The good thing about Comment Rating is that it puts the power in your readers’ hands. You may not like the comments that you get on your blog, but it’s always better to see what your community thinks. This plugin adds thumb up/down buttons to your comments. You can style comments accordingly based on how your community has voted on them.

I like the fact that Comment Rating makes it possible to differentiate between good, poor, and controversial comments. You can style comments depending on the number of likes and dislikes they have gotten. This plugin does have 3 different styles for your buttons, so you have got some options there. You can also choose to show one to three values.

The advanced options are worth exploring. If you do not want to change the way your comments look or do not want to auto-insert this system into your comments, you can just turn off the option. This plugin does prevent vote fraud (though it’s not foolproof). Localization is supported too.

If you have got issues with some of your commenters and want to give your community the chance to identify the trolls, Comment Rating is a nice plugin to consider.

Well. If you have looked at a XML sitemap before, it may have scared the heck out of you. But the beauty of WordPress is that there is always someone out there who comes up with a useful plug-in that addresses the basic needs of everyday bloggers. Google Sitemap is a free WordPress plug-in that allows you to create a super XML sitemap for your blog without too much fuss.

Once you download and install Google XML Sitemap plugin, you are set to go. You need to make sure that you create a blank sitemap.xml file on your root. You will then have to manually build your very first WordPress XML Sitemap. Below is the message you get when you run the plug-in to create your first sitemap:

Google Sitemap plug-in comes with lots of features. First you can choose how you want to provide your sitemap to Google. You can provide it as a XML file or if it is too large, you can go with the zipped version. You can also choose which engines to notify about your blog. You can choose Ask, MSN, Yahoo, and Google of course (keep in mind that you need a developer token to activate the Yahoo! feature).

There are a few useful features with this plug-in. You can define how your posts are prioratized. You can choose the number of comments or just go with one priority for all posts. You can also define what pages to include in your sitemap using a simple check-box form. You can also choose the location of your sitemap, but it should usually be on the root on your blog.

Finally, you can put priorities down for your pages manually as well. So basically Google Sitemap plug-in allows you to create fairly sophisticated sitemaps without having to write a single line of code. This plug-in is going for free and you can download it here. Don’t go overboard though.

Thankfully, the good folks at RunPHP have developed THE plugin for running PHP scripts on your WordPress blog. All you have to do is download RunPHP and enable it on your blog. You can then choose to Run PHP per post or page. You can choose who has the right to run PHP scripts on your blog.

runPHP widget then shows up under each post/page that you want to run PHP code on. If you have the right access level, you can just put the code down, and bam. Your WordPress blog can now run almost any script that is out there.

A Word of Caution: RunPHP is a very powerful script but can also compromise your blog’s security. If your blog is hacked, god knows what can be implemented on your blog. Having said that, if you have secure scripts that you want to run on your WordPress blog, now you can.