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(For more resources on WordPress see here.)

GD Star Rating

By Milan Petrovic (http://dev4press.com/)

• Why it’s awesome: Quickly adds ratings and ranking to your blog posts
• Why it was picked: Super easy to get running, offers lots of customizations

• Manual Install URL:
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-star-rating/
• Automatic Install search term: GD Star Rating
• Geek level: Newbie
• Configuration location: Top Navigation | GD Star Rating
• Used in: Posts, comments, pages

If you want to know what your readers like, then you need to allow them to quickly rate your individual posts and rank other readers’ comments; GD Star Rating does exactly this. Don’t be fooled by its deceptively simple outer shell. Those rating stars are backed by a massive administrative area that allows you to customize virtually every aspect of how a user rates your blog’s content. For example, you can change how the stars look, how many times to allow users to vote, where to display ratings, and much, much more. In addition to being crazily customizable, GD Star Rating also offers awesome analytics on who’s rating what, which items are popular, and virtually any other data point you could imagine.

Fixing the default ratings

Out of the box, GD Star Rating will include both a 10 Star Rating bar and a Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down ranking scale. Obviously, a post doesn’t need both, and 10 Star Rating will work just fine for all of our blog posts. The Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down will be great for our comments.

To access GD Star Rating’s main settings, visit GD Star Rating | Settings.

Turning off Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down on posts

Uncheck the checkbox next to For Individual Posts and For Individual Pages.

Turning off Star Ratings on comments

Uncheck the checkbox next to For Comments for Posts and For Comments for Pages.

Better Tag Cloud

By Nicolas Kuttler (http://www.nkuttler.de/)

• Why it’s awesome: It’s not really awesome, just wonderfully practical and create a nicely customizable TagCloud
• Why it was picked: Updated often, flexibility of placement, color customizations

• Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nktagcloud/
• Automatic Install search term: Better Tag Cloud
• Geek level: Newbie
• Configuration location: Settings | Better Tag Cloud
• Used in: Posts, pages, widgets

The Tag Cloud widget that comes with WordPress is very simple. Luckily, Nicolas Kuttler took the initiative to create a wonderful replacement. Not only does Better Tag Cloud give you a new widget, it also lets you include your tag cloud in posts and pages.

Use the shortcode [nktagcloud] to include Better Tag Cloud in a post or page.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

By Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (http://mitcho.com/)

• Why it’s awesome: Search engine optimization and increasing average time on site for you visitors
• Why it was picked: Accuracy of the relation algorithm
• Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/
• Automatic Install search term: YARPP
• Geek level: Newbie
• Configuration location: Settings | Related Posts (YARPP)
• Used in: Posts

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) helps your readers and the search engine bots to find other posts on your website that are similar to the one they are currently reading.

Once installed and activated, the YARPP plugin is virtually done. Check out one of your blog posts, and see if you like the results. Below the article will be a list of similar posts to the one you’re reading. While out of the box YARPP will satisfy 80 percent of the people, you should check out the YARPP settings, as it offers a ton of configuration options.