One of the best things about WordPress is its seemingly the endless list of plugins that all providing some sort of enhanced functionality over the other to improve the overall wordpress experience.

Dozens of new WordPress Plugins are released every single month, which means that anyone that has a wordpress powered website should constantly be on the lookout for these to ensure that their site is completely optimised and up-to-date. Today’s WordPress Wednesday post featured the 20 newest free & premium wordpress plugins.

Free Plugins

1. WP Teacher

WP Teacher is a plugin that allows teachers to use WordPress to their advantage by intergrating course content into thier personal website to ehnhance student learning. WP Teacher is built with easy-to-use features that will make his or her WordPress experience easier.

WP Teacher functions like typical blog postings, but provides addtional features to maximize student learning. All the features work togeather. The plugin is maximized for customization which makes it perfect for multi-site wordpress installation.

2.  Are You a Human

Are You a Human, replaces the awful user experience of normal CAPTCHA with short and simple games. Instead of the twisted and distorted CAPTCHA text, PlayThru’s games are fun for your users. PlayThru now works with Contact Form 7 and Gravity forms! PlayThru is automatically integrated with Contact Form 7 or Gravity Forms, all you need to do is add it within the form builder.

3. Twitter2Post

Great tool to archive your tweets for better SEO & show your tweets on your web with no backward limit at posts with special category

4. WP Social Stats

WP Social Stats is a social analytics plugin that tracks the performance of your blog or website posts on social networks. People love to share great content with their friends on social networks, but do you know which network is the most popular for your blog/website or what type of blog posts are shared the most?

WP Social Stats helps you answer these questions so you focus on creating great content, the key to success for any blog or website.

5. HTML5 Video Player with Playlist

Allows WordPress users to easily use HTML5 the element enable native video playback within the browser. It supports Android, iOS/iPad/iPhone and all browsers i.e. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE and Opera. HTML5 Video Player with Playlist, Full Screen, Random, Stream Seek, Volume Control, Timer, Play-Pause option.

6. Sell Media

The Sell Media plugin will allow you to turn any image, pdf, video, audio or document into a product that your visitors can purchase and download. If you can upload it into WordPress, you can sell it.

7. WP Slide-Up Box

Add jQuery-driven fancy slideboxes to your WordPress pages and Posts. With this plugin a layer will slide on an inserted picture on mouse hover.

8. GroupDocs

GroupDocs Annotation lets you embed several types of files into your WordPress pages using the GroupDocs Viewer – allowing inline viewing and annotation of the following file types, with no Flash or PDF browser plug-ins required:

9. Auto Image Resizer

The “Auto Image Resizer” is a state of the art WordPress Plugin which reduces your uploaded images to the maximal used image dimensions of your WordPress website.

If the uploader’s (author, member, whoever) browsers supports HTML5, Gears, Flash or Silverlight the images will be re-sized directly on the client otherwise the server will do that. So the Auto Image Resizer plugin works in every case regardless of the clients browser or OS.

10. Po.st

Po.st is the first and only social sharing platform that offers publishers the ability to monetize the social activity on their site. Our unique “after-the-share unit” makes it easy for publishers to generate revenue from a 300×250 ad unit that appears within the social sharing confirmation box.

Premium Plugins

1. Authors WordPress Plugin $6

The Authors plugin displays a microformated list of all authors that are members of your site, which is useful if you are running a multi-author site. Authors will have the ability to add links to their social profiles such as Behance, Delicious, deviantART, Digg, Dribbble, Facebook, Forrst, Flickr, Github, Google+, Grooveshark, Instagram, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Soundcloud, Spotify, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, YouTube.

2. Vaquita – Mega Accordion Widget $4

This is a beautiful accordion widget. Accordion Widget with an unlimited number of elements.

Features

• Unlimited number of elements
• Personal style for each element
• Multilanguage
• Easy to use

3. Windows Phone Box $9

Windows Phone Box is a good plugin that generates automagically review boxes for Windows Phone Marketplace Apps.

4. Tweetly $8

Tweetly requires your clients/users to tweet the current page or post to their profile before displaying the locked content. This isn’t just any old unlocking plugin; Tweetly is a stylish CSS3 animated box that catches the eye instantly. It’s fast, uses no resources except what is already built it to WordPress.

This can be used to send out viral messages to everyone’s followers who tweet the current page or post. With over 500 Million Twitter Users, having a good content-filled site will drive traffic directly to your site using this lightweight plugin!

5. Z6 URL Shortener $15

The Z6 URL shortener WordPress plugin integrates nicely into your current theme and turns your website, on your own domain, into a URL shortening service.

6. Theia Smart Thumbnails $12

Theia Smart Thumbnails for WordPress lets you customize the thumbnails for each of your images. Gone are the days when you had to manually crop or upload separate versions of your thumbnails. Now you can simply choose a point of interest for your image – e.g. a person’s face, an object, etc. – and all the thumbnails will be automatically updated to include them. Your pages will be much more aesthetically pleasing and your visitors will thank you for it.

7. Categories Grid $11

This plugin works with any theme and looks great. You can showcase your content in a unique style. Thumbnails are auto changing based on a latest post in that category.

8. Payment Express for Jigoshop $20

Payment Express is brought to you by DPS which is a high growth, innovative global leader in payment technology. Providing PCI DSS compliant payment solutions under the Payment Express brand, they are certified with all major card schemes. A global end to end platform for e-commerce, retail and unattended that facilitates payments seamlessly in real time.

Payment Express (PxPost) Payment Gateway is a WordPress Plugin which allows the Jigoshop plugin to accept credit card payments on site without redirecting customer to Payment Express.

Important Notes : You need to have SSL Certificate Installed on your site to use this Gateway.

9. The Countdown Pro $6

The countdown functionality can easily be added to a content or sidebar area and let your users know the counts. With counting down and up functionality, gives you a full control to your counter. This plugin comes with shortcode generator and a mutli instances sidebar widget, packed with bunch of options. All styles and scripts area pulled in the header section. Every each counter have their own selector that enables you to create spesifics style or script to the selector.

10. Content Reloaded $11

Do you want to create a content background image? or an icon for the title? Here it comes, the plugin that gives you an easy way to set the post title icon and content background.

Using the awesome post meta dialog, you can attach the content background image per each post, set the background position and opacity. This plugin also supports custom post type, you can disable and enable it from the admin panel.