My list of recommended WordPress Plugins – Part III

This is the third post on the series, “My List of recommended WordPress Plugins”. In this post I wish to introduce the the four plugins that won the WordPress Plugin Competition hosted by Weblog Tools.

• The Grand Prize was won by the OneClick plugin by Anirudh Sanjeev. OneClick is a WordPress Plugin+Firefox Extension combo which allows you to install WordPress themes and plugins with one click. You can install plugins and themes directly from your browser by selecting the appropriate option from the right click context menu of Firefox.  You can also install plugins and themes from your Admin Interface by directly uploading the plugin package or by providing the url of the plugin. PlugInstaller(which I have already introduced) by Henning Schaefer also allows you do the same for plugins, but not for themes. Personally, I likePlugInstaller over OneClick, because it integrates with your default plugin manager and allows you to Install, Activate, Deactivate and Uninstall plugins, wheras OneClick only allows you to Install and remove plugins. PlugInstaller can be installed on Windows and Unix servers, but PlugInstaller works only on Unix servers.
• The second prize was won by the MyDashboard plugin by Barry. This is an excellent plugin that allows you to customize your WordPress Admin Dashboard with cool gadgets and feeds. The plugin is basically based on the idea of Personalized homepages provided by iGoogle, PageFlakes, Netvibes etc. It provides a number of standard gadgets that provides you all the data provided by your default wordpress dashboard. I strongly recommend this plugin.
• Keith Dsouza won the third prize with his WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I used this plugin to upgrade my blog from v2.2.1 to v2.2.3 and to the latest version (v2.3), yesterday. The plugin worked smooth and fast and saved me a lot of headaches. It creates a backup of your existing installation and database, and thus allow you to revert to the previous version, if something goes wrong. You can upgrade your blog to the latest version of wordpress, which will be automatically downloaded from the wordpress repository, in less than 5 minutes. I strongly recommend this plugin too.
• The consolation prize was awarded to  Ozh, creator of Who Sees Ads. This is an Ad Management plugin that allows you to specify who sees ads on your site. The plugin is similar to the Shylock Adsense plugin (which I have posted earlier) in some respects, but is more advanced and provides better configurability. While Shylock Adsense allowed you to specify the pages and ad position directly from the plugin’s options page, in Who Sees Ads, you have to manually insert the generated code by editing the required template files. If you are comfortable with HTML and PHP, then Who Sees Ads will be a much better option, else stick on to Shylock Adsense.
• Login LockDown by Michael VanDeMar is another plugin that I found interesting. This plugin was not a contestant at the WordPress Plugin Competition. Login LockDown is a security plugin for WordPress, that records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.

If you have read my previous posts in this series, then you would have tried the SpotMilk admin theme by Ceprix. It is one of the wordpress addons that I like the most. The theme was updated recently to include wordpress v2.3 compatibility and few other changes. I recommend you to upgrade to the latest version. Also don’t forget to upgrade to the latest version of Admin Drop Down Menu too.

NB: Before you try any of these, please backup your WordPress database. If you are not sure how to do that, then it is better not to try these. Do it at your own risk.