If you are selling ads directly, you may have been frustrated with the excessive time involved managing your ads. Not only do you have to find advertisers to sponsor your blog, you have to manually edit your template to put the ad in, and then head over to your favorite calendar app to set an alert to remind you when to take the ad down.

Time consuming practices like those are a thing of the past. The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently, leaving you with more time to write new posts. The plugin adds a new “Ads” menu to the WordPress admin, featuring submenus for tweaking display settings and adding and removing ads.

You can show as many ads as you want, and in either manual or random order. Keep track of how many times an ad is clicked. When creating a new ad, you don’t have to calculate the end date yourself. Just input how many days you wish the ad to run for, and the correct date will be applied. The ad will be automatically taken down when the time comes.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp125/

AskApache Password Protect adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog.  Not only does it protect your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. plugins as well. This Plugin will make alot of the bots out there stop coming back. You just choose a username and password and you are done. It writes the .htaccess file, without messing it up. It also encrypts your password and creates the .htpasswd file, as well as setting the correct security-enhanced file permissions on both.

Imagine a huge brick wall protecting your frail .php scripts from the endless attacks of automated web robots and password-guessing exploit-serving virii.  Forget spam, these millions of zombie bots are too outrageous to ignore, they are attempting known (but strangely outdated) exploits looking for known vulnerabilities against blogs and other Internet software.  Sooner or later some poor blogger is going to miss an upgrade and become a victim to this type of video-game-like-attack.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.askapache.com/wordpress/htaccess-password-protect.html

StatPress is the real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect statistics information. Using StatPress you could spy your visitors while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories. In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).

Pricing: Free
Requirements: 2.0.2+
Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress/

Many people want to change their permalink structure, for example,
From /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
To /%category%/%postname%/

But doing so will make all pages indexed by search engines become invalid,moreover, losing visitors from other sites or bookmarks that links to you.

There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permenantly moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one. It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect. When you do this, Search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank.you will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.

By now, you know how can you change your permalinks without losing the traffic you’re already getting. You can download this Permalink Migration Plugin to achieve this for you.

This plugin will generates a “301 Redirect” when user or spider visit your site through old permalinks,and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post. Permalinks Migration Plugin allows you safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

WP JS Wordpress plugin Allows the developers to compress (using JSMIN algorithm and GZIP) JavaScript files as well as concatenate them into a single file easily. This will make websites faster and improve the user’s experience. Cache expiry time is can also be set in the admin page.

Let’s say we have the famous prototype and script.aculo.us JavaScript libraries. This is in total of 8 files and 247KB files size. Lets say we GZIP each file separately this turns the total into 63KB (74% decrease), which is a good decrease in size. However the user would still have to download 8 files. WP JS turns the files into a mere 45KB (82% decrease) download for the user. This plugin allows you push JavaScript development in terms of modularization and download sizes for Wordpress.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.halmatferello.com/lab/wp-js/

Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin keeps your website downloads organised, and provide means to monitor the amount of downloads a file has, along with an easy method of linking to those files using special tags. This plugin only uses 1 database table to store download information, uploaded downloads are stored in their own directory. Don’t want to upload? You can add links to existing downloads, and track them, also. Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin has got some new features e.g. Download Categories, Member only downloads, Localization support as well.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.0+
Source: http://blue-anvil.com/archives/wordpress-download-monitor…

My Top Commentators is a plugin that allows a blogger to discover who are the most active commentators on his blog (via the WordPress Dashboard, so other people will not see this information). You can also use different time frames for this, so you can see the top commentators: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days,This month, Last month, This year, Last year.

Secondly, you can also see all the comments left by a single person, and edit or delete them via the plugin interface. People that comment often on your blog are your most loyal readers, so it would be useful to know exactly who they are.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/my-top-commentators-wordpress-plugin/

The idea of BuddyPress is to take a standard vanilla installation of WordPress MU and turn it into something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network. BuddyPress is essentially a set of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin adds a distinct feature (or component) to BuddyPress and only handles functionality for that specific component (for example, private messaging). The standard features of BuddyPress are:

Extended Profiles

The extended profile component allows site admins to create specific profile fields for their members to fill in. They can create as few or as many profile fields as they like, be as specific or vague as they want. Profile fields can then be grouped.

Personal Blog

This is everything WordPress has to offer for publishing a blog. The only difference is that all administration tabs will be moved underneath a “Blog” tab. A Member’s blog will also appear under “/membername/blog/” or /membername.domain.com/blog” rather than at the root.

Private Messaging

BuddyPress private messaging works like internal site email. Members can message people on their friends list as well as forward and reply to received messages.

Friends

Members of a BuddyPress social network can be connected together by one member adding another as a “friend” and then the other member accepting the friend request.

Groups

Groups in BuddyPress are a gathering of members, blog posts, photos and any other user generated content.

The Wire

This is a place where friends can come along and post to a members profile. This would be a short message and could include a picture and some basic HTML. The TinyMCE editor will be used to allow for basic formatting.

Status Updates

Status updates in BuddyPress will appear on a member’s profile page. A member can update their status as frequently as they want to. All status updates are logged in a member’s activity log.

Albums

Members of a BuddyPress installation will be able to create their own photo albums. These albums can be shared with friends and groups. Each member is given a certain amount of space, which can be set by the site administrator.

As each one is a separate plugin, there is no reason why site admins can’t pick and choose which components they want and don’t want. There is also no reason why additional components couldn’t be written, or other existing WordPress plugins be used alongside.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://buddypress.org

Comment Info Tip is a WordPress plugin that provides you and your commenter’s a bit of information on their posting stats. When you mouseover a commenter’s name you will see a tip appear displaying some information about that given commenter. The tip will display 1 of 4 results:

• If the commenter has only posted once then it will say so in the tip (see number 1 in the legend below).
• If the commenter has posted more than once we will look up the last three posts they have commented in and display links to those posts. This allows you to see which type of posts this user is interested in and easily navigate to those posts (see number 2 in the legend below).
• If the commenter has posted more than once we will attempt to search their RSS feed and show an excerpt from their last post (see number 3 in the legend below).
• If it’s a pingback or trackback the tip will indicate so (see number 4 in the legend below).

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.search-this.com/2008/05/05/wordpress-plugin-comment-info-tip/

Skribit provides bloggers with the ability to receive real-time, user-generated suggestions directly from their readers via an east-to-install blog application. Not only does Skribit help bloggers understand their readers, but Skribit also helps facilitate an interactive reader-writer blogging community. Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.

Bloggers install the Skribit application into their blogs in four easy steps. Once the application has been installed, your readers can either login to Skribit or anonymously submit questions and suggestions to you. They can even vote on their own suggestions encouraging you to write about what interests them most. Currently, Skribit is under private beta at the moment. But, you can still register for an account, and they will notify you via email as soon as we open up Skribit to the public.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://skribit.com/