Over the coming weeks and months, I have tons of WordPress plugin reviews scheduled to be posted.   As I complete the reviews, they are being added to my ultimate list of WordPress plugins, which is a collection of WordPress plugins, their descriptions, and the links to these reviews.  My hope is that this page, in time, will prove to be a useful resource for WordPress users.

In the meantime, I ran across a great post by Lifehacker.biz called WordPress plugins and tutorials.   The authors went into an extreme amount of detail with their list of plugins, and there were even a few useful ones there that I didn’t know existed.  I recommend you take a minute or two and skim through their list to make sure you are taking advantage of all of these plugins available.

If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.3 yet, it may be because of compatibility concerns.    WordPress 2.3 had some major changes under the hood, causing several WordPress plugins to not work correctly.

I noticed the other day that WordPress has actually been collecting a list of WordPress 2.3 compatible plugins to help people prepare for their upgrade and hopefully avoid any problems that the newest release might cause.

Have you ever seen a blogger mention how important it is to schedule posts ahead? It is generally a good idea to have a few posts set aside for a rainy day, or scheduled ahead in case something comes up.  If you are a Wordpress user, you might not know that you have the ability to schedule posts ahead.  It is actually quite easy!  In addition to scheduling posts ahead, you can use old dates if you want your post to be dated sometime in the past.

Here is how to schedule your WordPress posts to be published at a different time and/or date:

1. Write your post.
2. Go to where it says Post Timestamp on the right side of your Write panel and adjust the time/date to reflect when you would like your post to be published. You will want to verify that your blog’s time is set up correctly to ensure the post appears when you want it to.
3. Publish the post.
4. The post will now appear in the Manage posts tab, but will not show on your site until the designated date/time. If you date it into the past, it will post right away and show the designated date/time.

This is a useful way to keep a few posts saved for a rainy day or to keep content showing up if an illness puts you out of commission for awhile. You can also experiment with posting times to see what works best for you and your readers. For example, I’ve found publishing posts early in the morning seems to help Google AdSense payouts per click. It also allows readers overseas to see my stuff during their evening hours, before they go to bed.

In addition to the stuff you’ll find here at Hack WordPress, there are all sorts of things being discussed around the blogosphere about WordPress. Here are a few things I’ve collected that I hope people will find useful:

• Keith over at Techie Buzz is WordPress theme and plugin designer, and has a lot of knowledge about PHP. He has a couple useful posts explaining how to create SEO friendly URL’s using mod rewrite and PHP and how to get rid of errors after upgrading to WordPress 2.3.
• Web Designer Wall has listed some plugins they find useful. There are a few I haven’t covered here yet, so you may want to check it out.
• Aseem has published a great guest post at JohnTP.com explaining how to increase your WordPress blogs load time.  Even the little things can go a long way towards improving your blogs load time.

When picking out a new WordPress theme, there are a lot of factors to consider. Do you want a 2-column theme or a 3-column theme? What about AJAX comments? Maybe you want specific colors? No matter what your preference is, one of the main factors you should probably consider is how search engine friendly your theme is going to be.

There are a lot of techniques that theme designers can use when creating their theme to help optimize it for search engines, and several authors have taken the time to do so. Here are what I feel are the best search engine optimized WordPress themes:

2-Column Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes

Slick Blue Theme (Advertising Ready, SEO Friendly)

Source | Download

Sodelicious Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Modern Blue Green Theme

Source | Download | Demo

YourBlog 2.0 Theme

Source | Download | Demo

PassionDuo Theme (3 Colors)

Green: Demo | Download, Red: Demo | Download, Blue: Demo | Download

Yakuter Tema 2.0 Theme

Source | Download | Demo

3-Column Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes

Big Blue Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Redie 3.0 Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Ambient Glo Theme

Source | Download | Demo

ProSense Theme

Source | Download (Orange, Blue, and Gray) | Demo

Cutline Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Courtney Tuttle has posted a great collection of SEO Friendly WordPress themes. It looks like these are existing WordPress themes that were modified to be more search engine friendly.

Have a search engine optimized WordPress theme you’d like to see included in this list? Feel free to comment below with a link and I’ll see about it getting added!