Pods is a CMS framework for WordPress. It’s a plugin that sits on top of WordPress, allowing you to add and display your own content types.

Calling Pods a ‘plugin’ is an understatement. It’s one of those WordPress plugins that does so much more than provide some functionality to work with that makes your life a bit easier or makes WordPress that much more useful. Pods has changed the way I work with WordPress. Pods has allowed me to truly use WordPress as the content management system it was born to be. While a ton of great stuff is happening in the core, Pods is giving us what we need to work with today, and it’s spectacular.

Over the next few months, I plan to divulge all I know about Pods in a series of tutorials and articles meant to act as my own personal user guide for Pods. Pods is a big enough system where you can actually work with it in your own style, and I think I’ve done that to an extent. Pods has an entire level of author features that I don’t particularly make use of simply because I prefer to get my hands even dirtier than Pods requires.

An introduction to Pods

As it is defined, Pods is a content management plugin for WordPress. Many people may wonder why a plugin is needed to make WordPress a content management system, doesn’t it do that already? Absolutely, but out of the box, WordPress specifically caters to a few types of content; Posts, Pages, Media, Comments, and Links. WordPress does a ton more (such as categories, tags, users, etc.), but as far as the average user is concerned, those are the major content types you’re able to work with. Themes bring all that managed content together to share with the world, and plugins build on top of that even more.

Many plugins exist to provide you with a new type of content to manage, most often a specific type of content aimed at achieving a specific goal. That’s awesome, and helps tons of people to make that change they’re looking to update on their site. Pods, however, thinks about things in a different way.

Pods provides a platform on which to build your own content types to manage, all the while providing some really advanced functionality having to do with that content. From the User Guide, a Pod is a group of input fields. You can add and arrange any number of the various available input fields to any number of Pods, essentially creating your own custom CMS for each website you build in WordPress.

Finding the happy medium between WordPress core and Pods

So if WordPress is a CMS, and Pods is a plugin that acts as a CMS framework for WordPress, how (and why) can you use them at the same time?

While you can technically accomplish the same functionality with an out-of-the-box copy of WordPress using a crazy blend of nested Pages, categorized Posts, and a ton of Custom Fields, Pods helps abstract that desired ‘next level’ of functionality you’re looking for as a WordPress developer.

Trying to explain what Custom Fields are and how to use them to a client isn’t something I look fondly upon. While it’s super for developers, to the rest of the world it’s terribly bulky and unintuitive. I think Custom Fields are an awesome available resource for plugin developers, but they’re one of those things better left unseen to the novice user. Pods brings the ability to work with custom pieces of data to the client, all the while giving developers a terrific extended platform to build upon. If you find yourself repeatedly using custom fields within your WordPress sites, especially for clients, you’re probably ready for Pods.

You can download it from the official site.

The wordpress plugins are arranged broadly by category of usage. As far as I know, all these plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress 2.5 version. Please feel free to suggest great plugins in comments that I can add to this list.

Manage WordPress Comments

• Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
• WP AJAX Edit Comments – Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post inline using AJAX.
• Close Old Posts – Closes comments on old posts without any DB queries.
• WP Grins – allows you to put clickable smilies on your post and comments forms.
• Live Comment Preview – the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.
• Show Top Commentators – Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.
• CommentLuv – shows a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment.
• MyAvatars – shows MyBlogLog’s avatars in your comments
• Comment Relish – Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
• Favatars – displays the favicon associated with the commenter’s website.
• Dofollow – lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments.
• OpenID Comments for Wordpress – allows users to leave comments using their OpenID.
• Extended Comment Options – allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
• Get Recent Comments – displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog.

Stop WordPress Spam

• Akismet – intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
• Bad Behavior – is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
• WP-Contact Form with Spam Protection – creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you easily.
• Defensio is a spam filtering web service to block comment spam.
• Digital Fingerprint � useful for detecting content theft.

Expert WordPress SEO

• Google XML Sitemaps Generator – creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.
• Permalink Redirect – replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry�s (or archive�s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• Head META Description – Insert HTML META description tags using post excerpts.
• Enforce www. Preference – will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
• Broken Link Checker – monitors and notifies you for broken links on your blog.
• Quick META Keywords – will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post based on categories under which the article is categorized.

Easy WordPress Navigation

• Related Entries – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced page navigation to Wordpress, which is very useful for navigation on index and category pages.
• Evermore – Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. Helpful to create expandable posts summaries in Wordpress. Combine with Less that changes the (more�) link so it displays the entire post, not just the part after the “more”.
• Random Redirect – Allows you to create a link to a random post on your blog. Lets readers browse in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
• WP-Cumulus – displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere
• Lightbox JS Plugin – used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
• Homepage Excerpts – Gives flexibility to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.
• WordPress Mobile Edition – shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
• Popularity Contest – keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
• Extended Live Archive – implements a dynamic, AJAXified way of digging into the archives of a blog.
• Landing Sites – When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
• Clean Archives – designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion. It lists the Month / Year, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article, and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
• Custom Query String – set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.
• KB Advanced RSS Widget – a wordpress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.
• Permalinks Migration Plugin – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website or affecting your search engine rankings.

Interactive WordPress Posts

• Share This – lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
• Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
• WP-Email – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
• WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• Viper’s Video QuickTags – easy posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo etc.

WordPress Twiter Plugins

• TweetSuite -� integrates Twitter with your blog with server-side TweetBacks, ReTweet-This buttons, digg-like Tweet-This Button, automatic tweeting of new posts etc.
• WP Twitip ID – Lets users add their twitter username to the comment form
• Check out more top Twitter plugins

WordPress Database tools

• WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today.
• WP-Supercache – A modification of WP-Cache that produces static html files.
• DB-cache – another caching plugin which claims your site will work much faster and will use less disk space for cached files.
• WP-DBManager – Lets you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

WordPress Admin Management Tools

• PodPress – adds lots of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
• TinyMCE Advanced – adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, the WordPress wysiwyg editor. Adds over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
• Exec-PHP – allows php tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files.
• Photo Dropper – lets you add free photos (Flickr / Creative Commons) to your blog posts without leaving Wordpress.
• WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
• Admin Drop Down Menu – eliminates the need for this double clicking on the Admin screens by allowing you to see the second level menu just by placing your mouse over a main menu.
• Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.
• Theme Test Drive – allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as an administrator, while visitors continue to see the default one.

WordPress Advertising

• Ad Rotator – Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
• AdSense-Deluxe – is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. More Google Adsense WP plugins.
• Buy Me a Beer – allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal on pretext of buying a beer.
• Wordpress BankRoll – offers to help you cut out the middleman by allowing advertisers to buy reviews directly on your blog.

Wordpress Blog Translation

• Global Translator – Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
• Translator Plugin Pro – provides automatic machine translation of your blog in 13+1 languages. Costs $30.

Enhance Wordpress RSS Feeds

• FD Feedburner – Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com
• Simple Feed Copyright – adds a simple copyright notice to full text wordpress feeds.
• Add Related Posts to Your Feed – adds a list of Related Posts to your full text feed. Requires either UTW or Related Posts plugin installed and activated.
• RSS Signature – allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds.

Random WordPress Stuff

• Democracy – adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
• flickrRSS – allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog.