The tags that you attach to your blog posts are a great way for readers to look for other relevant content on your site. They can be more powerful than the post categories you assign, but how do you go about reconciling multiple tags?

WordPress automatically generates a page for all the posts that have been assigned the same post tag, but what if a reader wants to look up posts that have two or more tags? That’s where the MultiTags plugin can come in handy. In effect, it allows for dynamic combinations of multiple tags.

For instance, let’s say that a reader is interested in Vancouver sushi restaurants. He would then be interested in both the “Vancouver” and the “sushi” tags that you may have assigned, but not necessarily all the “Vancouver” content, nor all the “sushi” content. He’d only want posts that have both.

With this plugin, that search critieria is possible. For more information, check out WP MultiTags on Vogel-Nest.de. The download link is there as well.

Perhaps you’ve started a new blog and you’ve imported a number of posts that are ready to be published. Perhaps you have an existing blog and you recently purchased a number of blog posts that are saved in draft form. Whatever the case, it can be time-consuming to timestamp all of these posts for publishing in a manual fashion.

Alleviating this concern is the Drafts Scheduler WordPress plugin by Jeff Rose. This plugin will automatically take all the posts in your WordPress blog that are currently sitting in draft status and it will schedule all of them for publishing at a future date.

Going through the options for this plugin, you can choose to publish your draft posts sequentially, defining the exact interval that you would like to use to separate each blog post. Alternatively, there is an option that allows for publishing the posts in a random order, but still based on the intervals you prefer. The third option is a full random publishing time for the posts, but you can still define the start date, the maximum number of posts per day, and the daily time frame.

It should be noted that there is no “undo” function in this build of the plugin and all draft posts will be time-stamped (“scheduled”) when you activate its use. The download link is available at the usual WordPress plugin directory.

Not all blog posts are made alike. That’s why you may have implemented a few plugins or adaptations on your blog to highlight some blog posts in a “featured” area. There are all kinds of ways to grant some special attention to your posts, but what about all of those great comments that your readers provide? There has to be a way to highlight them too, right?

Going beyond plugins like those that display most recent comments or the top commentators, Hikari Featured Comments allows you to add three custom fields to the comments posted on your blog. The three special properties are featured, buried, and children/threaded buried. You can change the semantics, but the default meanings sound like they would work just fine.

When a comment is flagged as “featured,” it will be highlighted above and beyond the other comments. You can add special CSS styles to these featured comments, making them more visible and more likely to be read by people browsing through the comments. By contrast, a “buried” comment is one that isn’t necessarily deleted, but it takes on nearly opposite characteristics of a featured comment. Perhaps the comment is faded out or put into a grey box. These are comments that aren’t really spam, so you don’t want to delete them, but they may be off-topic or not contributing to the conversation. The children/threaded buried comments work in a similar way, except they’re only applied to nested comments of the flagged comment.

Extensive documentation on the plug-in’s implementation and installation can be found at Hikari.ws. This is also where you find the download link to get the plug-in for free.

Do you feel the need for speed? Do you get a chill down your spine every time someone mentions a Koenigsegg or a Dacia Sandero? If that’s the case, the Speed Theme for BuddyPress just might be a fantastic option for your automotive-related blog.

The theme has been designed to work in tandem with BuddyPress for your community-minded website, but it can also be implemented without BuddyPress as a regular WordPress theme. Among its features the three-column fluid layout, jQuery sliders, magazine style appearance, and an integrated options panel accessible through the main dashboard.

Other highlights include custom post options, social bookmarking integration, Flickr support, widgetized sidebars and footers, WP tag support, dropdown menus, and poll support. It also helps that it’s a very sleek looking design, partly inspired by the popular BBC television series Top Gear.

For more information, including screenshots, feature lists, and a download link, head over to the developer’s site at 3oneseven.com.

One of the most popular features on Facebook is the ability to upload photographs. Just about everyone does it. You may have also noticed that just about everyone “tags” their Facebook photos with the other people that are in the pictures. These tags can send notifications to the people who are tagged, so they know if they’re being shown in a picture on Facebook.

Would you like to have a similar kind of idea attached to your WordPress blog? WP Pic Tagger is a WordPress plugin that provides exactly that kind of functionality. From the user/reader standpoint, the experience is very similar to Facebook; they hover the mouse pointer over the picture and they can see the little squares where people are tagged.

This can be extended even further, beyond tagging people and into in-image annotations for editorial purposes. Take a picture of a new product and you can highlight its different parts, features, and functions. This is similar, for instance, to what you may encounter with Flickr uploads, among other photo sharing services.

Go to Alleba.com to see a live demo of the plugin, as well as installation instructions and the free download link.

Are you a musician looking to share some of your work with your fans? Do you already have a WordPress blog and you wish there was an easier way to integrate audio files without complex coding? The Haiku plugin for WordPress could be a good fit.

It is not hard to insert multimedia files into blog posts using WordPress, since there are already icons in place in the WordPress dashboard when you add a new post for that kind of functionality. However, the way that these files are inserted may not be suitable to your needs. The critical difference with Haiku is that the media controls are displayed as simple text links.

This helps with browser compatibility, since it drastically simplifies the interface. The HTML5-based audio player for WordPress was coded with jQuery and jPlayer. You can insert the audio files into your posts using a simple shortcode format: [haiku url="http://www.example.com/song.mp3" "title="song title here"]. The title field is optional, but you should probably include that for SEO purposes.

You can see a short demo on the developer’s site, which is also where you can find the free download link.