With SMF rolling out with it's latest version 2.1, Finding the right mod can make a huge difference in the success of your SMF website. Some of these mods are new, others have been around for a while and continue to improve by the developers.

Topic Rating Bar


Features: 5/10-star scale for topic rating, Mini-rating on the message index, Permissions for every group, Rating stat page, Google rich snippet data, The best rating topic on forum main page.


Telegram Autopost Bot


Adds support for posting of new topics and messages to Telegram. Also supports posting when a new user registers. You can customize the messages posted for these actions. Uses either cURL or fsockopen to make the post.


Team Page


Team Page lets you add multiple custom pages to a team/staff page with groups, moderators or text


SMF2WPBridge


Login bridge for use WP with SMF.


SMF Gallery


Features: Ties directly into SMF, uses forum theme, members and permissions, Categories for images
Comment System, Keywords for picture, Picture Approval, Reporting of Picture, User Image galleries, Who is viewing a picture/gallery, Permissions for adding picture, editing own picture, deleting own picture, viewing the gallery, auto approved image poster groups, and managing the gallery, Settings for max image size and max image width and height, Creates thumbnails automatically for uploaded images, Supports bmp, gif, jpeg, and png images,Easy to install package for SMF


Simple Audio Video Embedder


An auto embed media modification for SMF that takes links for popular video websites and adds a player directly into the post or bbc area of your website.


Optimus


Features: Managing of title and description for the main forum page. Description meta-tag for boards' and topics' pages. Keywords meta-tag for topics. Users can fill them when creating/changing topics (only in the version for SMF 2.1). Support of Open Graph meta-tags and Twitter Cards. Ability to specify the verification codes when adding sites to Google, Yandex, and Bing (Webmaster Tools). Adding custom metatags. Adding any counters without template editing. Changing the robots.txt from the Settings page. Generator for the robots.txt file. Simple Sitemap XML. Generation of favicon. Support of Cyrillic domains. Statistics of search queries on the forum (only in the version for SMF 2.1).


Giphy for SMF


Adds a fun way to search for animated gifs in the message editor for user posts powered by Giphy.


Ad Management mod


This mod will install ads on the top of your page right under the toolbar. You can either choose to have it display on all the pages on your forum, or on three sections of you board. On the board index, thread index, and the thread itself. This mod allows you to turn on and off your ads as you wish. It also allows you to input your ad code in the features and settings section.
New features have been added so that you can install ads on the bottom of your forum and also after the first post. You are also able to disable ads on a per member group basis.

Great article.

Team page is really good as one of the things many forum users want to do from time to time is contact an admin or moderator and there's nothing more frustrating for them if they can;t easily find out who those people are.
SMF Hall of Fame is another similar mod worth consideration  https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=4185

SMFGallery is brilliant and without doubt the most effective gallery for use with SMF software. The free version offers heaps of features and I was so pleased with their product and support, that I bought the PRO version even tough I don't use most of it's options (just a few).

I do have a question re Simple Audio Video Embedder though.  I have used this with SMF2.0.x for years and it's flawless but I thought that (or similar) functionality was built into SMF 2.1 ?

Cheers :)

I'm not familiar with the Simple Audio Video Embedder mod but 2.1 has YouTube bbc code.