Assignment Desk has plenty of options you can optimize to take your news website to the next level. The default assignment status is new. You do have the option to define new workflow statuses. Portal owners can use this system to easily assign stories to their writers. If you need to have multiple authors on your website, Co-Authors Plus plugin is a must-have.

You can easily customize your form and make it fit your website’s needs. It has various fields you can modify or remove from your pitch forms. Adding a pitch form to your website does not take more than a simple cut & paste. This plugin does come with assignment and user management tools to help you better manage your community. You can put restrictions on your contributors based on the roles you want them to play on your website.

Assignment Desk can help you gather feedback from your community. Your members can vote on ideas and volunteer to help your website out with reporting.

Assignment Desk could be a bit of an overkill for smaller websites. But if you want to get your community involved in growing your business and have an easier way to gather ideas from your readers, look no further than this plugin.

AdRotate puts you in control of what ads show up on your website and where. You can start selling ads based on clicks or for a specific period of time. Of course, to get the most money out of the ads on your site, you need to track their performance. AdRotate covers that as well. Adding new ads to this plugin could not be any easier. You have the option to define how long each banner ad will run on your website. Want to sell based on a number of clicks or impressions? Just define what you have in mind and the rest is taken care of by this plugin.

Ad grouping is a powerful feature. It lets you tie a number of your ads and track their performance more effectively. You can take advantage of blocks to add a block of small banners to your website. This plugin comes with its own widget, giving you the chance to add an unlimited number of ads to your website (if you have the place for them of course).

There are 3 ways to add ads to your website when using this plugin. You can use short-codes, widgets, or PHP code to do the job. The system works with Google AdSense ads as well as affiliate banners. It can do a lot of little things automatically to save time managing your ads. The report feature is pretty decent too.

Overall, AdRotate is a pretty decent alternative to solutions such as OpenX. It may not be as versatile but you won’t have to deal with a whole new system to take advantage of it.

WP Family Tree is pretty straight forward to get to work. Each family member will have his/her page under “family” category. You get to define the parents for each member as well as gender and birth/death dates. If you add featured images to your posts, their thumbnails will be used in your family tree.

Users do have the option to customize their family tree and make small modifications without knowing too much about coding. Once you are ready to publish your family tree, just use the short-code “[family-tree]” to add your tree to your pages.

If you are creating a family website and want to add a family tree to it, WP Family Tree is a good plugin to get started with.

Every website needs a “contact me” page. You do want to make sure your contact page is used by legitimate visitors and not webbots. Fast Secure Contact Form makes it so easy to add secure contact forms to your WordPress website. It has a ton of options that one can customize to get the most out of it. It allows you to have multiple forms to differentiate between leads coming from different pages. All you have to do to add your forms to your website is include the following line on posts or pages:

Users have the option to add additional fields to their forms. Various types of fields are supported (radio boxes, check boxes, text areas, …). Your visitors can choose to attach files for your attention, if you choose to go in that route.

The forms are highly customizable. You can not only change the fields that show up on them, you have the option to modify their styles from the back-end.

What I love about this contact plugin is its anti-spam features. For starters, audio and image CAPTCHA are supported. You can always turn its CAPTCHA off if you find it annoying. It works with Akismet too. It checks e-mail address input from common spamming tactics and protects your site against injections and forced spams.

If you have a fairly popular website and do not want spammers to compromise your website and send you spam emails and junk, Fast Secure Contact Form is must-try.

To be clear, you do not need a plugin to implement QR codes on your blog. They are fairly easy to implement and customize but plugins such as Super Cool QRCode save you time doing just that. Once you install this plugin, it adds a special widget to your website that lets you define title, HTML elements, size, and error correction for your QR codes. You can go beyond the widget and add these to your website with short codes.

Once you have installed this plugin, a code like the one below gets added to your blog. If you have implemented this for each post, these should differ. You should check these using a QR reader on your smart-phone.

QR codes may not bring a ton of traffic to your website. But they could be very helpful for your mobile visitors. You can also use these on your business cards and other promotional material. Super Cool QRCode makes adding QR codes to your site fast and easy.

Table of Contents Creator can not only create very attractive tables of contents for blogs, it has a ton of options for publishers to take advantage of to customize their websites. The plugin can be configured to display static pages as well as your posts. If you are using a solution such as WP-Forum, you can take advantage of this plugin to display forum posts as well.

You get to pick and choose which static pages you want to show up in your table of content. Posts work the same way except you can define which categories you want to exclude. The fun part is you can even include link to sites and downloads in your table too (using special tags).

Table of Contents Creator has something for everyone. If you have a static business page, a blog, or a vibrant forum community, you can take advantage of this plugin to create a table of contents for your website. It can save you a lot of time. Not having to update links one by one is nice too.

Spammers use web bots to go through your website and mine e-mail addresses. While they don’t have permission to send e-mail to these addresses, they do it anyway. CryptX allows you to hide your e-mail addresses by using Javascript and Unicode. It covers both regular and mailto e-mail links. The plugin allows you to apply it to your content, comments, and other sections of your website.

I love the fact that you can add mailto to all your unlinked e-mail addresses. If you have been careless in that regard, you can fix that issue with one click. CrpytX also supports custom characters for @ and “.” signs in your e-mails.

You always have the option to turn CryptX off just in case it is not working for a certain article of yours or are just not interested in using it. It does not affect your site’s performance significantly, so it’s a decent option to go with.

jQuery T Minus Countdown is easily customizable. You can change its title, description, end date, and everything in between. You can even add a link right above or below your counter to give your visitors the chance to check your event page.

This widget gives you a lot of flexibility as far as your countdown details are concerned. It can count down your event to the second. The widget does have multiple modes for you to choose from.

If you are looking to add a beautiful countdown timer to your website, you can’t go wrong with this plugin. It’s easy to use, has the looks, and does what it promises.

This plugin is quite easy to get to work. Just install it and you are all set. You won’t have to delete or add anything to your code, database, server disk, or server configuration file. This plugin takes care of it all. It is compatible with WordPress 3.0 and older WPMU installations. Deleting this plugin is a piece of cake too. Just get rid of the files, and you are set. You won’t need to go through your database to uninstall this plugin.

Nothing is more frustrating than scheduling a post ahead of time only to realize WordPress’ failure to publish your post on time. Thanks to WP Missed Schedule plugin you can address this issue fast.

Persian World gets to work as soon as you activate it. You probably want to know some Persian before installing it. It not only allows you to post your content in Persian language, it supports Persian dates too. It does have fully customized Farsi widgets that you can add to your website to customize its look and feel further.

Your admin and post pages all get translated to Farsi. That could be very handy if you prefer your environment to be completely in Perisan language. This plugin enhances WordPress’ TinyMCE and automatically converts your numbers from English to Farsi as well.

I happen to know some Persian but I personally prefer my user environment to be in English language. If you are interested in starting a Persian blog and don’t want to deal with an English environment, this plugin could be for you.