This is the third part of Project WP, and the last one where we play pretty. After this, we’ll get into customizing a basic theme with PHP, HTML and CSS, and creating a blog identity with logo, icons & header. Expect Part 4 here next week, but for now:

Give us the Pretty one more time! 10+ Recommended WordPress Plugins to make your blog prettier

In our last post, we listed the 8 dead essential WordPress Plugins for you. Take a look at these non-essential, but still highly recommended plugins today. Note: all plugins have been tested by us for use in WordPress 2.5+.

1. cforms II

Forms, forms, forms. Very important for making your blog more professional. If you have a contact page, it’s a lot better to let your visitors input a few lines of text in a contact form, rather than giving them your plain email address. And don’t worry if this plugin looks too bloated with options in the beginning. It’s actually pretty easy to use and fit in your blog’s styling.

2. Related Posts

“If you liked this post, you might be interested in…” - this should be familiar to you, more or less. This plugin adds a sections under your posts and looks for similar tags to display your specified amount of related posts with a link. Not bad.

3. WP Page Numbers

Adds page navigation at the bottom of your index and archive pages. Of course, you can customize the look and feel with CSS. Don’t attempt to use this with rather new blogs if you don’t have too many posts yet. It just doesn’t look good if you only have two pages.

4. Ozh’ Absolute Comments

This awesome plugin makes managing comments a lot easier by adding three little buttons in your Admin Comments section. WordPress comes with Unapprove, Spam, and Delete - with this plugin, you get Reply (opens a popup for you to reply to this comment), Edit (lets you edit the comment directly), and View All (shows you all comments in that particular post). A great time saver!

5. TagThePress

Fetches tag recommendations from the service tagthe.net and lets you insert them for the post you’re writing. Tags are good for finding posts with your blog’s search function, but also for search engines. In combination with the All in One SEO plugin, this is a great tool: just copy&paste your tags into the keyword section and you’re set.

6. Organize Series

You already have Categories and Tags. Now, you also have Series - making it easier to find this type of posts. With this plugin, it’s easier to write, manage and find series on your WordPress blog. Comes with widget that you can add to your sidebar etc. etc.

7. WP-Polls

Gives you the ability to create polls on your blog and place a poll widget in your sidebar, so that you can ask your readers what their favorite color is. Or maybe what Photoshop version they use. After uploading this plugin to your server, make sure to activate both WP-Polls and WP-Polls Widget in your Plugin section.

8. CommentLuv

This is almost a classic. It adds a link to the commenter’s last blog post under their comment, displaying their post title. If you advertise this funciton on your blog, you might attract more comments! Give it a try.

9. Live Comment Preview

This plugin adds a live preview of the comment as you write. Fancy, fancy! For fast typers and keyboard addicts, though, the preview can be slow. But even in that case, it’s fun to sit back and watch this plugin write your preview.

10. Lucia’s Link Love

WordPress automatically sets a NoFollow attribute for every link in the comments. This is so that search engines and Technorati (click here to fave us!) don’t count a comment link as a backlink, which would increase the commenter’s blog’s rating. Now if you wanted to change this, maybe because you’d like to give your readers / commenters something back, you can do that with this fine plugin. You can build loyalty by saying, Hey, the nofollow attribute is removed from every comment after your third comment! This can encourage your readers to comment more.

We have this plugin in action on our blog - can we encourage you to write us a comment below? ;)

Bonus: Plugin Central

Finally, a plugin for plugins. Well, it’s the plugin for plugins. It sits in your Dashboard and lets you update your plugins with one click, much like WP Automatic Upgrade does for WordPress itself. You can also install plugins directly from your dashboard by typing the URL or name (yes, that works too!) - this plugin does it all for you.

Okaaay.

Here you have ‘em, our 10+ recommended WordPress Plugins to make your blog prettier and more exiting. We hope you like them and that this list is useful for you!

Make sure to check back next week for Part 4 of Project WP, when we dive deeper into WordPress by choosing a basic theme and customizing it to our liking.

In the meantime, tell us: have we forgotten any plugin that you can’t live without?