My Favorite WordPress Plugins

I was talking WordPress with my husband a couple of days ago, and we realized that he and I frequently use–and/or consider most important–different plugins. He said he’d like to know which are my favorites and why he should adopt them. The reason he (or anyone else) might want to adopt them is because they make WordPress even easier to use and they don’t require a degree to install, configure, or run. My lowest bar for a plugin is that it not annoy me. The highest praise I can give one is that the results delight me. So, here we are, the plugins I find delightful.

1. My new favorite plugin is Lighter Menus by corpodibacco. With 2.5.1 the administrative side of things changed. I found it confusing and annoying to get where I wanted to go. The Lighter Menus plugin puts all the admin navigation in a tidy little drop down bar at the top.
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Getting the most out of your typesetting professional

If you hire someone to typeset your work, the easier you make the job, the happier your typesetter will be. If you take a few extra minutes to be sure you’ve given the typesetter all the information he or she will need, you’ll find that many typesetters will welcome more work from you, and may give you a discount (I certainly would), on the work you request.*

This is the basic progression of events: You send the typesetter your manuscript, describe your trim size, and let the typesetter know if your printer accepts spreads or single pages. If your printer will print spreads, that means the interior margin can be wider than the exterior margin, making it easier to read the book when it’s open without sacrificing too much space on the outside margin. If your printer only accepts singles, the margins must be the same size on both the left and the right.

Your typesetter sets up the master(s) in InDesign (or some other layout software. Layout can be done in Word or Open Office, but the fine-grained controls aren’t there and it’s much harder to get a truly professional look.) The master is the design template. Depending on the type of manuscript, there may be two or many more masters. For an anthology where the authors’ names and titles have to appear on each page of each individual story, there are often twice as many masters as there are authors/stories.
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