Adding functionality to some of the WordPress sites recently I came across some great plug-ins. All of them worked for me under WordPress 1.5, and all took just a simple upload and activating in the Plugins menu.
Recently commented posts is actually much more than that. The official name is Customizable Post Listings and it supports Display Recent Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts and some other options. The function call produces a listing of the posts that received comments recently, which helps the Webmaster (if you need to reply to the recent comments) and the reader (in case they want to see what’s currently discussed on your site). See it implemented here, for example.
Most Commented – a natural addition to the site which gets lots of comments. Helps the Webmaster and the reader to see what’s hot and what topic requires extra attention, since it causes so much user feedback. See it implemented here, for example. The function allows for the actual number of comments to be displayed next to the link to the entry.
WP-ShortStat adds a ShortStat tab to the DashBoard in WordPress. It keeps track of hits, unique visitors, most popular pages on your site, recent referrers and top referrers, user’s browsers, countries, language locales and search strings used to reach your site. Overall, excellent reporting system, consisting just of a single-file plugin and installation as simple as dropping the file into the Plugins directory on the server. Can’t link to it implemented, since it’s part of the admin interface.
