The best plugins I have found, all tested to work with latest WordPress 3 – these plugins are also compatible WordPressMU. Plugins for: RSS, SEO, Widgets, Optimize, Links, Gallery, Drop-downs, Minify, Image, Compress, Navigation, Forms, Slideshow, Login, Redirection, Related, Search, Server Info, Tags, Translate, YouTube, Popular Posts, Stats, Spam, Cache, Mobile, iPhone, Sitemap, Clean, and Domain Mapping.
BEST PLUGINS – WordPress 3 – WordPress MU
Ad Codes Widget
The Ad Codes Widget allows you to place ANY size banner ads, AdSense®, Javascript, XHTML or any code you like, into a widget-ready bar for WordPress®. Also allows for rotation of scripts each page load. This is the best Text or Code Widget by far!
By PriMoThemes.com / WebSharks, Inc. – Visit plugin site
Advanced RSS
Feed aggregator widget which is able to reformat your RSS and ATOM feeds into any HTML layout you want. The built in widget feeds are cached locally to speed up load times, and title, link and number of items to display may be modified. Feeds are formatted via XSLT, but if you don’t know how to write XSLT there is a variety of built in templates for you use and learn from. The formatting of feeds is this plugins best feature – even display Twitter feeds anyway you like!
By Stephen Ingram – Visit plugin site
All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. This plugin presents your blog items in a way search engines love. One of the most popular SEO plugins – easy setup.
By Michael Torbert – Visit plugin site
Better RSS Widget
Replacement for the built in RSS widget that adds an optional link target, shortcode, and page conditionals. Display feeds right in your post or page too!
By GrandSlambert – Visit plugin site
Broken Link Checker
Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. Easy setup, works great – no more broken links!
By Janis Elsts – Visit plugin site
Cleaner Gallery
This plugin replaces the default gallery feature with a valid XHTML solution and offers support for multiple Lightbox-type image scripts.
By Justin Tadlock – Visit plugin site
Domain Mapping
Map any blog/site on a WordPressMU or WordPress 3 network to an external domain. Yes you can use any domain names for your blogs – way cool.
By Donncha O Caoimh – Visit plugin site
Drop-Down Post List
Generates a drop-down list of posts for a particular category.
By Dagon Design – Visit plugin site
Fast Secure Contact Form
Fast Secure Contact Form for WordPress. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. Does not require JavaScript.
This plugin works great straight from install, also has plenty of configuration options and multiple form capability. Easy to use and reliable.
By Mike Challis – Visit plugin site
Formidable
Quickly and easily create drag-and-drop forms. Too easy.
By Stephanie Wells – Visit plugin site
jQuery Colorbox
Like Lightbox and similar plugins, but better. Used to overlay images on the current page, images in one post are grouped automatically, and can display as slideshow. Best of all, you don’t need to add special code to your image links to make it work!
By Arne Franken – Visit plugin site
Limit Login Attempts
Limit rate of login attempts, including by way of cookies, for each IP. Great boost to security, a must.
By Johan Eenfeldt – Visit plugin site
Link Counter
Counts links in posts; organizes list by domain if desired. Basically produces a complete list of ALL links contained anywhere on your blog (links in posts, pages, the lot!)
By Henry Woodbury – Visit plugin site
Redirection
Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors. This plugin will redirect any url on your site (even a custom affiliate url) to any url of choice. Cool!
By John Godley – Visit plugin site
Related Sites
Add your posts to the Blog Traffic Exchange and add Links to related websites throughout the blogosphere. Get free backlinks on auto-pilot!
By Blog Traffic Exchange – Visit plugin site
RSS scroller
This plug-in will display RSS feed with simple scroller or ticker. It gradually reveals each item into view from left to right.
By Gopi.R – Visit plugin site
Search Unleashed
Advanced search engine that provides full text searching across posts, pages, comments, titles, and URLs. Searches take into account any fields added by other plugins, and all search results are contextually highlighted. You can also highlight incoming searches from popular search engines. Improves relevancy of search results.
By John Godley – Visit plugin site
SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
The purpose of this plugin is to strengthen our On Page SEO by adding new internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by search engine visitors to find the blog post from a search engine ( incoming search terms ). Can really improve search engine traffic.
By Purwedi Kurniawan – Visit plugin site
ServerBuddy
Tests server & hosting configuration to determine problems & compatibility with various WordPress themes and plugins.
By Dustin Bolton/PluginBuddy – Visit plugin site
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.
Reliable, set and forget, can run as mu-plugin, compatible with most other anti-spam plugins – boosted security!
By Mike Challis – Visit plugin site
TranslateThis Button
Automatically translates any site into 52 languages leveraging the Google Language API. Easiest WordPress translation plugin I found, and reliable too.
By Jon Raasch – Visit plugin site
TubePress
Displays gorgeous YouTube and Vimeo galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar. Easy to use, heaps of features, dynamic display of keywords based videos – splendid!
By Eric D. Hough – Visit plugin site
Widget Logic
Control widgets with WP’s conditional tags is_home etc. To see what conditionals can do, see Conditional Tags at WordPress.
By Alan Trewartha – Visit plugin site
WordPress.com Popular Posts
Shows the most popular posts, using data collected by WordPress.com stats plugin (required, see below).
By Frasten – Visit plugin site
WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. If you have problems with the graph/chart displaying correctly, download the G Network modified version below, which works in WordPress MU 3.0 too.
By Andy Skelton – Visit plugin site – G Network modified version
WP Minify
This plugin helps you easily integrate the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time. Simple, effective, and really works! Can also be used with WP Super Cache (see below) for blazing page loads.
By Thaya Kareeson – Visit plugin site
WPMS Mobile Edition
WordPress Multi Site Mobile Edition is a conversion of the famous WordPress Mobile Edition plugin suitable for WP3+ in both normal and multi-site mode. It will make WordPress use the Carrington Mobile theme designed for mobile devices when visitors come to your site or any site on your network with a mobile device. This is the fastest plugin for mobile device I have seen. Lacks some of the refinements of WPtouch (see below), but it still is the fastest and cleanest code for mobile.
By RavanH – Visit plugin site
WP Super Cache
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. Really works, with minimum of fuss – and like all of Donncha’s plugins, very well thought out.
By Donncha O Caoimh – Visit plugin site
WPtouch iPhone Theme
A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones. When using with WordPress MU, each site can have its own custom icons by placing them in ‘public_html/wp-content/blogs.dir/#/uploads/wptouch/custom-icons’ where ‘#’ is the blog id number.
By Dale Mugford & Duane Storey (BraveNewCode) – Visit plugin site
XML Sitemap Feed
Creates a feed that complies with the XML Sitemap protocol ready for indexing by Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and others. I love this plugin, because it just keeps getting better, and works with WordPress MU.
By RavanH – Visit plugin site
WordPress MU Plugins
My-Guide Clean Revisions WPMU Plugin
This Plugin cleans all saved revisions to optimize your database, with just one click.
By Daniel Bakovic – Visit plugin site
Unfiltered MU
Adds the unfiltered_html capablitiy to Administrators and Editors so that content posted by users with those roles is not filtered by KSES; Embeds, Iframe, etc. are preserved. Note: If for any reason the unfiltered_html capability is ever lost, simply deactivate, and then reactivate this plugin. For WordPress MU or WordPress 3.0 multisite only. Regular WordPress already offers this feature and does not need this plugin.
By Automattic – Visit plugin site
NOTE:
It is always good practice to backup your WordPress database before installing or upgrading plugins, then you can restore the database if problems occur. Its wise too, to backup the files of the previous version of a plugin when upgrading, just in case the new version causes an error – then upload the previous version’s files and re-activate (or restore database if required).
If you know of a plugin that should appear here, or believe any of the above plugins don’t work, please leave a comment below, thanks. Enjoy the plugins!
[Updated: 22 April 2011]
Nice list with some suggestions I did not know before! And nice to find one of my plugins in there too ;)
May I suggest some others for the MU list: http://4visions.nl/wordpress-plugins/wpms-mobile-edition/ and http://4visions.nl/wordpress-plugins/easy-fancybox/ . Both fully compatible with Multi Site even in /mu-plugins/)…
Thanks RavanH. I am currently using your wpms-mobile-edition and will add it to the list, was previously using WPtouch but your plugin loads on mobile much faster than any I have seen! I was hoping you could include facility for personalised icons per site, and google adsense, like wptouch, but it still is the fastest and cleanest code – lovely. As for fancybox, I have yet to test it.
Keep up the good work!
10 votes from me for All in One SEO Pack. Really does the hard work for you. All of the posts on my blog are good rated on search engines because of it.
Nice article, thank you for sharing this usefull informations with us
Good List!
Regards
Ned
Very informative article, i have an all in one seo pack installed very usefull in this blog
My millionaire mentor 2011
Great list of plugins here, thanks!
Any suggestions for a really good multi-site search plugin?
I have not tested any, maybe someone else could suggest one here, or you could comment back a recommendation.
I like using Google CSE to search accross sites – its easy, highly customisable, embeds into a page, performs fast searches, and indexed by Google.
hello admin, thanks for the list. Number 1,3 and 5 are already tested and working great with me. Others seems to be good though I haven’t checked any of them but will test them very soon and get back to you with my experience. I have a list of SEO plugin which might be interesting for you. Some of them are quite interesting specially for SEO. Please feel free to contact me if you wish.
Thanks,
Hendrik,
Germany
Good blog here! Also your web site loads up really fast! What internet host are you making use of?
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Hello apology for my ignorance, is there a free version for wordpress MU?
WordPress MU of itself, no longer exists, its all WordPress 3 now. The term WordPress MU Plugin is still used for plugins that work on all sites across a WordPress Network, when placed in /wp-content/mu-plugins/, they activate immediately. These plugins are becoming rarer these days, as most go the way of “Network Activate”.
Just the information I was looking for, for my research project. Excellent. Thanks!