With over seven thousand plugins available, it’s understandable that we all can’t be on top of every single Wordpress plugin that is released.

Bloggers have done their part in putting forth an effort to share their opinions and shed light on useful plugins but I noticed a strange trend. The vast majority of the people blogging about plugins out there all seem to recommend the same ones. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read why I just have to have wp-super-cache (although I prefer W3 Total Cache) or   All-In-One SEO Pack,  I wouldn’t be rich but I would definitely have enough decent beer to make it through a weekend-long Chuck Norris movie marathon.

So over the past couple of weeks, I have dug deep in to the Plugin Directory and put together a small collection of plugins that I found helpful and sadly overlooked. From Twitter to diagnostic services, these plugins all bring a unique feature or service to the table that carries the potential to help improve your blog. All of these plugins have been tested and working on a clean install of Wordpress 2.8 and were also considered based upon performance and the (generally small) amount of system resources they use.

I hope you enjoy the plugins, I’ll be back shortly with another plugin-related article – what plugins I use on my Wordpress – as well as a list of must-have diagnostic, database and systems tools for Wordpress.

Now, on to the plugins…

WP Quote Tweet

WP Quote Tweet is a simple, lightweight plugin with one purpose in mind – to allow users to quote Tweets from within a Wordpress post. This is done by locating the tweet’s ID number and pasting it into a shortcode command. It does a nice job formatting the output and even gives you the option of choosing between 7 templates for the quote.

Stealth Login

Stealth Login is one of those things that just makes good sense. It gives you the ability to create custom URLs for logging in/out, administrating and registering for your blog. It’s best attribute is the ’stealth mode’ feature where direct access to login files is forbidden. It could be helpful in preventing a break in using a compromised password or a brute force bot attack since neither know where to go.

TPC! Memory Usage

Similar to System Health, TPC! Memory Usage is a diagnostics and monitoring tool for your Wordpress. It displays both current and peak memory usage via a thermometer and system allowances/settings (including Wordpress and PHP memory limit) on the dashboard and pertinent server and database information as well as basic and notification settings on a back-end module. TPC! Memory Usage can be set up to monitor your blog’s memory usage and e-mail you if it reaches a pre-defined threshold which is a great feature.  After using both System Health and now TPC!,  I have to give TPC the nod based on its memory usage monitoring abilities, especially the notification feature.

Pretty Link

Pretty Link is one of the coolest plugins I have seen in some time. The primary function of the plugin is to act as a URL shortener (like bit.ly) so you (and your visitors) can take long URLs and shorten them to something similar to http://www.youdomain/ab123 . It includes numerous URL features and variables like full-fledged URL shortening scripts including temporary or permanent redirects and nofollow links. Pretty Link doesn’t stop there though. It then tracks and can generate reports on the number of hits and unique hits generated URLs receive via an attractive statistics dashboard. Pretty Link even includes a bookmarklet for you to use so you can create links on the fly. The only thing I don’t like about Pretty Link is that it is well, bloated. The statistics portion of this program, while extremely nice and convenient, isn’t necessary and I try to avoid plugin statistics systems to begin with as they are often resource hogs. Even still, Pretty Link is one of my new favorite plugins, I look forward to getting a lot of use out of it.

Reliable Twitter

I’ve used several plugins/widgets that all claim to be the best at displaying Twitter feeds in the sidebar but all of them have either tried to do too much or not enough. The biggest problem I’ve found with other Twitter widgets is in the output area, where it matters most, with misaligned posts, out of place avatars, intrusive ads from the developer and other poor display practices. Luckily, I found Reliable Twitter. Based on the Twitter Widget, this plugin uses Google’s AJAX API to display and cache tweets. It’s quick, easy to set up and tweets are displayed in a separated, readable fashion and not jumbled together like with similar plugins.

Karailiev’s Sitemap

When it comes to sitemap generators for Wordpress, everyone seems stuck on the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. While it is definitely a great plugin and a great sitemap generator, it is absolutely murder queries and memory usage when set to automatically rebuild the sitemap. After trying a couple of other options, I’ve settled on Karailiev’s Sitemap as it gets the job done and doesn’t seem to be near as hard on a server as its peers. This plugin allows you to set page and post priority, exclude posts/pages at the write stage. It creates standard and news sitemaps and also pings Google when your map has been updated as well.

Link Juice Keeper

Link Juice Keeper is a simple plugin that accomplishes one smart goal – do whatever you can to not lose any traffic! The plugin takes all broken, missing or invalid links that normally result in a 404 Not Found error and performs a permanent redirect on them, landing the visitor on your front page. Nice.

W3 Total Cache

When it comes to caching plugins, there’s two things you should know – 1)everybody should run one if they like their blog to perform at its peak and 2)wp-super-cache and DB Cache Reloaded aren’t the only games in town and, from my experience aren’t as good as W3 Total Cache. It caches or minifies just about every active part of your blog, from posts and pages generated to CSS and Javascript in your theme, all the way to RSS feeds and simple HTML files. W3 Total Cache includes the most thorough control panel I’ve seen for a Wordpress plugin allowing you the ability to tweak and fine tune minute settings as necessary. If you are currently using one of the competing  plugins, I think you will find it worth the time and effort to clone or imitate a production blog with this as its cache tool. I think you will be pleased with the results.

WP Widget Cache

WP Widget Cache is to widgets what wp-super-cache is to posts and pages and I’m kind of surprised this plugin doesn’t get more attention. Widgets can create just as many queries as posts or pages themselves, especially if you are running a lot of them, and this plugin does a great job at reducing them. It is very sparse on options but which is fine because it simply works. If you are running several widgets, you owe it to yourself to give this plugin  a try!

WP Smush.It

If you’re hosting the majority of your own images on your server then this is a must-have tool. This plugin integrates the smush.it in to Wordpress to optimize jpeg compression, convert certain GIFs to PNGs and strip un-used colors from indexed images. All of these can contribute to smaller image sizes and therefore faster page-loads and less bandwidth usage. Smush.It works automatically every time an image is uploaded to your gallery and it can be used to optimize existing images as well.

Well, there’s the list. I hope you found a useful plugin or two out of this or at least had an interesting read. Thanks for browsing.