Building a blog and trying to turn it into a community of some kind is not an easy thing to do, especially if you want to have your visitors opinions’ on different topics you write about. Sure, Wordpress has a nice comments system, but it does not allow you to really utilize the potential your blog might have in terms of communicating with the readers. You just have some sort of simple commenting system, but if you really want to build an active community in your blog you should provide them with more options, making your blog more like a forum where all topics are being started by you, but the visitors can comment and discuss them all they want almost like in a real forum. So here comes the IntenseDebate Comments Plugin for Wordpress that can help you make just that…

IntenseDebate Comments is specifically designed to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website, so that once a visitor comes and leaves a comment he’ll return to read the following discussion. The plugin has custom integration with your WordPress admin panel making moderation a piece of cake, almost like moderating a forum. With IntenseDebate Comments plugin you get comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting functionality, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations to enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you. There is a full comment and account data sync between Intense Debate and WordPress to ensure that you will always have your comments even after upgrading or removing the plugin for some reason. IntenseDebate Comments plugin requires WordPress version 2.5 or higher and is fully compatible with the latest version 2.8 so check that requirement before installing it in your blog and if needed you shpuld upgrade the version of Wordpress you have currently installed.

- Download the current version 2.2 of IntenseDebate Comments Plugin
- View the official website of IntenseDebate Comments Plugin for more information…

Nowadays the spam comments in blogs have become quite a serious problem for almost any blogger. There are a lot of automated solutions that try to block the automatic spam bots that visit your blog and leave a mess in the comment sections of your posts. But why should you add additional heavy load to your hosting server with very advanced spambot protection solutions that are hard to implement and configure and not always provide 100% protection when there are some very simple and still quite efficient solutions?

One such solution is the Block-Spam-By-Math Wordpress Plugin that protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by just adding a simple math question to it (example: “What is 4+3 ?“). This approach should give you 100% anti-spam protection and if any spambot bypasses it you can quickly and easily modify is just a bit to get back your full protection. So say bye-bye to the SPAM comments with the help of the quick and simple solution provided by Block-Spam-By-Math that needs noting more than to upload and activate it. And the best thing for this plugin is that it not only protects your blog from spam comments, but also from automated registrations and login attempts. And the only small drawback is that by default you also get the math question when you are logged in and need to post a comment to answer to a question from your visitors…

- Download Block-Spam-By-Math Wordpress Plugin

If you are making a personal weblog where only you’ll be the author it is quite easy to embed Google AdSense Ads in your Wordpress theme. But if you have a blog with multiple authors it becomes harder to track the revenues and share it among all the people. But there is a better alternative to do that with the help of a single Wordpress plugin called AdShare…

By using the AdShare Wordpress Plugin you can easily and quickly embed a code to show AdSense Ads from different publishers (your authors AdSense accounts) without without having to make heavy modifications to your blog. By using the AdShare plugin when a visitor opens your blog and reads a post by one author he’ll see AdSense Ads from his account and if an Ad is being clicked the revenue will go to the author. This will make it easier for you to attract new authors for your blog and at the same time stimulate all writers to improve their articles, because better articles attract more visitors and generate bigger revenue. So basically you are in a win-win situation – your authors are happy and your visitors are happier… ;)

Have in mind that the AdShare plugin requires WordPress version 2.7+ so your blog’s software should be up to date. After you upload and activate the plugin you’ll have to configure it going to Settings / AdShare. You’ll just have to define the default AdSense ID that will be used when an author cannot be determined – this should be your ID as the owner/creator of the blog. Then you need to enter the AdSense IDs for all your authors usernames and as the tird and last option you can choose to support the plugin by showing ADs with the plugin author’s AdSense ID. If you activate the support option about 2% of all show Google ADs will be to support the author so he’ll be able to continue to develop the plugin, but you are not required to.

When you configured all the IDs in the settings of the plugin you’ll need to modify your Blog’s template and to be more exact the Google AdSense code that you might’ve already placed or are going to insert. You need to change only the google_ad_client variable from it’s static value with a dynamic one that will be different according to the circumstances.

The standard value that looks like this:
google_ad_client = "pub-#########";

Needs to be replaced like this:
google_ad_client = "<?php global $pubid; echo $pubid; ?>";

If you are going to dynamically insert Google ads in your widgets or posts that are not going to be defined in the template files you’ll have to replace the above code with the following:
google_ad_client = "[pubid]";

- Download the AdShare Wordpress Plugin…