One of my favorite things about premium WordPress themes is that they give theme authors the opportunity to truly show off their talents. Because the theme will be purchased rather than given free, they don’t hold anything back and truly create some incredible work.

Michael at Solostream is no exception. He has created a number of free themes in the past, but has since been concentrating on creating and selling a variety of premium WordPress themes for bloggers and businesses looking for a magazine-style theme.

His most recent premium theme WP-Magazine 1.0 is his best work to date (in my opinion). Here are some screen shots of a few pages:

Once purchased, you have access to five different home page layouts and four different category/archive page layouts. You can find more information about the layouts available here.

Other features include:

• Widget-Ready, User-Friendly, and Optimized for WordPress Versions 2.2 and Above
• Home Page Featured Article Glider Box
• Built-In Banner Ad Blocks
• Built-In Site Guide in Right Sidebar
• Customized Recent Comments in Sidebar With Gravatar Support
• Author Biography Information and Gravatar Included on Single Post Pages
• Alternating Color Comments With Gravatar Support
• XHTML Valid

In addition to these great features, this theme also supports several plugins “out of the box” including the following:

• Popularity Contest
• Most Commented
• WordPress 2.3 Related Posts

If you’d like to view this theme in action, check out the WP-Magazine Demo Site. You can also purchase the theme from that site.

When it comes to WordPress, there are many things that separate it from the competition. My personal favorite, though, is the WordPress community, which has contributed all sorts of Wordpress plugins to anyone using the WordPress software. These are available for free without any obligation.

Many plugins are situational, either for certain types of blogs, or for certain particular functions, and probably don’t have a place on every WordPress blog. There are a few, however, that every WordPress blog should be using in some form.

Here is my list of the top plugins all WordPress blogs should be using, in no particular order:

• Related Posts - Arguably the most important plugin Wordpress has to offer. This plugin shows a designated number of related entries below your post (or wherever you want to place it). This is ideal for anyone, but especially for those that get a lot of search engine traffic. It goes a long way to keep web surfers on your site.
• Add Related Posts to Your Feed - Adds the above mentioned Related Posts to your feed (requires the Related Posts or Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin(s) to be installed in order to work).
• All-in-One SEO Pack - This is the ultimate SEO plugin for optimizing your blog for search engines. It automates the SEO process and gives you control over individual title, tags, and description information.
• Permalink Redirect - This plugin does a permanent 301 redirect. This will ensure that search engines don’t penalize you for duplicate posts when they index your site (with and without the www, as well as posts that don’t include the trailing /). This plugin now also redirects your site’s default feed to your Feedburner feed and allows you to set up custom redirects.
• WP-Contact Form - Many e-mail spammers search the web looking for e-mail addresses to use for spam purposes. Having your e-mail address available on somewhere on your website (including in the code somewhere) makes you vulnerable to these people. This plugin creates a contact form that people can use to contact you, so your e-mail address is not displayed. It also includes spam protection and some other optional features.
• WP-DB Manager - This plugin gives you full control of your database, including how to back it up, restore it, and deleting tables when necessary. If this plugin proves to be to advanced, the alternative is WordPress Database Backup, which allows you to backup your database, but doesn’t make it easy to restore it if something comes up.
• Google Sitemaps - Generates an XML-Sitemap file of your website that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will use to index your blog. This ensures Google is aware of all of your new posts, as well as any updates you’ve made to posts that were previously indexed and need to be updated.
• Akismet - This plugin comes by default with all current Wordpress installations, but requires activation. You can obtain a free key to activate it. It will catch most spam and place it in a approval queue so you can view it before it is posted on to your website.
• Bad Behavior - Prevents known spam bots from accessing your website and is compatible with Akismet (mentioned above).
• Gamer’s Pack - As video game technology continues to increase, this plugin will be more and more important. This plugin that makes your website easily viewable on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP gaming systems. I’ve also found it helps people trying to view your website on a cellular phone.

So, there is my list. 10 plugins that I feel all Wordpress users should use regardless of what type of blog they are running. I intentionally did not include any plugins that use comments, as many blogs do not accept comments, making these plugins not needed for them. My goal with this post was to cover only plugins that should be used regardless of the type of blog is being run.

Is there a plugin that you feel should have been included on this list? Let me know in the comments below!

A couple weeks ago I took a look at the Related Posts WordPress plugin, which is one of my favorite plugins available to WordPress users. It can be quite a chore to setup, but once done, the plugin will make your blog a whole lot better. Unfortunately, this plugin will not actually add these related posts to your WordPress feed.

There is, however, a different plugin that will do this for you called Add Related Posts to Your Feed. In order to setup the plugin, you just need to go through the standard setup process of uploading and activating it. The only catch is that you need to already be using the Related Posts plugin, or be using the Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin, for this plugin to properly add related posts to your feed.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are only a few select WordPress plugins that should be used by most WordPress blogs. Unless you are running a news site of some sort where your archived posts don’t hold any real value to search engine traffic, you should be using the Related Posts WordPress plugin to try to promote some of your older content.

The first thing you’ll notice after downloading this plugin, is that it is not overly easy to setup up.   In addition to the normal process of uploading it and activating it, you will more than likely need to make an update to one of your databases in order to function.  Here is what the author asks you to do:

ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
    `post_name` ,

    `post_content`

)

No idea how to create/alter a table?  No problem.  Here are the steps you’ll need to take to make the adjustment:

1) Backup your databases in case you have a problem.
2) Access your blog’s CPanel.
3) Click MySQL Databases.
4) Scroll down and click PHPMyAdmin.
5) If applicable, select the appropriate database in the menu on the right.
6) Scroll through your databases until you locate wp_posts.
7) In the Structure tab at the bottom, you should see some stuff that looks like this, but without the post_related field:

We need to create the post_related field pictured above.

Where is says Create an index on 1 columns, click the Go button. You should now see this:

9) Under index name, type post_related.
10) In the Index type drop-down box, select FULLTEXT.
11) Click Go where it says Add to index 1 column(s).
12) In the first field, select post_date [postdate].
13) In the second field, select post_content [longtext].
14) Click Save.

Now you should see the post_related field pictured above!

Now you just need to tell the plugin where to display your related posts:

<?php if(function_exists('related_posts')) { related_posts(); } ?>

Now that its set up, you can then determine the number of posts you’d like to display from a Options panel under Plugins, and how you’d like to display them.

So, what exactly does this plugin do?  Well, the name of the plugin pretty much sums it up.  Using the keywords in your post titles, this plugin attempts to figure out the most relevant related posts to the post you just wrote, then them wherever you tell the plugin to display the related posts.  This is all done automatically, so you’ve got your plugin setup, there will not be any additional maintenance.

Any questions or thoughts?  Sound off in the comments below!