are most attractive to the spam bots. You might use this information to block comments on certain posts, especially older ones with high spam volumes or simply be aware of the types of content that attracts the spam bots.

3. Haiku
There are dozens of audio players desgined to make life easier for podcasters using WordPress but Haiku is a minimalist HTML5 player that uses text “play” and “stop” links to start and stop audio files. Easy to integrate into any post, Haiku requires no version of Flash Player (or any other plugin) to work and can be used in any HTML5 compliant browser.

4. IE9 Pinned Site
One of the more important features of the new beta of Internet Explorer 9 is the ability to “pin” sites to the taskbar the same as if they were applications. This plugin makes it easy for you or your visitors to take advantage of this feature and quickly access recent posts and other parts of the site. Great for popular blogs or mission-critical sites that users may want quick access to at all times.

5. OrangeSoda Keyword Density
If you need a little bit of help with your SEO, OrangeSoda Keyword Density can help by providing a quick, free tool for getting the keyword density on your post as you work on your new posts. Great, for ensuring that you are targeting the correct keywords and a possible free replacement for some of Scribe’s features.

Keep in mind though that, even with the very limited timeframe for these plugins to have been published, there are still many dozens of other great plugins that didn’t get a mention. Your best bet is to visit the WordPress Plugin Directory regularly and stay on top of what’s new.

You don’t want to miss the plugin that could either save you a ton of work or improve your site in ways you can’t currently imagine.

This post was written by Lior who works for Producteev, an online task management company. You can also share your WordPress tip and hacks and write guest articles here.

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