Good news, everyone! We’re back with another list of small but useful utilities, plugins that can completely transform the purpose of a WordPress install, and others that introduce slightly experimental concepts to the workflow.

Have a look, tell us which are your favorites, and as always, let us know if we missed any other great plugins in the comments.

Without further ado, here is this month’s selection:

Priority Shortcodes

WordPress has a function that has causes both joy and suffering, depending on what you happen to be doing at the time. This function is called wpautop, and it is responsible for putting paragraph tags (<p></p>) around every sentence you write.

This is helpful when you’re just writing a post, but it also sometimes puts those tags around the output of shortcodes. In many cases, this is all right; but it may bother you to see something like this in your generated markup:

It might not happen, but if it does, install this plugin, and wrap your shortcode in an extra pair of brackets (“[]”). That’s it! All shortcodes wrapped in the extra brackets will be processedbefore wpautop, saving you a world of trouble.

Simple Content Experiments

Content Experiments are a method of using Google Analytics to help you set up A/B testing. (ie. You can test two different calls to action, to see if one gets more clicks than the other.) Simple Content Experiments allows you to define sections of content in any page, post, or custom post type via the use of shortcodes.

To get started, install Google Analytics on your site, create a Content Experiment in your Analytics dashboard, and grab the Experiment ID, you’ll need it. Then put in a shortcode that looks something like this:

Advanced Advertising System

Ads. Love’em or hate’em, they make the web go ’round. For now…

In the meantime, it never hurts to have a simple way to manage your ad zones, advertisers, campaigns, the ads themselves, and, of course, the means to figure out how much your advertisers owe you. Advanced Advertising System does all of that in an interface that is simple, clean, and easy to use.

There seem to be occasional slip-ups in the English phrasing used in the back end, but otherwise, it’s a solid offering.