Many of us don’t allow user registrations on our websites for various reasons (mine’s are mainly for the security challenges we have had in the past). But if you do leave that option on the table for your visitors, you should make the process of registering for new accounts easier for your visitors. One way to do that is by letting them sign up with their Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ credentials. These social plugin for WordPress make that possible:

Simple Facebook Connect: Facebook is the most popular social network around these days. Millions of people have an account with those guys. With this plugin installed, your visitors get to log onto your website using their Facebook credentials.

Simple Twitter Connect: similar to the first plugin, but this one lets your visitors use their Twitter account to do things on your website.

WP Google Plus Connect: so you want your visitors to be able to join your community using their Google+ credentials? That’s what this plugin offers. It integrates Google+ deeply into your community.

Social Login: this plugin lets your visitors comment and login with their social network credentials from Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Twitter. It does let you pick and choose which networks you want to activate on your site.

Social Connect: another cool plugin that allows your visitors to log on and register with your website using their Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com information.

These plugins are very useful if you want to make it easier for your visitors to join and contribute to your community using their social credentials.

Your turn: did we miss anything? Please suggest your favorite social login plugins here.

The Thesis and Genesis frameworks for WordPress do not need any introduction. They are highly versatile and make putting together highly customized sites easy. Both of these frameworks let you make your website as SEO-friendly as possible. I have seen plenty of news and problogging themes for these frameworks. But you can also use these to bring your shop online. Clip Cart by Themedy is an attractive e-commerce theme that is compatible with both of these frameworks.

Clip Cart is quite elegant and gives your website a modern makeover. It offers full shopping cart functionality by taking advantage of Cart66 WordPress plugin. You may use this theme even without that plugin. Just upload your products and integrate PayPal to start selling them. Clip Cart is easy to customize (especially if you know your way around the Thesis or Genesis frameworks) and offers additional design schemes.

In order to get Clip Cart working, you are going to need a license for Thesis or Genesis. It does come with a bunch of styles to get you started faster. I strongly recommend learning about hooks for these platforms if you want to make major customization work done on Clip Cart.

If you like to start your e-commerce site using the Thesis or Genesis frameworks, Clip Cart is worth checking out. It is fairly good looking and easily customizable.

No matter how great your content is, some people may not have the time to read it in one try. Giving them a way to save your articles to read a later time would make their life a whole lot easier. These 3 plugins allow you to do just that:

Instapaper Read Later Links: this plugin allows you to display Read Later links next to each post on your blog. Pretty useful for Instapaper users.

Readability Buttons: adds readability.com widget to your website. You have the option to show Read Now, Later, Print, E-mail, and Send to Kindle buttons on your website.

CleanSave: with this plugin installed on your website, you get to provide your visitors with the chance to save your articles to PDF, Dropbox, or Google Docs for future references (similar to what MSNBC and Fox Sports have done).

Not everyone of your visitors will have time to read your articles as soon as they see them. Thanks to the above scripts, they can save them to consume at a later time.

Getting a lot of comments on your blog is a big deal. Not everyone gets to pull that off. So it never hurts to thank your first time commenters via e-mail to not only show your appreciation for their feedback but also remind them to come back to your blog for more discussions. Of course, you do not want to do this manually if you get a ton of comments every day. Plugins such as Thank Me Later make doing this a whole lot easier.

Thank Me Later lets you thank people who have commented on your website. The message you send people is highly customizable. In fact, you can queue up multiple templates, give them a probability number, and let the script do the rest. Of course, you can use your messages to ask your commenters to come back to your website for more or subscribe to your website.

Thank Me Later is highly configurable. Webmasters can choose their delay time and restrict email by tag or category. You can also restrict your e-mails to those who are registered and logged in. When using this plugin, you do not want to spam your readers. So you should limit the number of e-mails each e-mail address receives from your site (I wouldn’t go above 2).

Thank Me Later lets you set comment gap and give your readers the option to opt out of your e-mails. Webmasters can further customize their messages with the shortcodes available to them. As long as you are not using this plugin to spam your audience, it can make a big difference for your blog.

Depending on the type of community you run online, you may not want your members to post profanity or abusive comments to your site. You can always watch out for those types of comments manually. Here are 3 profanity filter plugins that make the job much easier.

WP Content Filter: filters out profanity, abusive material, and other keywords of your choosing on your website. You can choose which parts of your website you want to filter and how the plugin should go about doing it.

WebPurify Profanity Filter: a profanity filter web service that makes sure the wrong type of content don’t show up on your site. It also lets you add your own words.

Defensio Anti-Spam: we have covered plenty of anti-spam plugins that could help you get a handle on rogue users and visitors on your website. This plugin is one of many you can use to filter spam and junk content. It offers malicious content detection, profanity filtering, URL categorization, script detection, and many more features.

There are plenty of other plugins you can use to filter profanity on your website. The above plugins do the job well though.

In the past few years, we have covered plenty of colorful themes for WordPress. Premium WordPress designs are great for folks who do not want to mess with a whole lot of coding. But if you know your way around CSS and PHP, there is no reason you should not use clean/blank theme frameworks to come up with a design unique to your site. Interested? These 8 clean theme frameworks are must-see:

Headway: one of my favorite theme frameworks around. It has a powerful set of tools that make designing a site from scratch a piece of cake.

Thesis: we have used Thesis for many projects in the past. It is SEO friendly and highly customizable. It has a dedicated team behind it that keep bringing new features to it.

Genesis: the Genesis Framework for WordPress has its benefits. The folks at StudioPress do have plenty of child themes available for it to get you started with this faster.

Pagelines: a drag and drop design platform for WordPress. You can use this to build good looking, responsive themes in no time. It has a pretty decent (growing) store too.

Backbone: an ultra clean and simple theme for WordPress. Two child themes are included with it for free. This does have a responsive design too.

Canvas theme: a highly customizable theme for WordPress. Canvas has a powerful options panel that gives you control over almost any element in it. It works well for business sites and magazines.

Thematic: an open source, search engine optimized framework for WordPress. It has free and commercial child themes. 13 widget ready areas are included.

Affiliate theme: designed for affiliate marketers. Lets you create landing pages and websites optimized for affiliate marketing.

If you are looking for a theme or framework to develop and customize your website with, the above solutions are worth checking out. They are developer friendly and put you in the driver’s seat.

The Thesis theme for WordPress does not need any introduction. It is one of our favorite frameworks around and is being used by some of the most famous bloggers and web publishers on the internet. The Thesis Theme framework makes putting together sophisticated WordPress sites easier. You can always come up with a unique design for it from scratch. These 10 beautiful Thesis skins save you some time getting your site online:

Clip Cart: a stylish e-commerce child theme for Thesis or Genesis. It provides support for Cart66 WordPress plugin.

Easy Thesis: this offers 8 color schemes and 3 widget areas. It is social media friendly and has additional sets of options for you to play around with.

Avenger: a pretty decent option for web publishers. It is opt-in forms ready and can handle multi-author websites.

Line It Up: a Thesis skin for corporations and small businesses. It is useful for those who want to promote their products online using this framework.

Foxy News: transforms your Thesis-based website into a news portal in no time. It has 9 custom widgets too.

Marketers Delight: designed for marketers, this package lets you create landing and squeeze pages using Thesis.

Feedpop: a powerful theme for personal blogs. It is social media friendly and has a clean look.

ThesisFolio: a versatile theme you can use for portfolio and business sites. It has 12 color schemes and is easily customizable.

Nexis: a pretty decent Thesis skin for blogs. It is SEO friendly and easy on the eyes.

Rough Print: this is a tumblog-style skin for Thesis sites. It has custom styles for different post formats.

Thesis continues to remain one of the most popular WordPress frameworks. The above themes help you get started with it faster.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have needed to change a certain word across your whole website? Those of you who have a well established website with hundreds or thousands of pages are going to find that difficult to do manually. Thanks to Word Replacer, you can change words on your website quickly. All you have to do is provide it with a list of words you want to replace and leave the rest to this plugin.

You can enter as many words as you want to replace on your website. While you may not want to make a habit of using this plugin to change words on your site, it is nice to have the option. You can change words in your posts, pages, and comments. What’s nice about this is that you can actually inject ads or change the style of your website by using replacement rules.

As you can see in the above screenshot, you can add regular expressions and Javascript ads to your website with Word Replacer. It is a fairly fast plugin and saves you time changing things around across your website.

Social sites such as Facebook and Twitter have millions of members. Many of these folks visit your website too. Letting your visitors log on to your website using their social IDs is a smart idea. For starters, it makes the process more convenient for them. It also help your community gain more registered members. Social Login is a WordPress plugin that adds this functionality to your website.

Social Login is developed to increase the level of engagement on your website. It is compatible with some of the most popular social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. You are going to need a OneAll account to get started. The plugin adds the social connect feature to your login forms, comments, and even your sidebar. Manual insertion is supported through this call:

(do_action('oa_social_login'))

Social Login is highly customizable. You can define where you want your visitors to go when they are logged in. The plugin can search for existing accounts in your database to match them up with social network ID used by your visitors.

Adding plugins such as Social Login may increase the number of registered members in your community. Besides, it makes commenting on your stories easier for your visitors. It is well worth testing.

Facebook is one of many social networks you can’t afford to ignore if you want to keep strengthening your community and driving more traffic to it. In the past few years, we have covered plenty of ways you can go about integrating Facebook into WordPress. If you are serious about getting the most out of your efforts on Facebook, you need to track your statistics. We mainly rely on Google Analytics for this. But these 5 Facebook statistics plugins can provide you with useful information as well:

Facebook Share Statistics: shows information about your posts that have been shared on Facebook. It shows likes, clicks, comments, and other useful information.

Most Shared Posts: this cool plugin lets you track your top blog posts based on how well they have done in top social networking sites.

Social Crowd: a simple but sleek plugin that displays your general social stats to your visitors. It covers the number of your Facebook likes, YouTube subscribers, Twitter followers, and Google+ friends.

WP-Stats-Dashboard: this cool plugin tracks over 50 social metrics and helps you make better sense of your content’s performance in the world of social media. It is a great tool when it works.

Trackable Social Share Icons: adds social buttons to your blog posts. But more importantly, it works with Google Analytics to track your social stats correctly.

What’s your favorite Facebook statistics plugin for WordPress?