WordPress offers tons of plugins which confuses the new user. Not just that but there are multiple plugins that serves the same purpose and have the same functions. Which one do you need to get the upper edge, we will cover it in this article. We are only mentioning the plugins that you need to start off your blog, so custom plugins will not be listed in this article, but you may find it being reviewed in our Plugins Category.

I recently wrote an article about how to use WordPress 3.0 multisite/network features. This feature is really cool but out of the box it only supports the multiple sites/blogs to be served on the same domain (networksite1.domain.com or www.domain.com/multisite1/). For some this may be fine but really most like you want to have unique domains for each individual site. In this article I provide a quick guide on how to set up multisite domain mapping in WordPress 3.0. Please note that you should not follow this tutorial if your WordPress 3.0 has not been configured to support multisites!

Over the last couple of weeks we've been through the process of creating a stylish blog design in Photoshop, coding it up into a static HTML and CSS concept, and now we'll put the whole thing together as a fully working WordPress theme. Follow this step by step walkthrough of the various WordPress theme files, and see how the HTML is split up and injected with PHP tags to provide the complete blogging functionality.

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. You can now shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to mask their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, their links on Twitter to come from their own domain, or generally increase the reach of their website by spreading these links on forums or comments on other blogs.

We have all heard this before: "you can do everything with WordPress." That's actually true. WordPress is a powerful open source content management system that can handle any type of website, as long as you have the right theme. Best of all, in most cases, you won't have to break the bank to get the job done.