Smilies (also known as emoticons) have been around for quite a long time. I’m sure when you think about the word “smiley,” the first thing that comes to mind is instant messaging, chat rooms or maybe even forums, but smilies can also be used on blogs.

WordPress comes with a small set of built in smilies that you can use within your posts and pages, but what if you’re looking for a bigger variety. Even more importantly, what if you’re looking to add smilies to your comments section so that your visitors can have a little fun and express their emotions visually? Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t offer this type of functionality right of the box, but it can be added with the use of a plugin or two.

Let’s take a look at the top 6 WordPress smilies plugins to help add a little personality and fun to your blog posts, pages and comments.

Speedy Smilies

The title of this plugin says it all. The main goal of Speedy Smilies is to make your smilies load fast on your pages. It also aims to make inserting smilies into your posts and pages quick and easy. It does this by adding a Speedy Smilies section to your editor so that you can easy add them in a single click.

Custom Smilies

This plugin does 3 things: lets you add smilies to your posts; lets visitors add smilies to the comments that they leave on your posts; and lets you manage your smilies by defining the shortcut needed to activate it.

Just like Speedy Smilies (above), Custom Smilies adds a section to your editor so that you can quickly insert smilies. It then goes a step further and adds smilies to your comment section so that visitors can click to add them to their comments. Lastly, you can create your own smiley shortcuts. Meaning, you get to choose what to type in order for the smiley to show in your posts.

Smilies Themer Toolbar

This plugin adds a smilies toolbar to your comments section and also to your blog editor. What’s so advanced about it is that you can actually choose which smilies show up on your toolbar. The smilies can also be rearranged by simply dragging and dropping them into the order of your choice.

If you don’t like where the toolbar appears in your comments section, you can move it using a php function provided in the plugin’s FAQ section. The plugin is currently also available in Japanese, Italian and Georgian; you can also easily translate it yourself using Launchpad.

Yahoo! Emoticons for Custom Smilies

If you really love the Yahoo! emoticons (who doesn’t), then you can use them on your blog with this plugin. Yahoo! Emoticons is a tweak for Custom Smilies (mentioned above), so you’ll need to have both plugins installed.

This plugin basically adds the Yahoo! emoticons as an additional pack to the Custom Smilies plugin. You’ll then be able to use them in your posts, comments and manage them along with the other smilies that come with the Custom Smilies plugin.

Cricket Moods

This plugin is a little different in that instead of allowing you to add smilies to your actual content or comments, it lets you add moods to your posts in the form of a smiley. You can add one or more moods to your posts and the smiley will be displayed along with the actual word describing it.

There is also a manager that lets you rename your moods and even change the graphics associated with those moods. There is no limit to the number of moods that you can have; so there is really a lot of flexibility and possibilities for the plugin.

wp-Monalisa

“wp-Monalisa is the plugin that smiles at you like monalisa does; place the smilies of your choice in posts, pages or comments.” This plugin can be a replacement for the WordPress default smilies, or be used in addition to them. While it does work out of the box, there are many features and customization options that you may need help with (ie. replace smilies with img tags); for this you’ll find video tutorials for assistance.

Just like Custom Smilies (above), it has a manager that lets you define custom shortcuts and hide certain smilies from posts and/or comments.

Do you use smilies on your blog? If so, do you use the default (built-in) smilies or a plugin and which plugin do you prefer? Let us know in the comments below.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing strategist for the political science Israel program at the Tel Aviv University, and who also works for an international company that offers Targeted Cancer Therapies.