Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Admisitrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

Installation instructions:

1. Extract loginlockdown-1.2.zip into your wp-content/plugins directory into its own folder (note: not the root plugins folder, as this may cause the activation routine to fail).
2. Activate the plugin in the Plugin options.
3. Customize the settings from the Options panel, if desired.

Requires at least WordPress 2.5, tested up to 2.5.1, however, I’m using it on my WordPress 2.7 blog with no problems at all.

Dowmload Login Lockdown here.

WP Review Site combines has these features:

Add a star rating system to your comment forms - This enables visitors to your WP blog do more than just leave comments: they can write a review and rate it via mousing over star icons. You define the categories, and your visitors can rate between 1 to 5 stars. And WP Review Site is completely customizable to fit your blog’s design; you can display rankings as you see fit, whether you use tables or CSS.

And WP Review Site lets you sort reviews by weighted average rating: you can set it to display reviews by the highest/lowest-rated, and not in chronological order. You can even choose to not show the rating system in some parts of your site. WP Review Site even has various sidebar widgets for you to add a list of top rated items to your site’s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average rating that user left.

And what makes WP Review Site even better for me is that it already comes with seven themes preconfigured to work with the plugin:

• WP Review Site
• WPRS: Aqua Featured
• WPRS: Award Winning Hosts
• WPRS: Bonus Black
• WPRS: Double Silver
• WPRS: Green Featured
• WPRS: Ocean

And even better, WP Review Site has already got its own affiliate link management system that will let you configure your links easier. Instead of inserting the URL for the same anchor text over and over, you can set your review blog to automatically insert affiliate links.

What I don’t care for, however, is the fact that the customization features of WP Review Site is spread over two options pages. I’d like to have everything in one configuration page.

For $97 dollars, you’d get free upgrades for life along with all the features mentioned above.

Pros:

• WP Review Site does the work of many different plugins to make WordPress work as a powerful affiliate review site.
• It comes with seven preconfigured themes
• Affiliate link management system is powerful

Cons:

• Too many separate options pages
• Switching themes would clear the sidebar of widgets

Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Instead of installing a huge number of plugins or sticking in a lot of third-party widgets on your blog, the Lifestream plugin simplifies the process by having a huge repository of social networks to easily manage your social feeds. And for those social networks that aren’t included with this plugin, you can create and use an unlimited number of feeds for Lifestream.

Here, in a nutshell, are the features of Lifestream:

• Unlimited number of feeds.
• Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two.
• Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code.
• Customizable display using stylesheets.
• Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam.
• Localization ready
• Daily digest available to summarize your activities.
• Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website

Requirements to install Lifestream are:

• PHP 5.1 or newer.
• MySQL 5.0 or newer.
• WordPress 2.5 or newer.

I knew when I downloaded this plugin that it’ll be a pretty big file, but the installation file is, well, way bigger than I expected it to be. It obviously took a long time to upload on my server. Running the plugin made my WordPress installation a bit sluggish, but it’s something I could live with.

You can use it as a sidebar widget, or you can even dedicate an entire page to your lifestream, like in this demo.

If you want to try out Lifestream, you can download it from here.

This is where Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu come in to be very handy. Originally meant as a way to reduce clicks and to make navigation faster, the plugin retains the topbar navigation and has a lot of new features for WordPress 2.7 users.

According to the plugin author, “When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a “desktop application” feel, and I think it’s superior to a vertical menu.”

The features of this plugin would be:

• Customizable color scheme with a neat color picker
• Normal mode for regular users, compact mode for real estate maniacs, minimal mode for those who never have enough
• Optional cute icons from FamFamFam
• Enhanced compatibility with handheld devices

I absolutely loved the color picker. I thought the new colors of 2.7 were a bit drab compared to the orange of the previous version.

I also find the compact version to be the best way to go about using this plugin, because it saves you a lot of screen real estate.

Installation should be a breeze: download from here, upload to your plugins folder using your favorite FTP client, and activate via the plugins page.

According to the site, WP-StatPress is the free plug-in for WordPress dedicated to the real-time management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, etc.

As you can see, data is presented in a way that is easily understood right away, especially by the novice. This is what makes WP-StatPress stand out. Upon opening WP-StatPress, you immediately see a graph showing your traffic for the month, something that other plugins lack. There is even a “Spy” function, that will let you check who is currently on your blog and what pages are they visiting.

StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar, or you can use PHP if you’re not into widgets. And this is what sold WP-StatPress to me: it can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when limited space is present. It will help you fight database bloat that’s present in other plugins. It can halp you trim down your database without going to PHPmyadmin.

If you like what you see, you can try and download WP-StatPress here and leave a comment if it works the way you want it to, or if you want it to add more features.

UPDATE: Apparently WP-StatPress is no longer updated by the developer. Thankfully, Pascal was able to point us to a fork/continuation of the WP-StatPress project, StatPress Reloaded.

Chitika|Premium is a CPC search-targeted advertising solution brought to you by Chitika. It can be run on the same page as Google AdSense, or on its own as an AdSense alternative.

Chitika|Premium ads sample

This plugin allows you to easily change the display of your Chitika|Premium ads through a settings page in the WordPress admin interface. It allows you to change any of the following features:

• Ad size
• Link and text color
• Background color
• Display position (above or below your post)
• Channel

Installing Chitika|Premium is just the same as any other plugin. Download it first, then extract, and then you need to fire up your favorite FTP client, and log in to your WordPress installation. Then do the following steps:

1. Upload /chitika-premium/ directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin Chitika|Premium through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Chitika | Premium’ to activate the display and add your username and change any display settings.
   If you are using a version of WordPress earlier than 2.5 your configuration screen will be in ‘Options’ > ‘Chitika|Premium’

If you have any problems using Chitika | Premium, don’t hesitate to contact the plugin developers.

The said comments aren’t spammy, but linking to off-topic sites isn’t something I consider good commenting behavior. In fact, comments like these give the impression that the person who did this was insincere and is only using my blog as part of SEO. Frankly, this blatant promotion annoys me at times, because there are way too many comments to edit and links to delete, and I don’t have much time for that. A plugin that will automate the process of removing links through a single mouse click would be a godsend.

Strip! by Markku Seguerra is a WordPress plugin that allows you hide links from a given comment. This gives you a button to strip any given comment of links, and unlike other plugins that offer a similar function, Strip! also gives you the option of restoring the links with the same button.

Strip! has been tested on WordPress 2.6, but may still work with older versions.

Installation of Strip! is easy: just upload to your WordPress installation using your favorite FTP client, and activate through the plugins page. You’d see the strip/unstrip buttons right away. I’ve been using Strip! on my personal blog since the time he unveiled it at WordCamp Philippines, and I’ve been satisfied with it so far. You can download Strip! from here.

What other commenting behavior do you find annoying? If you use other plugins to combat comment off-topic llinking, tell me about it.

WP-Tuner for WordPress is a powerful and easy way to answer hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host? This plugin will help you find out. One problem, though, with this particular plugin is that it’s not for the novice. Advanced WP users will be able to understand what the plugin tells them, but it may not be that obvious for everyone.

WP-Tuner is recommended to be used by:

• WordPress site administrators
• WordPress plugin and theme designers
• WordPress developers

WP-Tuner can also be used with a number of advanced ways, like hooking any WordPress action to it. You can even use it to time anything at all in WordPress.

Installing WP-Tuner is as easy as installing any other plugin: upload using your favorite FTP client, and activate via the plugins page. Be sure to read the plugin’s readme file and the associated help documents before using it.

Used with a bit of common sense, this powerful plugin will help blog administrators as well as software developers improve their WordPress blog performance.

By default, these shared items are readily available to your Google contacts who use Google Reader. But what if you want to share these entries with your blog readers as well? The people at Google Tutor came up with a nifty plugin that lets you include your shared items on your WordPress blog.

Shared Items Post is a WordPress plugin that automagically creates a blog post from your Google Reader Shared Items feed. You can schedule the post to go out daily, weekly, or monthly and even set the time of day.

The plugin is pretty straightforward, enabling you to automatically make a post out of your shared items. Since this is a pretty new plugin, the features are quite sparse. So far, the plugin only has these features:

• Post scheduling - by day, week or month, and time of day
• Post formatting - you have complete control over the layout of post from the plugin admin panel
• Post settings - set the author, category, and tags

Installation is straightforward: just download the file from here, unzip and upload to your plugins directory using your favorite FTP client, and activate in your plugins page. To see the plugin in action, Google Tutor provides us with these two sample posts here and here to see how it looks.

Honestly, I’d love to see a sidebar widget that will let us post a non-javascript version of our shared items on our blog sidebars, but I’m hoping that gets included in the future.

Overall, Shared Items Post is a good plugin for you to be able to share your favorite reads in your RSS subscriptions, and a nice way for your blog to have content when new posts cone far in between.

But now, IntenseDebate is out of beta and is offering a new WordPress plugin that offers the following features for your blog:

Two-Way Comment Sync

Comments made in IntenseDebate are automatically backed-up to your WordPress comment system, while your existing WordPress comments are automatically imported into IntenseDebate. In case you want to leave IntenseDebate and go back to the default comment system, your comments are safely migrated.

Admin Panel Integration

IntenseDebate has been interated to the WordPress admin panel, making the switch as smooth as possible.

Search Engine Optimization

IntenseDebate intelligently outputs the standard WordPress comments, which makes your comments easily indexed by search engines that ignore JavaScript. And it also makes visitors with JavaScript disabled on their browsers easily interact and make comments.

Trackbacks

Trackbacks and pingbacks are also easily integrated with IntenseDebate.

Profile Sync

You can login to IntenseDebate with WordPress, and vice versa.

Post Settings

WordPress admin settings like closing and opening comments on a post, and even changing your post titles, are automatically recognized and reflected in your IntenseDebate settings.

Other features included in the plugin would be:

• Threaded comments
• The ability to vote on comments and show comment reputations
• Simultaneously post a comment to a blog and Twitter
• Replly to comments and moderate comments by email
• Commentor profiles can include links to social networking pages
• Ability to add sidebar widgets with information on things like your top commentors

Intense Debate also works with Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr.