Meet Binny (blog), a geek at heart who wakes up to his twin monitor PC to do what he is best at – to code.

The first time I heard about this guy, he was releasing 6 WordPress plugins a week. ‘Holy crap, You must be kidding me’, that’s what I thought. What I heard was true. That was in the August of 2008.

This year again, he did the same madness. A week of plugin shower. 7 plugins in a row.

Here are @binnyva‘s collection of plugins

Eventr WordPress Plugin for Event Registration

This plugin can add a event registration feature to any WordPress blog. You can accept registrations and create a page of registered users. This plugin was originally created to manage registrations for BlogCamp Kerala 2008, and later was used for BarCamp Kerala registration too.

Pollin WordPress Plugin

Pollin lets you add polls to your blog. Can be easily inserted to any post or page using a short code. Looks neat. See a demo here.

Surveys WordPress Plugin

Add Surveys and manage them from within WordPress admin. You can insert surveys easily to any post or page using a short code.

Quizzin WordPress Plugin

Add quizzes to your posts or pages using this plugin. Can be added using a short code. Designed for maximum ease.

Quartz WordPress Plugin

Show random quotes or links or tips to visitors. The input quotes or tips can be done manually one after the other from the admin side or from a text file (that’s quite convenient).

Autofields WordPress Plugin

Filling up WordPress custom fields and excerpts is boring and tiring, this plugin makes it a bit easier by doing it for you. It fills the excerpt with the first paragraph of your post and fills up a custom field for image with the first image uploaded. Useful for themes that uses image as custom field like most of the StudioPress Themes.

Weather Man WordPress Plugin

Weather Man uses Yahoo Weather API to display weather of any place as a Sidebar Widget or you can merge it with posts using a short code. Travel and Tourism Blog owners, take note. See a demo.

MiniCart WordPress Plugin

Add a shopping cart or a Donate Button to any post or page using this plugin. You can create a item, which can be a product or a service and then insert the checkout button using a short code at the end of any post. See the instructions for more details. Demo.

Gallifrey Image Gallery WordPress Plugin

Once installed, Gallifrey will over ride WordPress default gallery and work with transition effects in place of it. It uses smart image loading, which loads the images only after the rest of the page is loaded. Watch a Demo.

(Plugins following this are not WordPress plugins, but were released during Plugin Week 2)

Web 2.0 Shadows – GIMP Plugin

Its a GIMP Plugin that will add a shadow and background to your work.

Page Ad – Drupal Plugin

Drupal is yet another Content Management System, just like WordPress. Usually its more used for Websites, WordPress rules the blogging world.

This plugin lets you control ads on Drupal and lets you create page specific ads. Tested on Drupal 5.

Export To WordPress -  Joomla Plugin

This piece of code will create a WordPress importable export from Joomla. (Joomla is a CMS, just like WordPress and Drupal). Moving to WordPress from Joomla? This is for you!

Link Code Insert – A GreaseMonkey UserScript

For Firefox users, with Greasemonkey installed, this piece of code will let you insert the html code for a link. Install the script, select some text and press Ctrl + Alt + A,  <a href=”"> and </a> will be inserted around the text. Makes it easy to add html links anywhere online.

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Leave a Comment: 13 Days of Plugin Shower

Frequency of Updates, Reader Feedback and an active Community, these are the elements that distinguishes a blog from a Website. And when you have all these factors right, you are on the right track to success. It’s easy to control Frequency, but the User Feedback greatly depends on the Community around the blog.

Building a Community involves deep rooted networking, and lots of Community love. A community is something that grows along with the blog, the bigger the community, the bigger the blog as a whole. Here are some amazing WordPress plugins that will help you in building the community around your blog. All of them are hand-picked!

Building Blocks for your Community

These wordpress Plugins will help you network better and stay in touch with your readers. Networking is the key to build a great community!

Thank me later: This wordpress plugin automatically sends a customized message to every commentator. The plugin can be configured to send any number of emails; I have set it to one, so when someone leaves a comment here for the first time an email is sent. The concept of the plugin is to send a thank you note after a defined period of time. I have left enough time so that I can reply to a comment before the note reaches the person.

Make sure that the email address from which the mail is sent is a valid email id. Many readers have contacted me directly by replying to the thank you note and that’s a great way to start a conversation! It’s a highly customizable plugin.

Subscribe to Comments: You will see a tick box below the comment box that reads, ‘Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail’. That’s this plugin in action. This plugin lets a commentator subscribe to comments and stay updated when someone replies to their comment. People seldom trace back their comments, but this plugin will make it easy for them to track the comments and come again to your site.

Top Commentator Widget: Its payback time! Thank your frequent commentators with a backlink and automate the process using this plugin. It stays on your sidebar and lists the frequent commentators. You can choose to reset the list weekly or monthly or never reset at all. Here, the list never resets, so the top stays at the top till someone else comes in!

Contact Form: A contact form is a must have for any blog. I have seen some contact pages with just the email address of the author. That’s useful when people are compelled to contact you, but a contact form will do more. It serves an invitation to contact you. Some of my readers often send me a ‘Hi’ note and I really appreciate that. Feel free to contact me here.

CommentLuv Plugin: This is yet another way of saying Thanks to the community. It inserts a link to the latest posts of the commentator and is quite a good way to lure in comments. But it makes the comment area look very linky and a bit messy. I love to keep my comments clean, so I don’t use it. Different people have different views, use if you like it. (See this post on DollarShower to see CommentLuv in action)

There are 4000+ WordPress plugins out there and I haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg. Do you know of another useful plugin? Share it here and serve the community?

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Leave a Comment: 5 Awesome Plugins for Community Building

The All-In-One SEO Plugin is one of the most popular plugins ever made for WordPress. And if you don’t have it, stop reading this, GO GET IT, because you are the only one who doesn’t have it yet!

The All in One SEO Pack is your virtual Search Engine Optimizer. It does all the dirty jobs of adding Meta tags, the Title tag, adding Meta keywords, adding post Description, avoiding indexing of duplicate pages (like Archives and Category pages) and other SEO stuffs that a normal blogger won’t like doing. And the best part; it’s all automated.

If you are not too much concerned about SEO, then you may not have tweaked the plugin, even though you already have it installed. The default installation is powerful enough, but it gets better with some extra tweaks. Exploiting something is so much fun!

Tweaking the All in One SEO Pack

The SEO plugin consists of two parts: Plugin Options Page, and a widget on the Post Editor. See the screenshots below and you will get an idea of what each page is meant to be. If you haven’t done anything yet to these pages, its time to start doing something now.

Add a Home Page Title

The Homepage title is the one line description of your blog; it need not be the same as the name of your blog. Tell the visitors what your blog is all about here. Include the keywords that would bring you traffic over a long period of time. And keep it short; don’t make it longer than 70 characters. This Title Appears on the Search Results and on the Browser Window when you are on the homepage.

The Plugin Options Page

Add Description and Keywords

The Homepage Title is for the readers, but the Description and the Keywords are for the Search Engines. Describe your Blog to the Search Engines and most importantly, add the most popular keywords on your site to the Keywords Section. Adding too many keywords lessens the keyword weight of each keyword, so include only the most important ones here.

No Index all the Duplicate pages

Did you know that on the web, there exists at least three copies of every post your write? Well, the funny thing is that it’s right within your blog! You have one copy on the homepage, one on archives page, and yet another on the category page, not to mention the additional copies on the tag pages. Remember, Google hates duplicate content so better noindex the duplicate pages. (See the arrows)

Add Post Title and Description

The Widget on the Post Editor

The Second Part of this WordPress SEO plugin is a widget on the Post Editor Page. Once the plugin is installed you will see the widget below every post of yours. Add the Title of the Post and a Description on this Widget. You have to do this every time you write a new post.  Adding a Keyword Rich, human-friendly hand-crafted description is important because Google uses this description on the Search Results page. So it acts like a Welcome message to a potential visitor. (See image below)

See the Description ( Below the title, in black )

Finally, Enter the Keywords

These are the keywords that go into the Meta keywords tag of the html of the page. It is said that Google no longer uses Meta keywords, anyhow, other Search Engines uses still uses them. Enter the keywords from the post here. If you do Keyword research, then this is the right place to enter the suggested keywords.

The SEO plugin is a quick solution to all your SEO needs. It’s a must have for every WordPress blog.

Download All In One SEO Pack

Thanks to Anand and Girish for contributing ideas to this article.

Update:

When Canonical URLs were introduced, a new check-box was added in the settings page, just above “Rewrite Titles”. Keep that check-box titled “Canonical URLs” ticked.

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Leave a Comment: Exploit All In One SEO Plugin in 5 Easy Steps