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.
2. I’ve always liked Search Everything by Dan Cameron, and it deserves a place on this list just because it’s so handy. When people visit a site where WordPress is used primarily for a CMS with a blog, rather than as a blog alone, being able to search everything is essential. It’s also nice that you can define what “search everything” means to you, excluding tags, for example, if you don’t want them searched as well.
3. WordPress Stats by Andy Skelton is next. You have to have a WordPress.com API key to use it, but it makes things easy if you want to keep an eye on which of your posts are getting the most traffic and where the traffic is coming from. It’s not a full-fledged Google toolbox, but it’s a handy little gadget, especially useful when someone doesn’t want to have to manage a full-fledged Google toolbox. Andy is also the author of the Bad Behavior plugin which my husband loves. I rely on Akismet for now (which he also helped build. Way to go Andy!).
4. Akismet (of course). Akismet is the spam protection plugin that learns. It comes packed with every install of WordPress so the only thing you need to do to use it is give it the API key you’ve already gotten to turn on Stats. Designed by Andy Skelton, Matt (whose website is worth a visit just because it’s so beautiful), and MDA.
5. WP-chgFontSize by Ferran Rodenas I like this plugin because not everyone can read at 10px (or .5 em, or 50%) or wants to look at 24px (or 2em or 150%), font and site visitors often forget that they can do a quick keyboard shortcut or click on their browser controls to change the size of the font they’re viewing. It also shows that you want to accomodate them; that you recognize your OTF size (one true font) isn’t theirs, and that’s okay. It’s always nice to make your visitors feel as important as they are.
6. My husband and I share a love of the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin by Ronald Huereca. Who hasn’t made a mistake in a comment and wish they could undo it before someone else saw? I know I have. This plugin allows users (and admins) to edit a comment to remove the evidence of foot-in-mouth or inability to choose between they’re/their/there problem the commenter just demonstrated.
7. There’s no list without cforms by Delicious Days. Cforms is a really nice form manager that allows you to create your own questions, add your own styles to the form, and track the responses in a couple of different ways. It’s a little confusing if you’re not familiar with CSS, but they even offer a pretty complete help section. Best thing about this plugin over other form managers is that I’ve never had it crash my site or refuse to run, and it offers a lot of room for my own creativity.
8. Dueced is all over the place (he has some great themes, too), but my favorite of his plugins is Collapsible Elements. Define how you want your elements to display, add a little custom CSS, and you have blocks of text that appear and disappear at a click. It’s especially useful for long FAQ pages or other big blocks of text (I should probably have demonstrated it on this post!).
9. As visual as I am, it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to be using a lightbox plugin of some sort. Frankly, I don’t have a big recommendation. There are new ones and variations of the old ones coming out all the time. I can say that Lightbox2 by Stimuli.ca is the one I use, and I like it because it’s simple, it doesn’t conflict with other plugins, and it does what I want it to do. You can’t ask for much more than that.
10. The Google XML Sitemap Generator by Arne Brachhold is pretty much a must and takes absolutely no time at all to set up. Everyone wants the search engines to find them, right?
Bonus A: Headspace2. This is the plugin my husband talked me into. I haven’t done much with it yet. It allows you to change the name of your post, add tags, and massage your SEO. So far it hasn’t annoyed me, so that’s a win.
Bonus B: Multi-Level Navigation. if you’re a mad lover of pretty glass buttons and smooth drop down menus but don’t know how to make one, this is a nice one for you. It builds a drop down menu for you based on the suckerfish dropdown technique. It takes some tweaking (or did for me) to make it look the way I wanted it to look, but it’s especially nice for a site that I’m not going to be tweaking on a regular basis. Once it’s set up and running, the site owner can change out pages and posts to their hearts’ content and the menu will keep up.
There are a lot of great WordPress plugins. If you want to explore and try them out, I suggest getting them from the WordPress Repository, where comments and ratings from others can help you determine if you want to take the time/go through the bother, and where you can be a little more assured that the cute little widget isn’t doing something you didn’t know about behind your back.
5 comments
This is a great post and very useful – we also just released a new plugin that allows you to add interactive video capabilities to your blog! Enhance your blog with both basic and advanced video capabilities. Upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix video content, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more…
Check it out and download it here: http://corp.kaltura.com/wordpress_video_plugin?campaign=wp-comments
Examples and pictures are on the plugin forum: http://community.kaltura.org/viewforum.php?f=4
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