PulseMaps Visitor Map comes with a widget you can add to your sidebar to display your visitors on a map. The most recent visitors are shown as flashing dots on your website. You have the option to change your widget’s setting from its option page. You can change the color, background, and title of the widget.

Clicking on the widget redirects you to Pulsemap.com, which is the place you can go over a larger map and view your recent visitors. The plugin is fast and compatible with most modern browsers. PulseMaps Visitor Map is a free plugin. You do have the option to upgrade to get even more features.

I am personally not a big fan of adding visitor maps to my sites. But they can give sites more credibility if used the right way. PulseMaps Visitor Map makes adding visitors maps to your website easier.

SOPA Blackout: one of the best anti-SOPA plugins for WordPress. It adds a customizable page to your website so you can join the blackout movement on January 18th.

Go Dark: another plugin you can use to oppose Internet censorship (SOPA and PIPA). You can use this to join the blackout movement on January 18th (if it goes on). It will return a 503 status code to avoid damaging your search engine rankings.

Stop SOPA Ribbon: one of the best ways to raise awareness against SOPA is by adding a small ribbon to the top of your site. That’s what this plugin does. It does not disturb your visitors, which is a big plus.

Censor Me: adds a “Stop Censorship” link to your website in a way your visitors won’t be able to miss. Simple but effective.

All of these plugins have their merits. Even if SOPA is defeated this time around, we all need to stay vigilant to make sure it does not brought forth again in a repackaged form. The above plugins make it easier for all WordPress users to raise awareness against this bill.

Update: it does seem that the House has given up on SOPA for now. But this fight is far from over.

AVH Extended Categories Widgets: adds 3 category widgets to WordPress. You can use this to display top and a group of categories in your sidebar. It enhances the default category widget and lets you exclude categories easily.

Collapsing Categories: makes your categories collapsible. It uses Javascript to make your website more dynamic.

List category posts: lets you display posts from certain categories in your sidebar or on your pages/posts.

Restrict Categories: this plugin allows you to control which categories various user roles on your site can interact with (view, edit, …).

Multiple Category Selection Widget: makes it easier for your visitors to delve deeper into what your site has to offer and search through your categories.

Category Import: a cool plugin that saves you time creating categories in bulk. It comes handy for setting up large portals.

Post Category Only: don’t want to show posts from sub-categories on your category pages? This plugin takes care of that problem.

Ultimate Category Excluder: excluding categories from showing up on your site is not that difficult. This plugin makes the process easier as you won’t have to write a single line of code.

The above plugins for WordPress categories are useful if you want to manipulate your categories without having to write a single line of code. In many cases, you are better off making changes to your code. But it is nice to have other options.

Please add your plugin suggestions below.

WP Greet Box: lets you display different messages to your visitors depending on how they find your website. You can use this to promote your social outposts or give your new visitors some incentive to become a loyal reader.

Referrer Detector: similar to the first plugin in many ways. It lets you target Digg, StumbleUpon, Google, and other social/search visitors uniquely.

What Would Seth Godin Do: not only lets you display a welcome message to your new visitors, it also supports messages for returning visitors.

Personal Welcome: this is useful for sites that allow user registrations. It lets admins send personal messages to new members.

Wibiya: Wibiya is more than just a plugin. It is a social toolbar with a ton of apps for you to choose from. Notifier Pro is a cool application for Wibiya that lets users display a message on certain pages, based a certain keyword, or after a page is visited a certain number of times.

Greeting your visitors from time to time to show your appreciation is a nice community building strategy. The above mentioned plugins let you do just that easily.

WassUp for WordPress: provides you with real time statistics on your traffic. It shows you exactly what your visitors are doing on your website.

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online: it shows your visitors who are online in your sidebar. It also displays the location of your visitors on a map.

Counterize: it keeps track of your visitors’ stats on your site. It records visitor IP, country, browser, operating system, and keyword stats.

Google Analytics Dashboard: gives you access to your Google Analytics data in your dashboard. It saves you the trouble of having to log in to your Google Analytics dashboard.

WordPress Download Monitor: those of you who run popular blogs probably share reports and other types of download links with your visitors. This plugin keeps track of your downloads.

There are plenty of other ways you can go about monitoring your website’s traffic. The above plugin get you started quickly.

WP Missed Schedule Fix: WordPress should have no trouble posting your scheduled articles on time. But from time to time the process fails, especially if you don’t have the perfect environment set up for WP. This plugin lets you get around this issue without having to make major changes to your server environment.

Display Scheduled Posts: lets you display the posts you have scheduled in a post or page of your choosing. It can give your community members heads up about your upcoming work.

Drafts Scheduler: perfect for those of you with a ton of drafts in your queue. It lets you publish them based on your defined criteria.

Content Scheduler: this plugin is handy if you have articles with time-sensitive material in them. It lets you expire posts or change their status at a certain time.

SOUP: another plugin you can use to promote your upcoming articles and drafts in your sidebar in form of a widget.

Post Shift: lets you move your older posts and shift them to be your newest posts. This could prove very useful in certain situations.

Please share your suggestions below.

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.

Ultimate Security Checker: a powerful choice if you have not done a whole lot to protect your website against hack attacks. It performs security checks on your code, permissions, and database. It opens your eyes to what things you are doing wrong.

Exploit Scanner: not sure if your website has already been a victim of a malicious attack? This plugin goes through your database and lets you know if it can find anything suspicious.

Bulletproof Security: one of the best security plugins around for WordPress. It protects your website from XSS, CSRF, Base64 and SQL Injection hacking attempts. Performs security checks. Offers built-in .htaccess file editing too.

Wassup for WordPress: lets you keep track of your community members and identify those that may be messing with your website. Once you know who is messing with your website, banning them won’t be that difficult.

WordPress Firewall 2: if there is any fault with this plugin, it is the fact that it is too strong for my taste. It will send you many false positives. On the positive side, it will gives you heads up if someone is messing with your site.

Antivirus: checks your website for exploits and viruses and notifies you if it can find something. It is a hit and miss based on our test but still worth a try if you are worried your site might get hacked.

You won’t need all these plugins to keep your website protected against hack attacks. But having one or two of them installed wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Once you install this application, a log box shows up under your posts. You can take advantage of it to enter your workout data. You also have the option to provide your Garmin link on your website.  The back-end is quite powerful. Users can change how their information is displayed on their website. You can define your distance unit, your gender, height, weight, and other physical attributes.

This plugin can calculate your heart rate training zones, training pace, body mass index, absorption of oxygen value. The toolbox included with this plugin is pretty helpful too.

Runners Log is compatible with Yahoo! Weather system. The chart capabilities of this plugin work like a charm. Implementing it is straight forward. Just use the appropriate short-code to add the correct information to your website. Here are a few short-codes offered:

Runners Log is not perfect but it is still a very useful plugin for those of you who want to keep track of your workout sessions on your website. It has plenty of settings and gives you enough options to customize its behavior to your heart’s desire.

User Locker: sometimes people just forget their credentials and try different username/passwords out of desperation. But brute force attacks are very real, which is why you should ban abusers with this plugin.

User Spam Remover: this is a powerful plugin that can clean out your database from spammers and accounts that have not been used since their creation. You do have the option to define the time period after which inactive accounts are removed.

Wassup: have you ever wondered what people are doing on your website? This is a powerful plugin that spies on your visitors and keeps you informed if they are messing around with sensitive things.

Must Screamer: an effective security plugin that uses PHPIDS to detect attacks on your WordPress site. Enables you to ban and take the appropriate actions to protect your website.

SI Captcha For WordPress: sometimes you can turn abusers and spammers off by making it difficult for them to mess with your website. This powerful CAPTCHA solution is certainly capable of that.

User Access Manager: this is especially useful if you want to limit your content to just a group of people you have approved. This plugin essentially creates a private area on your blog.

User Role Editor: you can’t blame people for messing with your website if you have not paid enough attention to their roles on it.  This plugin allows you to manage your members’ roles more conveniently.

IP Allowed List: quite a strong plugin that turns your website into a private community open only to people you define. This probably won’t work for every type of website but is still pretty useful.

Secure Invites: don’t want everyone to have access to your sign up page? This is a script that lets you invite users to your website. Keeps track of the invites on your website.

Spammer Blocker: I personally have no patience for spammers. At least hackers try to destroy your business and need some skill to do it (not that it’s a good thing). Most spammers are just useless and use robots and annoying tactics. With Spammer Blocker, you can just drop the hammer on their IPs and get them out of your life.

How do you deal with rogue users on your site?