“Plug-ins extend what WordPress can do by adding new functionality and features with minimal effort on your part” writes Scott McNulty in Building a Wordpress Blog People Want to Read. If you’re new to Wordpress, I highly recommend picking this book up! It’s short and and gets to the meat of using WordPress effectively.
Plug-ins are basically little bits of code that developers write and distribute for others to use on their WordPress sites. I’m using quite a few on this site to make it do stuff that I want it to without having extensive knowledge of programming. Some plug-ins work right out of the box once activated; others require a bit of input from me to work. Some are intuitive; others not so much. For the latter, I move on to a different one if I can find a suitable replacement, otherwise if the competition is lean, I hash it out.
So what am I using?
| Administrative | For Posts and Pages |
| Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – moves the WP dashboard from the left to the top and has drop down navigation. | NextGen Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slide show option. |
| pageMash – Customize the order your pages are listed and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. | Event Calendar - Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. |
| WP Super Cache – This plug-in generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. | Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 100 more. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history. |
| HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies. | Add to Any Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all the rest. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history. |
| Robots Meta – This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused and nofollow unnecessary links. | Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. |
| TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. (TinyMCE is a WYSIWYG editor that WP uses.) | WP-Print - Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. |
| Theme Test Drive – Theme Test Drive Wordpress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. | WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. Very cool feature so that users don’t have to delete their comment if that make typos or want to add anything. |
| Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. | WP-Gravatar – This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. |
| WP-DB Manager – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. | cformsII – cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page! |
Wow – that’s a lot of plug-ins! Sometimes when WordPress releases new versions, plug-ins become obsolete or aren’t compatible with the new version. How do I know when this happens? Simple, something stops working. I simple deactivate the affected plug-in in my dashboard or delete it all together from my server.
Here are some screen shots of a couple of the plug-ins in action:
Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu
The drop down menu moves the default WP dashboard to the top of the screen and has drop down menus to help one easily find the page, post or application one is looking for & ultimately saves time.
pashMash
pageMash adds drag and drop functionality to your administrative functions. Users can also hide pages so that they aren’t shown in your navigation menu.
Theme Test Drive
Pretty cool feature – lets users test out a different theme without it being live.
ccforms II in action on my "Contact" page
This is pretty cool, too bad I didn’t investigate forms earlier in my WP blogging adventure. This can also be used as a comment form on posts, but I really wanted to use it for people to email me privately or to sign up for my future email newsletters. The plugin also includes image “captcha” to keep spam under control. Unfortunately, my email address is already floating around in cyber space, but since implementing the form a coupl e of weeks ago it’s significantly less than it was a month ago.
WP Ajax Edit Comments Plugin
Allows users to edit their own comments. It also allows me to edit a users comment, which is something I don’t do. I don’t censor comments, although if it’s outright spam, it is deleted if Akismet doesn’t catch it.
Print Post
Once in awhile, I write a post that someone might like to refer back to – I made it easy and installed a print plug-in so readers can click on the post and print out a copy.
Add to Any Subscribe Button
Allows users to subscribe with their favorite feed reader.
Add to Any Share Button
Allows users to share a particular post on various sites like Stumbleupon or Digg, etc.
My avatar
One note about Avatars – the little picture of me that shows up when I or others post a comment. I’ve enabled gravatars, which are “globally recognized avatars” and are linked to a users email address. Visit Gravatar to register your avatar and the next time you visit, your avatar will show up when you post a comment on my blog. Other sites that have gravatars enabled will also display your avatar.
My apologies to those of you who land here looking for pottery related information today, I promise that studio time is in my forecast this week! Meanwhile it’s snowing today which is a good thing I suppose. I can use the day to finish up the Colorado Potters Guild Website guilt free since it’s probably colder than a witches…well you get the picture. 
Later,
~Cynthia
