A search turned up over 400 results.  There are fewer plugins that are tagged “twitter”, but even these amount to 259.  In attempt to find the “best” I extracted details of all 259 and placed them in a spreadsheet.  I then eliminated all those with an average user rating of 4 or less, and those that did not look relevant.  The rest I sorted on the product of average user rating and number of downloads to find the most popular and highly rated twitter plugins.

The top 20 are listed below:

Twitter for Wordpress

Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.
Downloads: 149,778
Average user rating:4.4

Twitter Widget Pro

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including parsing @username, #hashtags, and URLs into links. Requires PHP5.
Downloads: 56,705
Average user rating:4.3

TweetMeme Button

Adds the TweetMeme button into your posts and RSS feed.
Downloads: 40,940
Average user rating:4.7

WP to Twitter

Posts a Twitter status update when you update your WordPress blog or post to your blogroll, using the Cligs URL shortening service.
Downloads: 36,992
Average user rating:4.8

Pretty Link

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. Create short links suitable for Twitter using your own domain name!
Downloads: 35,264
Average user rating:4.3

Tweet This

Adds a  Tweet This Post  link to every post and page. Shortens URLs. Can automatically tweet new blog posts. Highly customizable.
Downloads: 37,701
Average user rating:4.1

Twitme

This plugin allows you to automatically post your new posts on the twitter website.
Downloads: 23,053
Average user rating:4.2

WordTwit

WordTwit is a plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Twitter account as a tweet.
Downloads: 17,302
Average user rating:4.8

Tweetable

Integrate Twitter with your WordPress blog. Automatically tweet new posts, display your latest tweet in your sidebar, etc.
Downloads: 17,422
Average user rating:4.6

Wickett Twitter Widget

Display tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog. As seen on WordPress.com.
Downloads: 12,997
Average user rating:4.7

MyTwitter

MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitter updates (tweets) on their blog and update their status through the Options page.
Downloads: 13,555
Average user rating:4.6

Digg Digg

Integrate  Digg Button ,  Reddit Me Button ,  Dzone Button ,  Yahoo Buzz Button  and  TweetMeme (twitter) Button  Into Wordpress Content.
Downloads: 8,989
Average user rating:5

Tweetbacks

Show tweets that mention your post as “tweetbacks” in your comments section.
Downloads: 12,231
Average user rating:4.2

Twitter Friends Widget

Displays your Twitter friends with their profile images in the sidebar.
Downloads: 7,103
Average user rating:5

TwitterCounter

Integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter.
Downloads: 6,946
Average user rating:5

Subscription Options

Adds subscription option icons for your RSS Feed URL; your FeedBurner Email Service URL and your Twitter Stream URL. Totally user-defined.
Downloads: 9,249
Average user rating:4.1

@ Reply

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments.
Downloads: 7,223
Average user rating:4.5

Twitter Friendly Links

Your very own TinyURL within your OWN domain! If you DO promote your blog posts in Twitter, then you MUST make your links look cool!
Downloads: 8,547
Average user rating:4.1

SimpleTwitter

SimpleTwitter displays the most recent twitter post (tweet) for a given user. The tweet is cached on the webserver for a number of minutes.
Downloads: 6,350
Average user rating:4.7

BackType Connect

The BackType Connect Wordpress plugin lets you show related conversations (from Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed & more) inline with your own comments.
Downloads: 5,331
Average user rating:5

While I don’t like the image, and won’t be putting it on my front page, it is gratifying to know that I must be doing something right as far as promoting my own website is concerned.

Here are the results:

                                                                                                   1
         1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         0
----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0
All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page -- who might ... I put both
Generate custom meta tags easily by filling in the questions, then copy and paste ... the title, description
Having a meta description tag on each page may give those pages an SEO advantage ... so 150 characters
i want to know the safe length for "meta description" and "title" .... in title tag. and in the case
Ok, lets get one thing clear - Meta tags are still important for SEO. Google uses the meta description
You can set the maximum number of characters that will be used to generate your Description meta-tag.
Meta Description Tag: required. Enter a description for your Web page. A maximum of 150 characters is
Your Title and Meta Description are marketing tools first since ... for the keyword meta tag is 1000,
Description tags consist the information on seo and google tips on writing meta description tags, length,
31 Oct 2008 ... A Good Example of a Description Meta Tag:. We will use a page on a ... Description Tag
                                                                                                   1
         1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         0
----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0

1         1         1         1         1         1         1
0         1         2         3         4         5         6
0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0
 descriptions in short of in the description meta tag, ...
scription and keyword tags should be unique to the page. ...
ers (including spaces) is a good maximum length to use. ...
e of description tag maximum up to 330 ...
ion for its page descriptions, which while not directly ...
g. Longer is not necessarily better and a maximum of ...
is suggested for this Tag. You get one chance to capture ...
0, whereas scrubber.com says the max is ...
ength, limits, guidelines, suggestions, character limits, ...
Tag Tips. - Keep it to the Google Maximum of Less. ...
1         1         1         1         1         1         1
0         1         2         3         4         5         6
0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0

My best guess is that anything up to at least 155 characters (including spaces) will be displayed.

Why would I want to do this? I have recently started to actively administer four WordPress Blogs, three public and one private. The three public Blogs are:

• Dr Baker Comments (this blog)
• CSEM-BMP Comment
• Gordon Fricker’s Blog

Some time ago I saw a list of essential WordPress plugins, so I thought I should find it again. As I found, there are many such lists. From these lists I’ve created a Top Twenty List of Essential WordPress Plugins.

The ten lists I consulted from my google search were compiled by:

1. Design Meme
2. David Dairey
3. Mindful Geek
4. Michael Gray
5. Jiannis Sotiropoulos
6. Donna Fontenot
7. Quick Online Tips
8. Ben Yoskovitz
9. Adam Hirsch
10. Tech Roam

I also consulted Lists of Essential WordPress Plug-ins. Some of these lists showed up on google (listed above). The other lists were compiled by:

• Market Federation
• Sam Stevens
• Devanshu Mehta
• tube torial
• Joe Brockmeier
• Sean Aune
• Calvin Woon
• Vlad Akilov

I’ve written a paper detailing how I ordered the plugins. The results, the top twenty essential WordPress plugins are listed below.

I put this list together to see what is realy essential in terms of plugins. The advice I’ve read is don’t go overboard with plugins. So my advice is don’t load all of these.

I’ve also added advice on increasing the memory limit available to WordPress after the tables below.

The top twenty plugins appeared in from 3 to 12 lists (out of 18). Where several appeared in the same number of lists I compared the place they occured in the individual lists to obtain an overall position.

As well as the Top Twenty Essential WordPress Plugins, here are the runners up, the next twenty essential WordPress Plugins. These plugins occured in two lists each.

As well as plugins, Market Federation suggests:

Plugins can take a lot of resources, especially memory and many bloggers complain about their memory limit and wordpress cache system failing. Most shared hosting providers will limit the memory usage to 8Mb but you can alter this with a little trick. Login to your FTP account and find .htaccess file in your public_html directory. If you can’t find it then you will have to create it otherwise edit it and add the following line

php_value memory_limit 12M

This increases your memory limit to 12Mb which is more than enough for wordpress.

An alternative to using the .htaccess file would be to add the following to the wp-config.php file. However I’m lead to believe that this will only work if your hosting provider is not using PHP in safe_mode, and you would need to ensure that this is retained on any WordPress upgrade.

ini_set("memory_limit","12M");

I recently wrote:

It is my contention that virtually no one will read anything at the foot of the page, but they will look for things there (but only things that they would expect to find, things like:

But then wondered, well what do people expect, what is “standard” for a page footer?

I expect a Copyright statement, and some links to items like Privacy, About, Contact, Disclaimer, Terms of Use and sometimes the actual contact details such as Name, Address, Post Code, Telephone number, Fax number, Email address.

I’m also not surprised to see logo, membership icons, trust icons, valid (x)html/css icons, accessibility icons, navigation links, sitemap link, search  box, home page link, page creation date, page update date, page URL, request for comment with link, etc.

Having written up (down?) what I expect in a footer, I thought a little use of google would be in order and found a very interesting article by Jeff Lash on More Than Just a Footer.  In his article he comments:

During countless usability tests, I have observed users who scroll to the bottom of the page when they are lost, only to be left helpless by the generic footer navigation.

Designers need to give as much attention to the footer design as to the other elements on the page. While simply blocking off some space for the footer might be an acceptable solution in some cases, there are many ways to take advantage of the bottom of the page.

He then goes on to suggest three inventive approaches:

 

1. An out-of-site map: where he references A Sitemap on Every Page. 
2. Rate it: a rate this button, useful for identifying most popular pages.
3. Sell it: “Bottom of the page deals” that the user is not expecting.

 

His page ends with Related Topics links.

Also worth reading is Best Website Footer Design? by Ronald Huereca.  While the article is short it is followed by many comments with links to commenters’ favourite footers.  Well worth a browse.  There is also this gem of a comment by Andy Faulkner:

If the reader has got to the bottom of the page, then it is highly likely that they read the content and therefore it is also likely that they found it worthwhile. If they found this worthwhile, then offering similar content in the footer seems like a good idea to me.

What do you expect to see, or think should be, in a footer?